they had said to themselves: we have enough, we will place our skill, our organization, at the country's service, taking no compensation beyond the modest rewards with which most men who serve their country are content. But to the packers the war was merely an opportunity for additional gain. In 1917 they levied upon the public a tax four times as great as their average before the European war. There is no sign anywhere that they manifested the least disposition to abate their unfair and unlawful practices. Whatever might befall their country and the world, they were going to assure themselves that their grip on the food supply of the peoples should be tighter at the peace than before the war.

But in inveighing against the packers do we not overlook the fact that they represent a higher, more efficient business form than the disorganized body of small producers they are forcing out of existence? Possibly, in the sense that the Pan-German Central European empire represents a higher, more efficient governmental system than the smaller nationalities it threatens to extirpate. Efficiency, however, is not everything, either in government or in business. And furthermore, there is reason to doubt the reality of an efficiency that can not be put into operation without foul means. If the Big Five have really been more efficient than other producers why have they persistently resorted to crooked practices to win the field to themselves? Are we to suppose that they had a perverse preference for methods in contravention of law and abhorrent to the universal sense of fair play? This is a hypothesis we refuse to entertain. The packers resorted to unfair methods because they were not efficient enough to overcome competition by fair methods.

Ten years ago such revelations as the Federal Trade Commission is making would have given rise to universal demand for criminal prosecution. But we have lost our illusions of the efficacy of criminal procedure in such cases. The arrest and conviction of a few more or less responsible officers of the packing companies would no more shatter the system of business Realpolitik than the assassination of a von Mirbach or a von Eichorn shatters the system of political Realpolitik. It is necessary to go deeper. This the Federal Trade Commission recognizes in its recommendatioins: (1) Let the ownership of rolling stock used to transport meat animals be a government monopoly. (2) Let the stock yards be acquired by the government and operated without favor. (3) Let refrigerator cars and services auxiliary to their operation be monopolized by the government. (4) Let warehouses, cold storage plants, etc., be monopolized by the government and operated as public markets offering equal facilities to all.

Such efficiency as the packers have actually at

tained in the processes of manufacture can, it is evident, be maintained under the reforms proposed by the commission. Such competitive advantages as go with great wealth and an established organization remain untouched. The $178,000,000 of net profits accumulated by the packers in the years 1915-1917 may remain with them, to improve the equipment of the industry. It is not proposed to disintegrate the system of distribution upon which the monopoly powers of the packers depend, but to carry it to a higher stage of development under the control of the government.

1

It is a reform which we ought to put into effect at the earliest possible moment. The food supply of the nations, for the period of the war and for the period of reconstruction, will be of primary concern to the statesmen' of our own country and the Allied nations. We can not afford to appear before the world as a nation capable of fighting against Realpolitik abroad, but tolerant of Realpolitik as applied at home by a little band of insatiate adventurers, scheming to make the hunger of the peoples yield them profit and power.

Bureaucracy in the Making

N

OTHING is more difficult of achievement than the ideal of responsible government. In any society, the real rulers are hidden from the public view; for the influences which go to make action are too numerous and intricate to be at all easily known. It is clear enough that in the last few years the extension of the administrative process has only emphasized this general truth. The executive power has largely freed itself from the control of the legislative organ; and the centre of governmental power has become concentrated in a fashion that would be hardly understood by the parliamentarians of the nineteenth century.

Much of this, indeed, is intelligible enough. The decay of legislatures is most obvious. The executive is so much better informed, so much better served, and, in its higher branches, so much better known, that it was inevitable, in the age of the positive state, for public opinion to look there for the definitive political power. No legislative assembly in the world has been able to retain a vigilant supervision of the authority it delegates to the executive. A people indifferent to anything save the results of political action could not help comparing the achievement of Mr. Wilson with the stolid complexity of Congress, the febrile energy of Mr. Lloyd George with the baffled and sporadic bewilderment of the House of Commons. In the result, we have an immense increase of boards, commissions, clerks, and departments charged with the real business of government. Our civil services have literally passed the stage where enumeration of their personnel is possible. No ordinary citizen can hope to follow their regulations or understand their technique. He cannot know that one man is able and another merely decorative. He cannot estimate the part played by the unknown subordinates in the determination of ministerial decisions. He has practically none of the data upon which a judgment of their value must depend. He has become helpless before an administrative science so technical that the old simplicity of politics is dead. He can concern himself only with vague outlines and large results. The recesses of political action have become closed to all save the highly initiate.

