d's economic body, capacity is enormously hampered. I
was once an apprentice in a chemist's shop, and also once in a
draper's--two of my brothers have been shop assistants, and so I am
still able to talk understandingly with clerks and employees, and I
know that in all that world all sorts of minor considerations obstruct
the very beginnings of efficient selection. Every shop is riddled with
jealousies, "sucking up to the gov'nor" is the universal crime, and
among the women in many callings promotion is too often tainted by
still baser suspicions. No doubt in a badly criticized public service
there is such a thing as "sucking up to" the head of the department,
but at its worst it is not nearly so bad as things may be in a small
private concern under a petty autocrat.

In America it is said that the public services are inferior in
personal quality to the staffs of the great private business
organizations. My own impression is that, considering the salaries
paid, they are, so far as Federal concerns go, immeasurably superior.
In State and municipal affairs, American conditions offer no
satisfactory criterion; the Americans are, for reasons I have
discussed elsewhere,[8] a "State-blind" people concentrated upon
private getting; they have been negligent of public concerns, and the
public appointments have been left to the peculiarly ruffianly type of
politician their unfortunate Constitution and their individualist
traditions have evolved. In England, too, public servants are
systematically undersalaried, so that the big businesses have merely
to pay reasonably well to secure the pick of the national capacity.
Moreover, it must be remembered by the reader that the public services
do not advertise, and that the private businesses do; so that while
there is the fullest ventilation of any defects in our military or
naval organization, there is a very considerable check upon the
discussion of individualist incapacity. An editor will rush into print
with the flimsiest imputations upon the breech of a new field-gun or
the housing of the militia at Aldershot, but he thinks twice before he
proclaims that the preserved fruits that pay his proprietor a tribute
of some hundreds a year are an unwholesome embalmment of decay. On the
whole it is probable that in spite of scandalously bad pay and of the
embarrassment of party considerations, the British Navy, Post Office,
and Civil Service generally, and the educational work and much of t