commonly applied, it is not a measure of good government.

Certain phrases and certain sets of ideas gain dominance at certain
times. Just now the idea of administrative efficiency is uppermost. It
seems necessarily to be the controlling factor in the progress of any
business or any people. Certainly, a people should be efficient; but an
efficient government may not mean an efficient people,--it may mean
quite otherwise or even the reverse. The primary purpose of government
in these days, and particularly in this country, is to educate and to
develop all the people and to lead them to express themselves freely and
to the full, and to partake politically. And this is what governments
may not do, and this is where they may fail even when their efficiency
in administration is exact. A monarchic form may be executively more
efficient than a democratic form; a despotic form may be more efficient
than either. The justification of a democratic form of government lies
in the fact that it is a means of education.

The final test of government is not executive efficiency. Every
movement, every circumstance that takes starting-power and incentive
away from the people, even though it makes for exacter administration,
is to be challenged. It is specially to be deplored if this loss of
starting-power affects the persons who deal first-hand with the surface
of the planet and with the products that come directly out of it.

There is a broad political significance to all this. Sooner or later the
people rebel against intrenched or bureaucratic groups. Many of you know
how they resist even strongly centralized departments of public
instruction, and how the effectiveness of such departments may be
jeopardized and much lessened by the very perfectness of their
organization; and if they were to engage in a custom of extraneous forms
of news-giving in the public press, the resentment would be the greater.
In our rural work we are in danger of developing a piece of machinery
founded on our fundamental industry; and if this ever comes about, we
shall find the people organizing to resist it.

The reader will understand that in this discussion I assume the
agricultural work to be systematically organized, both in nation and
State; this is essential to good effort and to the accomplishing of
results: but we must take care that the formal organization does not
get in the way of the good workers, hindering and repressing them and
wasting their