It is he, and he only, that brings the rubbish of office to the burning-glass of sense.
Walter Bagehot
The Public Record
Walter Bagehot was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race. He is known for co-founding the National Review in 1855, and for his works The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873).
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The immense importance of such a fresh mind is greatest in a country where business changes most.
But if the country be a progressive, eager, changing one, soon the bureau will either cramp improvement, or be destroyed itself.
This conception of the use of a Parliamentary head shows how wrong is the obvious notion which regards him as the principal administrator of his office.
His business is to see that it is properly worked.
The use of a fresh mind applied to the official mind is not only a corrective use, it is also an animating use.
A public department is very apt to be dead to what is wanting for a great occasion till the occasion is past.
The vague public mind will appreciate some signal duty before the precise, occupied administration perceives it.
A perfect Parliamentary Minister would be one who should add the animating capacity of the Duke of Newcastle to the accumulated sense, the detective instinct, and the laissez faire habit of Sir George Lewis.
As soon as we take the true view of Parliamentary office we shall perceive that, fairly, frequent change in the official is an advantage, not a mistake.
If his function is to bring a representative of outside sense and outside animation in contact with the inside world, he ought often to be changed.
Still less are the critical function and the animating function of a Parliamentary Minister likely to be perfectly exercised by one and the same man.
If the function of a Parliamentary Minister is to be an outsider to his office, we must not choose one who, by habit, thought, and life, is acclimatised to its ways.
There is every reason to expect that a Parliamentary statesman will be a man of quite sufficient intelligence, quite enough various knowledge, quite enough miscellaneous experience, to represent effectually general sense in opposition to…
A considerable Cabinet Minister has to defend his department in the face of mankind; and though distant observers and sharp writers may depreciate it, this is a very difficult thing.
A fool, who has publicly to explain great affairs, who has publicly to answer detective questions, who has publicly to argue against able and quick opponents, must soon be shown to be a fool.
The very nature of Parliamentary government answers for the discovery of substantial incompetence.
At any rate, none of the competing forms of government have nearly so effectual a procedure for putting a good untechnical Minister to correct and impel the routine ones.
There are but four important forms of government in the present state of the world--the Parliamentary, the Presidential, the Hereditary, and the Dictatorial, or Revolutionary.
Of these I have shown that, as now worked in America, the Presidential form of government is incompatible with a skilled bureaucracy.
If the whole official class change when a new party goes out or comes in, a good official system is impossible.
The whole issue is based on a single election--on the choice of President; by that internecine conflict all else is won or lost.
The managers of the contest have that greatest possible facility in using what I may call patronage--bribery.
In the United States party intensity is aggravated by concentrating an overwhelming importance on a single contest, and the efficiency of promised offices as a means of corruption is augmented, because the victor can give what he likes to…
The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.
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