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board, from the board to its inspectors, and from inspectors through their subs down to the actual workers—this operating through a series a levers, each of which absorbs in friction and inertia part of the moving force; is as bad, in virtue of its complexity, as the direct employment by society of individuals, private companies, and spontaneously-formed institutions, is good, in virtue of its simplicity. Fully to realize the contrast, we must compare in detail the working of the two systems.

Un

Officialism is habitually slow. When non-governmental agencies are dilatory, the public has its remedy: it ceases to employ them, and soon finds quicker ones. der this discipline all private bodies are taught promptness. But for delays in State-departments there is no such easy cure. Life-long Chancery suits must be patiently borne; Museum-catalogues must be hopelessly waited for. While, by the people themselves, a Crystal Palace is de signed, erected, and filled, in the course of a few months, the legislature takes twenty years to build itself a new house. While by private persons, the debates are daily printed and dispersed over the kingdom within a few hours of their utterance, the Board of Trade tables are regularly published a month, and sometimes more, after date. And so throughout. Here is a Board of Health which, since 1849, has been about to close the metropoli tan graveyards, but has not done it yet; and which has so long dawdled over projects for cemeteries, that the London Necropolis Company has taken the matter out of its hands. Here is a patentee who has had fourteen years' correspondence with the Horse Guards, before getting a definite answer respecting the use of his improved boot for the Army. Here is a Plymouth port-admiral who delays sending out to look for the missing boats of the Amazon until ten days after the wreck.

Again, officialism is stupid. Under the natural course

Here, as every one

of things each citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases, are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while the incompetent, society soon finds out, ceases to employ, forces to try something easier, and eventually turns to use. But it is quite otherwise in State-organizations. knows, birth, age, back-stairs intrigue, and sycophancy, determine the selections, rather than merit. The "fool of the family" readily finds a place in the Church, if " the family" have good connections. A youth, too ill-educated for any active profession, does very well for an officer in the Army. Gray hair, or a title, is a far better guarantee of naval promotion than genius is. Nay, indeed, the man of capacity often finds that, in government offices, superiority is a hindrance--that his chiefs hate to be pestered with his proposed improvements, and are offended by his implied criticism. Not only, therefore, is legislative machinery complex, but it is made of inferior materials. Hence the blunders we daily read of-the supplying to the dockyards from the royal forests of timber unfit for use; the administration of relief during the Irish famine in such a manner as to draw labourers from the field, and diminish the subsequent harvest by one-fourth;* the filing of patents at three different offices and keeping an in dex at none; the building of iron, war-vessels that should be of wood, and the insisting on wood, for mail-steamers that should be of iron. Everywhere does this bungling show itself, from the elaborate failure of House of Commons ventilation down to the publication of the London Gazette, which invaribly comes out wrongly folded.

A further characteristic of officialism is its extrava gance. In its chief departments, Army, Navy, and Church

*See Evidence of Major Larcom.

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it employs far more officers than are needful, and pays some of the useless ones exorbitantly. The work done by the Sewers Commission has cost, as Sir B. Hall tells us, from 300 to 400 per cent. over the contemplated outlay; while the management charges have reached 35, 40, and 45 per cent. on the expenditure. The trustees of Ramsgate Harbour--a harbour, by the way, that has taken a century to complete-are spending 18,000l. a year in doing what 5,000%. has been proved sufficient for. The Board of Health is causing new surveys to be made of all the towns under its control-a proceeding which, as Mr. Stephenson states, and as every tyro in engineering knows, is, for drainage purposes, a wholly needless expense. These public agencies are subject to no such influence as that which obliges private enterprise to be economical. Traders and mercantile bodies succeed by serving society cheaply. Such of them as cannot do this are continually supplanted by those who can. They cannot saddle the nation with the results of their extravagance, and so are prevented from being extravagant. On works that are to return a profit it does not answer to spend 48 per cent. of the capital in superintendence, as in the engineering department of the Indian Government; and Indian railway companies, knowing this, manage to keep their superintender.ce charges within 8 per cent. A shopkeeper leaves out of his accounts no item analagous to that 6,000,000%. of its revenues, which Parliament allows to be deducted on the way to the Exchequer. Walk through a manufactory, and you see that the stern alternatives, carefulness or ruin, dictate the saving of every penny; visit one of the national dockyards, and the comments you make on any glaring wastefulness are carelessly met by the slang phrase "Nunky pays."

The unadaptiveness of officialism is another of its vices. Unlike private enterprise which quickly modifies its action

to meet emergencies--unlike the shopkeeper who promptly finds the wherewith to satisfy a sudden demand-unlike the railway company which doubles its trains to carry a special influx of passengers; the law-made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances through its ordained routine at its habitual rate. By its very nature it is fitted only for the average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements. You cannot step into the street without having the contrast thrust upon you. Is it summer? You see the water-carts going their prescribed rounds with scarcely any regard to the needs of the weather-to-day sprinkling afresh the already moist roads; to-morrow bestowing their showers with no greater liberality upon roads cloudy with dust. Is it winter? You see the scavengers do not vary in number and activity according to the quantity of mud; and if there comes a heavy fall of snow, you find the thoroughfares remaining for nearly a week in a scarcely passable state, without an effort being made even in the heart of London to meet the exigency. The late snow-storm, in deed, supplied a neat antithesis between the two orders of agency in the effects it respectively produced upon omnibuses and cabs. Not being under a law-fixed tariff, the omnibuses put on extra horses and raised their fares. The cabs, on the contrary, being limited in their charges by an Act of Parliament which, with the usual shortsightedness, never contemplated such a contingency as this, declined to ply, deserted the stands and the stations, left luckless travellers to stumble home with their luggage as best they might, and so became useless at the very time of all others when they were most wanted! Not only by its unsusceptibility of adjustment does officialism entail serious inconveniences, but it likewise entails great injustices. In this case of cabs for example, it has resulted since the late change of law, that old cabs, which were before saleable

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at 10%, and 127. each, are now unsaleable and have to be broken up; and thus legislation has robbed cab-proprietors of part of their capital. Again, the recently-passed SmokeBill for London, which applies only within certain prescribed limits, has the effect of taxing one manufacturer while leaving untaxed his competitor working within a quarter of a mile; and so, as we are credibly informed, gives one advantage of 1,500l. a year over another. These typify the infinity of wrongs, varying in degrees of hardship, which legal regulations necessarily involve. Society, a living, growing organism, placed within apparatuses of dead, rigid, mechanical formulas, cannot fail to be hampered and pinched. The only agencies which can efficiently serve it, are those through which its pulsations hourly flow, and which change as it changes.

How invariably officialism becomes corrupt every one knows. Exposed to no such antiseptic as free competition-not dependent for existence, as private unendowed organizations are, upon the maintenance of a vigorous. vitality; all law-made agencies fall into an inert, over-fed state, from which to disease is a short step. Salaries flow in irrespective of the activity with which duty is performed; continue after duty wholly ceases; become rich prizes for the idle well born; and prompt to perjury, to bribery, to simony. East India directors are elected not for any administrative capacity they may have; but they buy votes by promised patronage--a patronage alike asked and given, in utter disregard of the welfare of a hundred millions of people. Registrars of wills not only get many thousands a year each for doing work which their misera bly paid deputies leave half done; but they, in some cases, defraud the revenue, and that after repeated reprimands. Dockyard promotion is the result not of efficient services, but of political favouritism. That they may continue to hold rich livings, clergymen preach what they do not