It has become a question of the utmost importance as to whether an administration so immense as that of the modern state is really compatible with liberalism. The old theory of ministerial. responsibility does not work. No one except Mr. Baker's subordinates can accurately estimate his value as Secretary of War; and they are estopped from speech. A cabinet minister is theoretically a despot over his department; but in practice he is so perplexed by the immense variety and difficulty of the subjects upon which he must pass that he is bound to rely upon the judgment of his technical inferiors. Lord Milner must trust to one general for this and a colonel for that; upon cordite Captain ✗ is the recognized specialist and upon machine-guns Colonel Y. All the decisions are the minister's decisions; and yet all of them, by the division administration requires, escape the region of responsibility. The government becomes narrowed into a series of officials whose names are unknown and of whose functions we are largely ignorant. They have a habit, undoubtedly, of duty. They are sufficiently sensible to the charms of power to exert themselves unremittingly in its exercise. Their experience has made them thoroughly conversant with the details of their business. They alone know the technique of memoranda, the method of official intercommunication, the way in which past problems have been settled. The cabinet officer will be satisfied with them if things go well. If they go ill, he is dependent upon them for the response to criticism. Things must be developed into a routine, if they are here to prosper. General rules that do not permit of deviation; a sense that the new is the troublesome; a fear of congressional criticism; a dislike of newspaper publicity-all these are essential in the official type that our immense administration develops. Suggestions from outside are repelled as invasions of sacred territory. Public criticism is rejected as based on inadequate information or backed by the promise of a departmental inquiry. Access to the summit is denied

because the information proffered would interfere with the process that has been set on foot. The facts are concealed because secrecy is essential to the public interest. It is a system, doubtless, that has its origin in the general public indolence and ignorance about the details of politics, and, in so far, is doubtless our own creation. It is nevertheless impregnated with all the characteristics of that arbitrary government it is our object to destroy.

The fact of such impregnation is clearly seen if the process of administration is examined in two special aspects. Within the departments themselves what is remarkably obvious is the concentration of power. It comes to be possessed by a small clique whose habits and traditions are handed down from generation to generation; so that in France M. Chardon can complain that men of high distinction have never taken a decision in the whole course of their official career. One man is suspect because he has been a professor. Another is frowned upon

because his novels show that his heart is outside the department. A third is neglected because his inventiveness does not run in the groove of filing cabinets and new index systems. The departments fail to develop internally a proper sense of cooperation, on the one hand, and a proper sense of responsibility on the other. Their hierarchical structure is fatal to their originality. Their mole-like secrecy prevents a proper sense of perspective. The man whose only thought is to secure buttons will sooner or later have a soul that cannot rise above buttons. The man who knows that he cannot receive public blame or public credit is deprived of the most valuable stimulus to thought. The result is to emphasize the value of the routineer at the expense of the inventor. It is to belittle the importance of humanity in the public official. It is to degrade him into a petty clerk only distinguished from other clerks by the larger building in which he works and the more fashionable functions to which he is invited. It is to belittle his intelligence and thus to betray it.

The consequence, sooner or later, is what we have seen in the France of the last ten years. The lower branches of the civil service revolt against the inhumanity of their occupations. They demand the opportunity of personal responsibility. They become eager to get outside the rut of routine and find means of translating their whole personality into their effort. They develop technical ideals of service. They resent the jobs they see perpetrated. They watch with disgust promotions made through influence, or ignorance, or jealousy. They note the pathetic attempts to conceal official failure from the public. They resent the secrecy with which the facts are invested. They become what is termed administrative syndicalists by which implies the desire of the official to play a public and responsible part in government. They become interested in standards of work and wages. They form-as Mr. Burleson has occasion to know-trade unions for self-protection. A sufficient irresponsiveness to their demands causes the internal irritation which in France displayed the utter incompetence of the administrative regime, the divorce of its ideals from the national life. That is the penalty that human nature extorts for the neglect of essential freedoms.

Externally, also, analysis reveals similar defects. Everyone who has been in the anteroom of a great public official knows the spectacle that will confront him. There is the man with a grievance who is being humorously handed round from clerk to clerk and has already become the butt of the very messenger to whom he announces himself. There is the man who is unable to secure accurate specifications for his contract. An harassed inventor sits moodily in a corner, wondering if he can explain his ideas to the glib little secretary who promises everything but attention. A man who has passed months in a country upon which knowledge is all-important sits waiting to be told that his information is unacceptable. Every time the door opens the visitors look up eagerly, but in vain. Then a senator, anxious about a position for his nephew, will enter to be immediately and unctiously ushered into the presence. It is the same in England and France and Italy. The very vastness of the enterprise demands routine; and routine is the annihilation of humanity.

Nor is it different when admission to the presence is gained. The story is eagerly, almost feverishly, told, and received with a polite calm that is bound to convince the narrator of his entire unimportance. Your grievance will be investigated so soon as you apply on the right form; but the form is to be obtained from another bureau with which this department has no connection. The invention will be considered, but the waiting-list is so long that the minister regrets he can hold out no immediate hopes. The specifications for the contracts are not yet ready. Or a journalist is told of the minister's eagerness to win the war, the department's sense of the urgency of the task in hand. The traveler is thanked for the information he is willing to proffer, but the department feels that it ought not to deviate from the track of its ordinary procedure. It is Dickens's Circumlocution Office, and a new generation of Barnacles has arisen to lend it the distinction of their airy incompetence.

