than anywhere else, the effect on the offices is tremendous.  Every office is filled anew at every presidential change, at least every change which brings in a new party.  Not only the greatest posts, as in England, but the minor posts change their occupants.  The scale of the financial operations of the Federal government is now so increased that most likely in that department, at least, there must in future remain a permanent element of great efficiency; a revenue of 90,000,000 pounds sterling cannot be collected and expended with a trifling and changing staff.  But till now the Americans have tried to get on not only with changing heads to a bureaucracy, as the English, but without any stable bureaucracy at all.  They have facilities for trying it which no one else has.  All Americans can administer, and the number of them really fit to be in succession lawyers, financiers, or military managers is wonderful; they need not be as afraid of a change of all their officials as European countries must, for the incoming substitutes are sure to be much better there than here; and they do not fear, as we English fear, that the outgoing officials will be left destitute in middle life, with no hope for the future and no recompense for the past, for in America (whatever may be the cause of it) opportunities are numberless, and a man who is ruined by being “off the rails” in England soon there gets on another line.  The Americans will probably to some extent modify their past system of total administrative cataclysms, but their very existence in the only competing form of free government should prepare us for and make us patient with the mild transitions of Parliamentary government.

These arguments will, I think, seem conclusive to almost every one; but, at this moment, many people will meet them thus:  they will say, “You prove what we do not deny, that this system of periodical change is a necessary ingredient in Parliamentary government, but you have not proved what we do deny, that this change is a good thing.  Parliamentary government may have that effect, among others, for anything we care:  we maintain merely that it is a defect.”  In answer, I think it may be shown not, indeed, that this precise change is necessary to a permanently perfect administration, but that some analogous change, some change of the same species, is so.

At this moment, in England, there is a sort of leaning towards bureaucracy—­at least, among writers and talkers.  There is a seizure of partiality to it.  The English people do not easily change their rooted notions, but they have many unrooted notions.  Any great European event is sure for a moment to excite a sort of twinge of conversion to something or other.  Just now, the triumph of the Prussians—­the bureaucratic people, as is believed, par excellence—­ has excited a kind of admiration for bureaucracy, which a few years since we should have thought impossible.  I do not presume to criticise the Prussian bureaucracy