John stuart mill

right at all to please himself without giving pain to any one.

I have reserved for the last place a large class of questions respecting the

limits of government interference, which, though closely connected with the

subject of this Essay, do not, in strictness, belong to it. These are cases in

which the reasons against interference do not turn upon the principle of

liberty: the question is not about restraining the actions of individuals, but

about helping them: it is asked whether the government should do, or cause to be

done, something for their benefit, instead of leaving it to be done by

themselves, individually, or in voluntary combination.

The objections to government interference, when it is not such as to involve

infringement of liberty, may be of three kinds.

The first is, when the thing to be done is likely to be better done by

individuals than by the government. Speaking generally, there is no one so fit

to conduct any business, or to determine how or by whom it shall be conducted,

as those who are personally interested in it. This principle condemns the

interferences, once so common, of the legislature, or the officers of

government, with the ordinary processes of industry. But this part of the

subject has been sufficiently enlarged upon by political economists, and is not

particularly related to the principles of this Essay.

The second objection is more nearly allied to our subject. In many cases, though

individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the

officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by

them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education —

a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and

giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left

to deal. This is a principal, though not the sole, recommendation of jury trial

(in cases not political); of free and popular local and municipal institutions;

of the conduct of industrial and philanthropic enterprises by voluntary

associations. These are not questions of liberty, and are connected with that

subject only by remote tendencies; but they are questions of development. It

belongs to a different occasion from the present to dwell on these things as

parts of national education; as being, in truth, the peculiar training of a

citizen, the practical part of the political education of a free people, taking

them out of the narrow circle of personal and family selfishness, and

accustoming them to the comprehension of joint interests, the management of

joint concerns — habituating them to act from public or semi-public motives, and

guide their conduct by aims which unite instead of isolating them from one

another. Without these habits and powers, a free constitution can neither be

worked nor preserved, as is exemplified by the too-often transitory nature of

political freedom in countries where it does not rest upon a sufficient basis of

local liberties. The management of purely local business by the localities, and

of the great enterprises of industry by the union of those who voluntarily

supply the pecuniary means, is further recommended by all the advantages which

have been set forth in this Essay as belonging to individuality of development,

and diversity of modes of action. Government operations tend to be everywhere

alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are

varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience. What the State can

usefully do, is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and

diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to

enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of

tolerating no experiments but its own.

The third, and most cogent reason for restricting the interference of

government, is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power. Every

function superadded to those already exercised by the government, causes its

influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more

and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the

government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government. If the

roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock

companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches

of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards,

with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central

administration; if the employes of all these different enterprises were

appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every

rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the

legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name.

And the evil would be greater, the more efficiently and scientifically the

administrative machinery was constructed — the more skilful the arrangements for

obtaining the best qualified hands and heads with which to work it. In England

it has of late been proposed that all the members of the civil service of

government should be selected by competitive examination, to obtain for those

employments the most intelligent and instructed persons procurable; and much has

been said and written for and against this proposal. One of the arguments most

insisted on by its opponents is that the occupation of a permanent official

servant of the State does not hold out sufficient prospects of emolument and

importance to attract the highest talents, which will always be able to find a

more inviting career in the professions, or in the service of companies and

other public bodies. One would not have been surprised if this argument had been

used by the friends of the proposition, as an answer to its principal

difficulty. Coming from the opponents it is strange enough. What is urged as an

objection is the safety-valve of the proposed system. If indeed all the high

talent of the country could be drawn into the service of the government, a

proposal tending to bring about that result might well inspire uneasiness. If

every part of the business of society which required organized concert, or large

and comprehensive views, were in the hands of the government, and if government

offices were universally filled by the ablest men, all the enlarged culture and

practised intelligence in the country, except the purely speculative, would be

concentrated in a numerous bureaucracy, to whom alone the rest of the community

would look for all things: the multitude for direction and dictation in all they

had to do; the able and aspiring for personal advancement. To be admitted into

the ranks of this bureaucracy, and when admitted, to rise therein, would be the

sole objects of ambition. Under this regime, not only is the outside public

ill-qualified, for want of practical experience, to criticize or check the mode

of operation of the bureaucracy, but even if the accidents of despotic or the

natural working of popular institutions occasionally raise to the summit a ruler

or rulers of reforming inclinations, no reform can be effected which is contrary

to the interest of the bureaucracy. Such is the melancholy condition of the

Russian empire, as is shown in the accounts of those who have had sufficient

opportunity of observation. The Czar himself is powerless against the

bureaucratic body: he can send any one of them to Siberia, but he cannot govern

without them, or against their will. On every decree of his they have a tacit

veto, by merely refraining from carrying it into effect. In countries of more

advanced civilization and of a more insurrectionary spirit the public,

accustomed to expect everything to be done for them by the State, or at least to

do nothing for themselves without asking from the State not only leave to do it,

but even how it is to be done, naturally hold the State responsible for all evil

which befalls them, and when the evil exceeds their amount of patience, they

rise against the government and make what is called a revolution; whereupon

somebody else, with or without legitimate authority from the nation, vaults into

the seat, issues his orders to the bureaucracy, and everything goes on much as

it did before; the bureaucracy being unchanged, and nobody else being capable of

taking their place.

