VI. LAWYER AND PRESS


The riddle of administration is the most subtle of all those that the
would-be prophet of the things that are coming must attempt. We see the
great modern States confronted now by vast and urgent necessities, by
opportunities that may never recur. Individualism has achieved its
inevitable failure; "go as you please" in a world that also contained
aggressive militarism, has broken down. We live in a world of improvised
State factories, commandeered railways, substituted labour and emergency
arrangements. Our vague-minded, lax, modern democracy has to pull itself
together, has to take over and administer and succeed with a great
system of collective functions, has to express its collective will in
some better terms than "go as you please," or fail.

And we find the affairs of nearly every great democratic State in the
hands of a class of men not specially adapted to any such constructive
or administrative work.

I am writing here now chiefly of the Western Allies. Russia is peculiar
in having her administrative machine much more highly developed in
relation to her general national life than the free democratic
countries. She has to make a bureaucracy that has not hitherto been an
example for efficiency into a bureaucracy that will be constructive,
responsive, liberal, scientific, and efficient; the Western countries
have to do the same with that oligarchy of politicians which, as
Professor Michels has recently pointed out in his striking book on
"Political Parties," is the necessary reality of democratic government.