one says, “We have not ships enough, no ‘relief’ ships, no navy, to tell the truth”; the other cry says, “We have all the wrong ships, all the wrong guns, and nothing but the wrong; in their foolish constructive mania the Admiralty have been building when they ought to have been waiting; they have heaped a curious museum of exploded inventions, but they have given us nothing serviceable”.  The two cries for opposite policies go on together, and blacken our executive together, though each is a defence of the executive against the other.

Again, the Home Department in England struggles with difficulties of which abroad they have long got rid.  We love independent “local authorities,” little centres of outlying authority.  When the metropolitan executive most wishes to act, it cannot act effectually because these lesser bodies hesitate, deliberate, or even disobey.  But local independence has no necessary connection with Parliamentary government.  The degree of local freedom desirable in a country varies according to many circumstances, and a Parliamentary government may consist with any degree of it.  We certainly ought not to debit Parliamentary government as a general and applicable polity with the particular vices of the guardians of the poor in England, though it is so debited every day.

Again, as our administration has in England this peculiar difficulty, so on the other hand foreign competing administrations have a peculiar advantage.  Abroad a man under Government is a superior being:  he is higher than the rest of the world; he is envied by almost all of it.  This gives the Government the easy pick of the elite of the nation.  All clever people are eager to be under Government, and are hardly to be satisfied elsewhere.  But in England there is no such superiority, and the English have no such feeling.  We do not respect a stamp-office clerk, or an exciseman’s assistant.  A pursy grocer considers he is much above either.  Our Government cannot buy for minor clerks the best ability of the nation in the cheap currency of pure honour, and no Government is rich enough to buy very much of it in money.  Our mercantile opportunities allure away the most ambitious minds.  The foreign bureaux are filled with a selection from the ablest men of the nation, but only a very few of the best men approach the English offices.

But these are neither the only nor even the principal reasons why our public administration is not so good as, according to principle and to the unimpeded effects of Parliamentary government, it should be.  There are two great causes at work, which in their consequences run out into many details, but which in their fundamental nature may be briefly described.  The first of these causes is our ignorance.  No polity can get out of a nation more than there is in the nation.  A free government is essentially a government by persuasion; and as are the people to be persuaded, and as are the persuaders, so will that government be.  On