Walter Bagehot

The English people do not easily change their rooted notions, but they have many unrooted notions.

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.

But it is quite certain that the Prussian bureaucracy, though we, for a moment, half admire it at a distance, does not permanently please the most intelligent and liberal Prussians at home.

A system against which the most intelligent native liberals bring even with colour of reason such grave objections, is a dangerous model for foreign imitation.

It is a form of Government which has been tried often enough in the world, and it is easy to show what, human nature being what it in the long run is, the defects of a bureaucracy must in the long run be.

Men so trained must come to think the routine of business not a means, but an end--to imagine the elaborate machinery of which they form a part, and from which they derive their dignity, to be a grand and achieved result, not a working and…

The very means which best helped you yesterday, may very likely be those which most impede you to-morrow--you may want to do a different thing to-morrow, and all your accumulation of means for yesterday's work is but an obstacle to the new…

It was the system which he had established--a good system for his wants and his times--which, blindly adhered to, and continued into a different age, put to strive with new competitors, brought his country to ruin.

The system which now exists is the product of the reaction; and the history of its predecessor is a warning what its future history may be too.

It is not more celebrated for its day than Frederic's for his, and principle teaches that a bureaucracy, elated by sudden success, and marvelling at its own merit, is the most unimproving and shallow of Governments.

Not only does a bureaucracy thus tend to under-government, in point of quality; it tends to over-government, in point of quantity.

He thinks that they are stupid, ignorant, reckless--that they cannot tell their own interest--that they should have the leave of the office before they do anything.

Protection is the natural inborn creed of every official body; free trade is an extrinsic idea alien to its notions, and hardly to be assimilated with life; and it is easy to see how an accomplished critic, used to a free and active life…

Voltaire says, somewhere, that, 'the art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third'.

The functionaries are not there for the benefit of the people, but the people for the benefit of the functionaries.

A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality.

The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy--a bureaucracy trained from early life to its special avocation--is, though it boasts of an appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of the art of business.

One of the most sure principles is, that success depends on a due mixture of special and non-special minds--of minds which attend to the means, and of minds which attend to the end.

They combine these different specialities--make it clear where the realm of one ends and that of the other begins, and add to it a wide knowledge of large affairs, which no special man can have, and which is only gained by diversified…

The summits (if I may so say) of the various kinds of business are, like the tops of mountains, much more alike than the parts below--the bare principles are much the same; it is only the rich variegated details of the lower strata that so…

The application of this principle to Parliamentary government is very plain; it shows at once that the intrusion from without upon an office of an exterior head of the office, is not an evil, but that, on the contrary, it is essential to…

If it is left to itself, the office will become technical, self-absorbed, self-multiplying.

It will be likely to overlook the end in the means; it will fail from narrowness of mind; it will be eager in seeming to do; it will be idle in real doing.

An extrinsic chief is the fit corrector of such errors.

The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.