They will tend, in short,
to become a bureaucracy.
The only institutional safeguard is to separate as absolutely as it is
possible to do so the staff which executes from the staff which
investigates. The two should be parallel but quite distinct bodies of
men, recruited differently, paid if possible from separate funds,
responsible to different heads, intrinsically uninterested in each
other's personal success. In industry, the auditors, accountants, and
inspectors should be independent of the manager, the superintendents,
foremen, and in time, I believe, we shall come to see that in order to
bring industry under social control the machinery of record will have
to be independent of the boards of directors and the shareholders.
3
But in building the intelligence sections of industry and politics, we
do not start on cleared ground. And, apart from insisting on this
basic separation of function, it would be cumbersome to insist too
precisely on the form which in any particular instance the principle
shall take. There are men who believe in intelligence work, and will
adopt it; there are men who do not understand it, but cannot do their
work without it; there are men who will resist. But provided the
principle has a foothold somewhere in every social agency it will make
progress, and the way to begin is to begin. In the federal government,
for example, it is not necessary to straighten out the administrative
tangle and the illogical duplications of a century's growth in order
to find a neat place for the intelligence bureaus which Washington so
badly needs.
Pages:
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394