y of good Parliamentary
government, and there is happily a natural provision that there will be
such heads. Party organisation ensures it. In America, where on account
of the fixedly recurring presidential election, and the perpetual minor
elections, party organisation is much more effectually organised than
anywhere else, the effect on the offices is tremendous. Every office is
filled anew at every presidential change, at least every change which
brings in a new party. Not only the greatest posts, as in England, but
the minor posts change their occupants. The scale of the financial
operations of the Federal government is now so increased that most
likely in that department, at least, there must in future remain a
permanent element of great efficiency; a revenue of 90,000,000 pounds
sterling cannot be collected and expended with a trifling and changing
staff. But till now the Americans have tried to get on not only with
changing heads to a bureaucracy, as the English, but without any stable
bureaucracy at all. They have facilities for trying it which no one
else has. All Americans can administer, and the number of them really
fit to be in succession lawyers, financiers, or military managers is
wonderful; they need not be as afraid of a change of all their
officials as European countries must, for the incoming substitutes are
sure to be much better there than here; and they do not fear, as we
English fear, that the outgoing officials will be left destitute in
middle life, with no hope for the future and no recompense for the
past, for in America (whatever may be the cause of it) opportunities
are numberless, and a man who is ruined by being "off the rails" in
England soon there gets on another line. The Americans will probably to
some extent modify their past system of total administrative
cataclysms, but their very existence in the only competing form of free
government should prepare us for and make us patient with the mild
transitions of Parliamentary government.

These arguments will, I think, seem conclusive to almost every one;
but, at this moment, many people will meet them thus: they will say,
"You prove what we do not deny, that this system of periodical change
is a necessary ingredient in Parliamentary government, but you have not
proved what we do deny, that this change is a good thing. Parliamentary
government may have that effect, among others, for anything we care: we
maintain merely that it is a defect." I