intimately is the office routine and the administrative rules. The
result is an undue anxiety to secure a uniform system. I have heard
of a French minister of education taking out his watch, and remarking,
"At this moment all the children of such and such an age in France are
learning so and so." This is the ideal of the administrator, an ideal
utterly fatal to free growth, initiative, experiment, or any far
reaching innovation. Laziness is not one of the motives recognized in
textbooks on political theory, because all ordinary knowledge of human
nature is considered unworthy of the dignity of these works; yet we
all know that laziness is an immensely powerful motive with all but a
small minority of mankind.

Unfortunately, in this case laziness is reinforced by love of power,
which leads energetic officials to create the systems which lazy
officials like to administer. The energetic official inevitably
dislikes anything that he does not control. His official sanction
must be obtained before anything can be done. Whatever he finds in
existence he wishes to alter in some way, so as to have the
satisfaction of feeling his power and making it felt. If he is
conscientious, he will think out some perfectly uniform and rigid
scheme which he believes to be the best possible, and he will then
impose this scheme ruthlessly, whatever promising growths he may have
to lop down for the sake of symmetry. The result inevitably has
something of the deadly dullness of a new rectangular town, as
compared with the beauty and richness of an ancient city which has
lived and grown with the separate lives and individualities of many
generations. What has grown is always more living than what has been
decreed; but the energetic official will always prefer the tidiness of
what he has decreed to the apparent disorder of spontaneous growth.