A very different spectacle is exhibited among a people accustomed to transact

their own business. In France, a large part of the people having been engaged in

military service, many of whom have held at least the rank of noncommissioned

officers, there are in every popular insurrection several persons competent to

take the lead, and improvise some tolerable plan of action. What the French are

in military affairs, the Americans are in every kind of civil business; let them

be left without a government, every body of Americans is able to improvise one,

and to carry on that or any other public business with a sufficient amount of

intelligence, order and decision. This is what every free people ought to be:

and a people capable of this is certain to be free; it will never let itself be

enslaved by any man or body of men because these are able to seize and pull the

reins of the central administration. No bureaucracy can hope to make such a

people as this do or undergo anything that they do not like. But where

everything is done through the bureaucracy, nothing to which the bureaucracy is

really adverse can be done at all. The constitution of such countries is an

organization of the experience and practical ability of the nation, into a

disciplined body for the purpose of governing the rest; and the more perfect

that organization is in itself, the more successful in drawing to itself and

educating for itself the persons of greatest capacity from all ranks of the

community, the more complete is the bondage of all, the members of the

bureaucracy included. For the governors are as much the slaves of their

organization and discipline, as the governed are of the governors. A Chinese

mandarin is as much the tool and creature of a despotism as the humblest

cultivator. An individual Jesuit is to the utmost degree of abasement the slave

of his order though the order itself exists for the collective power and

importance of its members.

It is not, also, to be forgotten, that the absorption of all the principal

ability of the country into the governing body is fatal, sooner or later, to the

mental activity and progressiveness of the body itself. Banded together as they

are — working a system which, like all systems, necessarily proceeds in a great

measure by fixed rules — the official body are under the constant temptation of

sinking into indolent routine, or, if they now and then desert that mill-horse

round, of rushing into some half-examined crudity which has struck the fancy of

some leading member of the corps: and the sole check to these closely allied,

though seemingly opposite, tendencies, the only stimulus which can keep the

ability of the body itself up to a high standard, is liability to the watchful

criticism of equal ability outside the body. It is indispensable, therefore,

that the means should exist, independently of the government, of forming such

ability, and furnishing it with the opportunities and experience necessary for a

correct judgment of great practical affairs. If we would possess permanently a

skilful and efficient body of functionaries — above all, a body able to

originate and willing to adopt improvements; if we would not have our

bureaucracy degenerate into a pedantocracy, this body must not engross all the

occupations which form and cultivate the faculties required for the government

of mankind.

To determine the point at which evils, so formidable to human freedom and

advancement begin, or rather at which they begin to predominate over the

benefits attending the collective application of the force of society, under its

recognized chiefs, for the removal of the obstacles which stand in the way of

its well-being, to secure as much of the advantages of centralized power and

intelligence, as can be had without turning into governmental channels too great

a proportion of the general activity, is one of the most difficult and

complicated questions in the art of government. It is, in a great measure, a

question of detail, in which many and various considerations must be kept in

view, and no absolute rule can be laid down. But I believe that the practical

principle in which safety resides, the ideal to be kept in view, the standard by

which to test all arrangements intended for overcoming the difficulty, may be

conveyed in these words: the greatest dissemination of power consistent with

efficiency; but the greatest possible centralization of information, and

diffusion of it from the centre. Thus, in municipal administration, there would

be, as in the New England States, a very minute division among separate

officers, chosen by the localities, of all business which is not better left to

the persons directly interested; but besides this, there would be, in each

department of local affairs, a central superintendence, forming a branch of the

general government. The organ of this superintendence would concentrate, as in a

focus, the variety of information and experience derived from the conduct of

that branch of public business in all the localities, from everything analogous

which is done in foreign countries, and from the general principles of political

science. This central organ should have a right to know all that is done, and

its special duty should be that of making the knowledge acquired in one place

available for others. Emancipated from the petty prejudices and narrow views of

a locality by its elevated position and comprehensive sphere of observation, its

advice would naturally carry much authority; but its actual power, as a

permanent institution, should, I conceive, be limited to compelling the local

officers to obey the laws laid down for their guidance. In all things not

provided for by general rules, those officers should be left to their own

judgment, under responsibility to their constituents. For the violation of

rules, they should be responsible to law, and the rules themselves should be

laid down by the legislature; the central administrative authority only watching

over their execution, and if they were not properly carried into effect,

appealing, according to the nature of the case, to the tribunal to enforce the

law, or to the constituencies to dismiss the functionaries who had not executed

it according to its spirit. Such, in its general conception, is the central

superintendence which the Poor Law Board is intended to exercise over the

administrators of the Poor Rate throughout the country. Whatever powers the

Board exercises beyond this limit, were right and necessary in that peculiar

case, for the cure of rooted habits of mal-administration in matters deeply

affecting not the localities merely, but the whole community; since no locality

has a moral right to make itself by mismanagement a nest of pauperism,

necessarily overflowing into other localities, and impairing the moral and

physical condition of the whole laboring community. The powers of administrative

coercion and subordinate legislation possessed by the Poor Law Board (but which,

owing to the state of opinion on the subject, are very scantily exercised by

them), though perfectly justifiable in a case of a first-rate national interest,

would be wholly out of place in the superintendence of interests purely local.

But a central organ of information and instruction for all the localities, would

be equally valuable in all departments of administration. A government cannot

have too much of the kind of activity which does not impede, but aids and

stimulates, individual exertion and development. The mischief begins when,

instead of calling forth the activity and powers of individuals and bodies, it

substitutes its own activity for theirs; when, instead of informing, advising,

and upon occasion denouncing, it makes them work in fetters or bids them stand

aside and does their work instead of them. The worth of a State, in the long

run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones

the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of

administrative skill or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the

details of business; a State, which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be

more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find

that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the

perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end

avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine

might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.

[End]