rmany, this class is necessarily more
numerous in proportion to the population, the landwehr system imposing
many more restrictions than the conscription on the free action of the
people, and requiring more officials to manage it, and the semi-feudal
jurisdictions and forms of law requiring much more writing and
intricate forms of procedure before the courts than the Code Napoleon."

A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official
power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave
free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government,
as well as impairs its quality.

The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy--a bureaucracy trained from
early life to its special avocation--is, though it boasts of an
appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of
the art of business. That art has not yet been condensed into precepts,
but a great many experiments have been made, and a vast floating vapour
of knowledge floats through society. One of the most sure principles
is, that success depends on a due mixture of special and non-special
minds--of minds which attend to the means, and of minds which attend to
the end. The success of the great joint-stock banks of London--the most
remarkable achievement of recent business--has been an example of the
use of this mixture. These banks are managed by a board of persons
mostly NOT trained to the business, supplemented by, and annexed to, a
body of specially trained officers, who have been bred to banking all
their lives. These mixed banks have quite beaten the old banks,
composed exclusively of pure bankers; it is found that the board of
directors has greater and more flexible knowledge--more insight into
the wants of a commercial community--knows when to lend and when not to
lend, better than the old bankers, who had never looked at life, except
out of the bank windows. Just so the most successful railways in Europe
have been conducted--not by engineers or traffic managers--but by
capitalists; by men of a certain business culture, if of no other.
These capitalists buy and use the services of skilled managers, as the
unlearned attorney buys and uses the services of the skilled barrister,
and manage far better than any of the different sorts of special men
under them. They combine these different specialities--make it clear
where the realm of one ends and that of the other begins, and add to it
a wide knowledge of large