despotism, we may well pause to ask ourselves, not that conundrum so dear to philosophy, "What is the State?" but the far more important and more easily overlooked question, "Who is the State?"

CHAPTER IX

SOCIALISM AND BUREAUCRACY

IN the days of Monarchy the enquiry as to who is the State was abruptly solved by the well-known and arrogant answer of Louis XIV. After 1688 in England, however, when the struggle between Parliament and the King was concluded, the State fell into the hands of a close aristocratic corporation of great families, a corporation so jealous of its right to rule that it would not allow even the intellectual capacity of Burke to obtain its proper recognition. The French Revolution and the Reform Bill of 1832 opened the political gateway to talent as well as to wealth. The giving of places disappeared, and the Civil Service was recruited by competitive examination. The careers of Disraeli, of Chamberlain, and of Mr. Lloyd George are sufficient proof that, given sufficient capacity, there is no height to which any man may not rise in the service of the State. It is curious, therefore, to find the phrase governing classes as firmly estab

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lished in the language as ever it was in the eighteenth century. It is clear that as long as government exists at all a governing class is inevitable. You may recruit them how you will, grade them as you like, pay them high or low, they will nevertheless form a class with inherited instincts and traditions. From every conceivable variety of home boys go to Eton, yet Eton never fails to stamp them with its seal of tradition. Professions do not differ in this respect from schools. The soldier and the sailor and the lawyer acquire personality from their employment. It is not surprising, therefore, that the atmosphere of a Government Department catches hold of a man in his youth and moulds him into a type. Unconsciously he adopts a traditional point of view, acquires an esprit de corps, and as the years go by embodies in himself all the attributes and characteristics of the bureaucrat.

During the war even the temporary denizens of Whitehall found themselves putting on the clothes of bureaucracy and picking up its habits of thought and action. The love of writing, the accumulation and distribution of documents, the filing and indexing and annotating, the belief in the printed form, are the first symptoms of the bureaucratic disease. At a later stage there comes an inability to take decisions, an intense desire to pass on and upwards the

awkward problem and the dangerous responsibility, and a defensive huddling together against every breath of criticism or threatening of attack that comes from outside.

This bureaucratic type has done loyal and splendid service in the past; it is admirably fitted for the slow and cautious business of uncompetitive statecraft; and it has always been ready to respond to the institutions of Democracy and to sink itself in the will of the Cabinet of the day. It is only lately, when its place in the political scheme has altered, and when powers have been thrust upon it that it was never intended to possess, that it has incurred suspicion and unpopularity. There is indeed a direct antithesis between the bureaucratic and the business type, and it is an illusion to believe that they are interchangeable. During King Edward's reign many of the great business firms tempted distinguished civil servants into the City by the offer of large salaries, but the experiment was almost invariably unsuccessful. Of late years the converse has been tried, and the failure of the business man as a bureaucrat has been painful and notorious. The business man cannot tolerate the restraints of a Government Department, and he has not been trained to control the expenditure of public money. The bureaucrat cannot make the swift decisions that are vital in the business world, and he has

not been trained to work in competition. The one craft is responsibility without risk; the other is risk without responsibility. Bureaucrats have been found fairly successful and efficient if they have been asked to administer a socialized business that is not competitive, but even then their success is never comparable to a business that is competitive and is not socialized. The fact remains that the vast increase in the size of the bureaucracy and the manifold ramifications of its duties has not changed the type of man that it produces. It is assumed by the advocates of the Socialist State that, if they swept out what they choose to call "the governing classes," they could be replaced by a new body of men who would be perfectly fit and efficient, not only to control the rest of the population, but also to manipulate the entire industrial and economic business of the country. It is an assumption that needs examination.

The essential difference between a democratic Civil Service and a socialistic bureaucracy is the vast increase of real power that the latter will possess. In the past the Civil Service has been sufficiently small to be easily controlled by the Cabinet. It has therefore been the Cabinet that held the real power in the State, a power which has been becoming gradually too great, and which it should be the business