Before election you can promise to rush bravely into the
breach. But when you arrive there all out of breath, you find that
each absurdity is invested with habits, strong interests, and chummy
Congressmen. Attack all along the line and you engage every force of
reaction. You go forth to battle, as the poet said, and you always
fall. You can lop off an antiquated bureau here, a covey of clerks
there, you can combine two bureaus. And by that time you are busy with
the tariff and the railroads, and the era of reform is over. Besides,
in order to effect a truly logical reorganization of the government,
such as all candidates always promise, you would have to disturb more
passions than you have time to quell. And any new scheme, supposing
you had one ready, would require officials to man it. Say what one
will about officeholders, even Soviet Russia was glad to get many of
the old ones back; and these old officials, if they are too ruthlessly
treated, will sabotage Utopia itself.
No administrative scheme is workable without good will, and good will
about strange practices is impossible without education. The better
way is to introduce into the existing machinery, wherever you can find
an opening, agencies that will hold up a mirror week by week, month by
month. You can hope, then, to make the machine visible to those who
work it, as well as to the chiefs who are responsible, and to the
public outside.
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