the party managers,
and retires from politics to the relief of his fellows.

A general lack of interest in politics can prove fatal to democracy. The
party managers, without the fear of the electorate before their eyes, will
increase the number of salaried officials and strengthen their position by
judicious appointments. Nominally, these inspectors and officers will be
required for the public service, and the appointments will be justified on
patriotic grounds. There will be little criticism in Parliament, because
the party not in power will be anxious to create similar "jobs" when its
own turn comes. Besides, as the public pays for these officials, there is
no drain on the party funds; and this is a matter of congratulation to
party managers, who are always anxious not to spend more than they can help
on the political machinery.

BUREAUCRACY

But the horde of officials and inspectors will change democracy into
bureaucracy, and the discovery is sometimes made too late that a land is
ruled by permanent officials, and not by elected representatives. The
elected representatives may sit and pass laws, but the bureaucracy which
administers them will be the real authority.

It may be an entirely honest and efficient bureaucracy, as free from
political partisanship as our British Civil Service and police-court
magistracy are, but if it is admitted to be outside the jurisdiction of the
House of Commons, and to be under no obedience to local councils, and if
its powers involve a close inquisition into the lives of the people, and
include the right to interfere daily with these lives, then bureaucracy and
not democracy is the actual government.

A host of salaried political workers--agents, organisers, secretaries,
etc.--will make popular representative government a mere matter of
political rivalry, an affair of "ins and outs," and by this development of
the party system will exclude from active politics all who are not loyal to
the "machine," and are not strong enough to break it. But a host of public
officers--inspectors, clerks, etc.--paid out of the public funds will do
more than pervert representative government: they will make it subordinate
to the permanent official class; and bureaucracy, once firmly in the
saddle, is harder to get rid of than the absolutism of kings, or the rule
of an aristocracy.

Yet a permanent Civil Service is better in every way in a democracy than a
Civil Service which lives and dies with a