X. The Burden of Bureaucrats

The democratic principle is the basis of our liberties, and, as I have said before, the democratic principle is in danger. It will be a sad conclusion to the glorious history of the British Constitution if, having through the centuries wrested power from one privileged class after another until all power is quite definitely placed in the hands of the people, 114 The Burden oj Bureaucrats liS the people should now proceed to relinquish that power into the hands of the new privileged class, worse in every way than any of those that have gone before-the bureaucratic class. We must, of course, have a certain amount of Government. The most bigoted Individualist recognises the need for Justice, Defence and Educa tion, as well as for roads and drains and a few other things which, at whatever cost, can only be secured through collective action. But to argue, as the Socialists do, that because the roads are publicly owned, therefore everything else should belong to the public, is at best a failure to appreciate the difference between necessity and con venIence.

There are two ways of looking at Government. Some people seem to regard it as a blessing which must be encouraged and developed and increased in every possible way. Others, and this is surely the more sensible view, look upon Government as an expensive and necessary evil, of which a free and enlightened people should have as little as possible. It is easy to show that those things which are done by public authority, even when they are well done, are the subject, and must always be the subject, of gross extravagance, waste and delay. That is not because Civil Servants are incompetent, but because things which are done in the name of the public must be done with meticulous regard to order and procedure. Public action offers more opportunities for abuse than private action, 116 The Return to Laisser Faire but it would be wrong in this country, though not in others like America, to attack public action on the grounds of abuse.

I came across a particularly flagrant case quite recently, but I do not pretend that it is typical. Public parks must, of course, be owned and main tained by public authority, and I was walking through one of the London parks only a day or two ago. I stood apd watched a uniformed gardener, beautifully clothed, reminding one of the dustman in William Morris's" News from Nowhere." His boots and gaiters were polished and nowhere about hil:TI was a sign of business contact with Mother Earth. He wore gloves, and in his -right hand was a small pair of secateurs. He was standing beside an old laurel bush, taking in his left hand· one leaf at a time and snipping it off with the implement in his right hand. By the side of him there stood yet another public official, also a gardener and also arrayed in all the beauties of the London .County Council uniform. This fellow was holding a sack, into which his companion leisurely deposited one at a time the old laurel leaves as he cut them from the bush. Three or four yards away on the path was a thitrdofficial, obviously of a lower grade, be cause he wore no uniform, sitting on an empty barrow, waiting for the sack when it might, in due time, have received its quota of old laurel leaves.

I do not put this forward as an example of what happens inmost of our public work, but it may fairly be said that this sort of abuse is only possible when The Burden of Bureaucrats 117 collective action. is taken on such a scale as to wipe out all trace of individual responsibility. I understand that the windows of Windsor Castle are cleaned on the inside by the Office of Works and on the outside by the Department of Woods and Forests. This may be inevitable if these things are to be done at all with public money, for public money must be spent in accordance with well defined public principles. We have allowed the business of Government to grow to enormously swollen proportions, until to-day we are putting into the hands of the bureau crats, national and local,no less a sum than a £ 1,000,000,000 a year. Nobody will, therefore, question the wisdom at this stage of a pause for consideration, nor will anyone think it unwise if we now ask ourselves how far all this expenditure is really worth while, and whether the tendency of the future should be to increase or to diminish it.

There are four kinds of bureaucrat, or quasi bureaucrat; four distinct classes that have grown out of our enthusiasm for political or Collectivist action. First we have the bureaucrats proper, national and local, hundreds of thousands of them taking their salaries direct from the· public purse. Secondly, there is an enormous bureaucracy which has fastened itself on to the trade union movement. The working-class contributions to trade union funds are very largely spent in the upkeep of an ever-growing class of officials, many of them having no other excuse for existence than the necessity for lIB The Return to Laisser Faire conferring' with the public officials; and each class encourages the other to grow. Thirdly, the trade associations, which are the joint product of trade unionism and'legislation, have provided themselves within quite recent times with a very big and rapidly growing bureaucracy of their own. Lastly, there are the lawyers and accountants who earn a living by explaining to the ordinary man all the sophisticated technicalities imposed upon him by the bureaucrats of all the other kinds.