The truth is that we have evolved the great society without the institutions adequate to its functioning. Nearly ninety years ago de Tocqueville warned us of a civilization in which men might exchange their freedom for material ease. That is

the real danger by which we are confronted. The immense centralization the modern regime has effected involves everywhere outside the inner circle an anaemia which is fatal to responsible intelligence. The terminology is itself a foreign language. The technique can be known only to the initiate. We are coming, in fact, to realize the truth of Aristotle's dictum that citizenship is the capacity to rule and be ruled in turn. There has never been a time when constant and widespread education in the process of politics was so gravely needed. There is real danger lest we develop an intelligent class of professional officials who regard the members of the modern state as what the French in an expressive phrase call les administrés-the subjects of their rules and regulations. The one great problem of this generation is to find place in the categories of politics for the personality of the individual citizen. Representative government is a useless fiction if the delegation it involves divorces the business of politics from the cast of life. It is only by the widespread association of men in its responsibilities that we can avoid that danger. That means a dispersion of the centres of authority not merely in area, but also in function. It means the recognition that every interest in the state demands political expression. No organization is adequate in which a single citizen is rendered powerless to contribute his utmost to the public good; for no organization that fails in this has seized the secret of the democratic spirit.

T

HE success of the American army at Château
Thierry and on the Marne has demon-

strated a fact of far reaching importance. American troops fight best under their own commanders. Since General Pershing at the end of March placed himself and his army at the service of General Foch our troops have been to a considerable extent under the leadership of French and British officers. Trained officers were what the American army lacked most. The French and British formations, on the other hand, lacked men. The conclusion to be drawn seemed obvious. If any country could voluntarily abdicate the traditional historical right to an independent army it was America, and she made the temporary sacrifice with a goodwill that moved our Allies profoundly. General Pershing's preference was that our troops should be grouped in army corps and armies rather than dispersed. In some cases American divisions have, in fact, been complete in every particular of staff and line. In others, American regiments have been brigaded with the French troops under French superior command, and American battalions and companies have also been alternated with similar French units.

Almost all the fighting done by the American army has up to now taken place in French sectors. We shall speak in this article in Franco-American terms. The same general conditions and conclusions hold, however, in relation to the British command. No hard and fast plan could have been carried out, owing to shifting military circumstances which still prevail; but from the operations of the past three months emerges a truth that may be stated in rough statistical form somewhat as follows. An American officer sixty per cent trained will probably get more out of American troops than a French officer ninety per cent trained. Our soldiers have proved themselves adaptable and modest, not in the least know-it-all, not in the least chauvinistic. The response they have given to the French and English officers who have assisted in their training has been unqualified. Fortunate indeed is our army to have such instructors as these able and experienced and generous men. It would not stand where it is today but for their constant aid and counsel. But the relations of the French officer to the American soldier as teacher and as commander in actual operations are two different questions, especially when it comes to putting such large groups as divisions, to say nothing of larger groups, under the guidance of French officers, the differences in national psychology make themselves sharply felt.

On the battlefield the source of the fighting force and instinct of our troops is just as intensely American as that of the French is French and the British British. It is for America, as she stands trial in the European arena, that our men are going over the top, for America that they are eager to risk their lives. Though their sentiment for France be ever so strong, one can't talk many minutes with American soldiers without getting the spontaneous impact of their nationalism. The Director of the French military hospitals of an important city in the war zone declares that every one of our men who died in their hospital made it clear to his French nurse that he was dying for America. In the field every American element that is added, American guns, American airplanes, adds to the spirit and dash of the troops. And in the matter of the staff and high command, when that, too, is American, a sort of liberating electric current is transmitted down through the military hierarchy and heightens the morale and the zest of the men in the ranks.

Consider General Pershing's job in the light of this incontrovertible psychological truth: Like President Wilson's leadership of our nation through the mazes of international politics, his leadership of our great army in the making, amidst many cross influences, must be as clear-sighted as it is courageous and unflinching. As upon the President rests the ultimate responsibility for keeping before our Allies the democratic ideals for which we are fighting, so upon General Pershing rests the ultimate responsibility for organizing and employing our army in France to the best advantage of our Allies as well as ourselves. It is the American forces that are going, in the long run, to settle the fate of the world, and it is as much the Commander-in-Chief's duty as it is the President's to keep an open mind and an independent spirit. He must take great account of tradition and experience, and yet realize that it is not traditionalism or even experience in military matters that can carry us to success. At this critical hour the contribution of America must be as fresh as the spirit of our troops, and to make it prevail the American army must, as soon as possible, become autonomous, homogeneous and effective in national

terms.

The first steps to this great end have already been taken. Since the end of May, when an American unit in Cantigny made the first conclusive demonstration of the calibre of our troops, our army has been growing by leaps and bounds towards self-conscious independence and to justifying day