s of its own
type, if it is "to choose its own magistrates," as Montesquieu said.

The people, then, chooses its servants through the intervention of its
representatives; and consider, to return to our point, how absolutely
necessary it is for it to secure representatives who are intellectually
the exact image and imitation of itself. Everything dovetails neatly
together.

Here then we have the people interfering influentially in the
appointment of the civil service. It continues "to do everything
itself." Complaints are raised on all sides of this confusion of
politics with the business of administration, and indeed we hear
continually that politics pervade everything. But what is the reason of
this? It is the principle of the national sovereignty asserting itself.
Politics, political power, means the will of the majority of the nation,
and is it not fitting that the will of the majority should make itself
felt--indeed need we be surprised that it insists on making itself
felt--in the details of public business, as administered by the
permanent staff, as well as elsewhere? The ideal of democracy is that
the people should elect its own rulers, or, if this is not its ideal, it
is its idea, and this is what it does under a parliamentary democracy
through the intervention of its representatives.

This is all very well, but efficiency has been dealt another blow. For
how is a candidate to recommend himself for an office to which
appointment is made by the people and its representatives? By his merit?
His chiefs and his fellow civil servants might be good judges of that;
but the people or its representatives are much less capable of judging.

"The people is admirably fitted to choose those to whom it has to
entrust some part of its authority"; so Montesquieu; we must now examine
this saying a little more closely. What reasons does the philosopher
give? "The people can only be guided by things of which it cannot be
ignorant, and which fall, so to speak, within its own observation. It
knows very well that a man has experience in war, and that he has had
such and such successes; it is therefore quite capable of electing a
general. It knows that a judge is industrious, that many of those who
are litigants in his court go away satisfied, and that he has never been
convicted of bribery, and this is enough to warrant it in appointing to
any judicial office. It has been impressed by the magnificence or riches
of some citizen, an