han the forms of
it". Their whole education and all the habit of their lives make them
do so. They are brought young into the particular part of the public
service to which they are attached; they are occupied for years in
learning its forms--afterwards, for years too, in applying these forms
to trifling matters. They are, to use the phrase of an old writer, "but
the tailors of business; they cut the clothes, but they do not find the
body". Men so trained must come to think the routine of business not a
means, but an end--to imagine the elaborate machinery of which they
form a part, and from which they derive their dignity, to be a grand
and achieved result, not a working and changeable instrument. But in a
miscellaneous world, there is now one evil and now another. The very
means which best helped you yesterday, may very likely be those which
most impede you to-morrow--you may want to do a different thing
to-morrow, and all your accumulation of means for yesterday's work is
but an obstacle to the new work. The Prussian military system is the
theme of popular wonder now, yet it sixty years pointed the moral
against form. We have all heard the saying that "Frederic the Great
lost the battle of Jena". It was the system which he had established--a
good system for his wants and his times--which, blindly adhered to, and
continued into a different age, put to strive with new competitors,
brought his country to ruin. The "dead and formal" Prussian system was
then contrasted with the "living" French system--the sudden outcome of
the new explosive democracy. The system which now exists is the product
of the reaction; and the history of its predecessor is a warning what
its future history may be too. It is not more celebrated for its day
than Frederic's for his, and principle teaches that a bureaucracy,
elated by sudden success, and marvelling at its own merit, is the most
unimproving and shallow of Governments.

Not only does a bureaucracy thus tend to under-government, in point of
quality; it tends to over-government, in point of quantity. The trained
official hates the rude, untrained public. He thinks that they are
stupid, ignorant, reckless--that they cannot tell their own
interest--that they should have the leave of the office before they do
anything. Protection is the natural inborn creed of every official
body; free trade is an extrinsic idea alien to its notions, and hardly
to be assimilated with life; and it is easy to