352 THEORY AND ADMINISTRATION 



kept out of politics. Let admission to the public service and ad- 

 vancement in the public service be altogether removed from the 

 political pressure of legislators and unaffected by the political opin- 

 ions of candidates. Forbid the civil servant to canvass or to speak 

 or to write on any party political questions. Teach him to regard 

 himself as the servant of the whole nation, and not of a party in the 

 nation. You are no doubt debarring him from one of the privileges 

 of a citizen. But he has other privileges which the ordinary citi- 

 zen does not possess, and his special powers carry with them special 

 disabilities. He must submit to the latter if he is to be trusted in 

 the exercise of the former. 



The chief danger which seems to threaten political life in our 

 times is the growing power of wealth and the tendency to abuse public 

 authority and public office for the sake of private gain. This was a 

 gross evil under the despotisms and oligarchies of former days, and 

 an evil from which it was hoped that democratic government would 

 deliver us. It has, however, reappeared under new forms, and in 

 many countries it threatens the honest and efficient working both of 

 the elective and of the administrative machinery of the nation. 



The grander and the wider the part which administration plays 

 in the highly developed modern state, attempting a hundred new 

 tasks and handling sums of money of unexampled magnitude, so 

 much the more essential has it become that the machinery of gov- 

 ernment should be worked with a high-minded and single-minded 

 devotion to the interests of the whole people. 



It is for the people themselves to secure this by showing that keen 

 and sympathetic watchfulness over administration which the 

 founders of the American Republic nearly three hundred years ago 

 gave to those simple and homely institutions, the product of long 

 English centuries, out of which the vast fabric of your present 

 national government has grown. The state is no doubt only a name 

 for the totality of the individuals who compose it. But it repre- 

 sents, or ought to represent, those individual citizens in their highest 

 aspect, in their most earnest hopes. It embodies the hallowed 

 traditions of their past. It looks forward to an ever-widening col- 

 lective effort after progress in the future. A state wisely, purely, 

 energetically administered is not only itself the product of an en- 

 lightened and upright people; it is a mighty factor in helping to cure 

 their faults, to cultivate their virtues, to bring them nearer and nearer 

 to their ideal of a happy and noble life. 



