torious persons who have never
identified themselves with current political opinions, and who have
slipped into public employment, thanks to some brief moment of
inattention on the part of the politicians. These intruders sometimes
get on by the mere force of circumstances, but they never reach the
highest posts which are always reserved, as indeed is proper and
fitting, for those in whom the people has put its trust.

This is how the people administers as well as governs through the
intervention of the representative system, dictating to ministers the
policy and the details of government.

--I realise, some one here will object, that administrators are
nominated by the people, but I do not see how the affairs of the country
are actually administered by the people.--

Well, I will tell you. In the first place, by nominating officials it is
already far on the road to controlling them, for it infuses into the
body of the permanent civil service the spirit of the people to the
exclusion of every other source of inspiration, and effectually prevents
the civil service from becoming an aristocracy as otherwise it has
always a tendency to do. Next, the people does not confine itself to
electing its administrators, it watches and spies on them, keeps them in
leading strings, and just as the popular representatives dictate to
ministers the details of government, so also they dictate to
administrators the details of administration.

A _prefet_, a _procureur-general_, an engineer-in-chief under democratic
rule is a much harassed man. He has to play his own hand against his
ministerial chief and the deputies of his district. He ought to obey the
minister, but he has also to obey the deputies of the district which he
administers. In this connection curious points arise and situations not
a little complicated. The _prefet_ owes obedience to the deputies and to
the minister, and the minister obeys the deputies, and it might
therefore have been supposed that there was only one will, the will
which the _prefet_ obeyed. But what the minister has to obey is the
general will of the popular representatives, and it is this will that he
transmits for the allegiance of the _prefet_; but then the _prefet_
finds himself colliding against the individual wills of the deputies of
his district. The result is what we may call conflicts of obedience
which have extraordinary interest for the psychologist, but which are
less agreeable for the _prefe