Ever since the beginning of the century Parlia ment has passed two Acts of Parliament a week, 100 Acts a year, or nearly 3,000 Acts in all, each of them placing new restrictions on our liberty, and each of them calling for more bureaucrats to see that we behave in the manner required, and more lawyers to tell us how it is possible to act in the unnatural way which these legislative devices always prescribe. We must have in the neighbour hood of a million bureaucrats, a hundred thousand trade union officials, a hundred thousand association bureaucrats, and goodness knows how many lawyers and accountants, none of the whole of this huge army producing anything, and most of them making it more difficult for the rest of us to produce that which we must perforce share with them. Between them they have created so unnatural a position that a large proportion of the brains which should be applied to the normal work of the world is diverted to the difficult task of complying with their requirements. The bureaucrat, very naturally, has a minor interest in the work over which he is set; The Burden 01 Bureaucrats 119 his chief interest is found in the technicalities of his own unnatural requirements. These people tend to get a completely false conception of their useful ness and their position. To them technical com pliance with some clause of some Act of Parliament is much more important than, say, the building of a house. This interest in the machinery of bureau cracy leads naturally and easily to the develop ment of bureaucratic abuse. Every reader will be able to supply illustrations from his own experi ence.

There was a time when one could be born with a single certificate, when an entry by the Registrar of Births and Deaths was sufficient·compliance with the requirements of the bureaucrat to enable us to enter the world; but to-day we are not properly born until we are doubly registered, once for the benefit of the hoards of officials who keep the census and a second time for the information of the new legionaries of the Ministry of Health. The interest of the official is in the sub-clauses of the Act of Parliament and in devising machinery which shall bring them out of their obscurity.H~s whole mind tends to become occupied with things that really do not matter. I have upon occasion to write to the local authority of the district in which I live, and, being old and lazy, I find it difficult to pick out the many departments and the numerous officials and to decide exactly where the functions and prerogatives of each begin and end. My practice, therefore, is to write to the Clerk of the Council, just as in busi120 The Return to Laisser Faire ness one would write to the secretary of a company; but whereas in the latter case the secretary will pass the communication on to the appropriate department for immediate attention, in the former case a much more elaborate procedure has to be adopted.

In a somewhat lengthy experience I have never failed to get back from the Clerk of the Council a typewritten letter, duly copied and filed and posted under a three half-penny stamp, to inform me that he, the Clerk, has passed my letter over to the Surveyor, the Inspector, the Collector, the Regional Director, the Assessor; or whoever the other appropriate functionary may be. In this way this particular local authority is filling up building after building with more and more clerks as week by week Parliament provides it with more and more functions. It should never be forgotten that from the nature of the case none of these peqple have, or can ever have, any interest in economy; they have nothing to gain and everything to lose from any such idea. When I was an amateur bureaucrat at the Ministry of Munitions, my little department did its very best to increase its personnel. Seventy-five persons gave me the right, as head of the department, to a carpet and an armchair, while my secretary could then claim a desk with drawers down the sides and in addition a mirror to hang on the wall. Economy must always be against the interests of the bureaucracy: two striking illustrations are on my desk as I write.

In the year 1919 I established Ways and Means, The Burden of Bureaucrats 121 a weekly review, and in that connection the Stationery Office sent me a daily list of official publications. In the same way I was put upon the list of the American Department of Labour in Washington, and the bureaucrats there were good enough to send to me from week to week a budget of official publications dealing with American industry. That was nearly ten years ago. Ways and Means died eight years ago, but that does not matter to the bureaucrats, either English or Ameri can, and I went on receiving the daily communica tion from the Stationery Office until I called their attention to the matter in the latter part of I928, while the weekly budget from the Department of Labour at Washington still lumbers up my post box. In the same way our own Ministry of Labour goes merrily on to this day wasting its printed matter on the editor of the long-defunct Ways and Means.

It is very important that we should understand that a 'bureaucracy multiplies and increases in a way that is not given to institutions of any other kind. I chanced upon a striking illustra tion of this some few days ago, when I found the father of three clever daughters boasting that each of them was making good progress in the study of medicine, and that all three were likely to become doctors. The father's pride seemed to me somewhat lacking in balance, as I have yet to learn that there is an un limited market for feminine medical practitioners, and I put this point to him. His reply was definite, emphatic and confident. He did not for a moment 122 The Return to Laisser Faire imagine that these girls would earn a living in the medical market as doctors in search of a practice, " but," said he, "there will be more and more appointments for various sorts of inspectors." He was delightfully vague about it, but as he was i11 touch with the Ministry of Health he did not doubt that he could place all three. Here, surely, is a flagrant case where weare actually breeding bureau crats.

It must not be supposed, as one would imagine from the study of the theory of democracy, that the people with one mind decide upon some urgent piece of work and then proceed to find some bureaucrat willing to undertake it. That is only the theory of the matter. In practice things happen exactly the other way round. These bureaucrats spend a large part of their time in drafting new sorts of legislation, which are pumped into Parlia ment through Ministers, passed without discussion and then forced upon the rest of us. Nobody can pretend that most of the financial and industrial legislation of the last decade or two has arisen from a conscious public demand. It has, of course, been invented and promoted by an in terested bureaucracy. These people are ourre,al rulers. The lengths to which we have gone in this way can be seen by anyone who will take the trouble to read an ordinary daily newspaper. The summary of the news of the day as given in The Daily Tele~ graph of the day on which I am 'writing contains twenty items, which I was at some pains to analyse.

The Burden of Bureaucrats 123 I found that three of these items were concerned with the normal activities of ordinary, normal people, acting on their own individual responsi bility. The other seventeen items catalogued as the day's activities were concerned entirely with the antics of the various sorts of bureaucrats. There were parliaments, councils, conferences, unions, associations, commissions, inquiries, committees and soviets of every sort, kind and description, one of them suppressing the traffic in women and the other sixteen suppressing almost every other kind of trade and traffic ever thought of. The public does not seem to recognise tEat these bureaucratic arrangements are really designed to hinder and not to help. Their authors would not, perhaps, admit this, and Parliament seems to be quite ignorant of this obvious characteristic. Take a very simple illustration. The public will is that a man who·sells 150Z. and calls it a pound shall be put in gaol as a thief, and the old-fashioned public were content to rely upon the police force to catch such a thief and to put him into gaol; but the bureau crat has found a better method. He says that no body may sell a pound until some bureaucrat has been paid a salary to certify that it is not I SOz.

This arrangement provides a comfortable occupa tion for large numbers of inspectors, hinders not only the thief who wishes to palm off 15oz. as a pound, but everybody in the whole realm of busi ness who under the bureaucratic blight is officially branded as a thief until, by means of forms and 124 The Return to Laisser Faire stamps and ceremonies, he has established his reputation for honesty. No .word of mine must be taken as implying any disrespect or lack of appreciation for officials as individuals. I number many of them among my personal acquaintance, and there is no more hard working, conscientious, or well-meaning class amongst us. I take leave, however, to question whether the status and quality of the Civil Service will stand the strain of the recent introduction of hoards of the school board type. It must, or so it seems to me, be' very distressing to professional Civil Servants to see their high calling degraded by the additions of legions of lower and middle-class people in the way that has happened in recent years.

My objection to the bureaucrat is of another kind. So long as he i? concerned with those limited restraints which are a proper part of the business of government, he is in his proper. place, doing his proper work and rendering a valuable service to sO'ciety. But he must realise that his profession is to restrain, that he can do nothing else and that from the very nature of the thing he can be nothing but a nuisance and a hindrance when productive work is in question or normal human activity is desired. The effect upon the standard of living of all oIus of the inordinate growth of the·bureaucracy and all the lesser bureaucracies is, of course, extremely serious. Weare creating to-day an ever-growing number of non-producers, who have a claim to share The Burden of Bureaucrats 125 the good things of life with an ever-diminishing number of the producers of those things. In dividualism brings each of. us into closer touch with production, while any other system tends to make more and more of us into parasites.