“Administration as a non-political function of government is a conception unfamiliar to the American mind; and I propose to describe in outline how administrative problems appear to the eye of a man who has spent twenty years in studying those forms of government in which administration is conducted on a non-political basis. I have observed in actual operation ten distinct forms of government which conform to this condition. They are the Crown Colony System in various British Colonies; the Central Government of India; the Indian Provincial System in Burma; the system of Protected Native States in the Malay Peninsula; the Government of a Commercial Company in Borneo; the Rule of an Independent White Raja in Sarawak; the early American Government in Mindanao; limited Parliamentary Government in British Guiana and Barbados; the French Colonial System in Indo-China; and the Dutch Colonial System in Java. In the countries I have named there are administered the public affairs of more than 300,000,000 people. Although these governments have been constantly attacked on the ground of their lack of a popular political element it is the general verdict of those who have observed them in action that, leaving political participation aside, they furnish this vast population with a larger measure of the tangible fruits of good government than is enjoyed by any people under the more ‘liberal’ constitutions of Europe and America.... The influence exerted upon policy by the one and by the other of these two modes of procedure differs profoundly. In the United States the matter is decided, initially, by some hundreds of men, and many having strong political motives for taking a particular view; in India the matter is decided, initially, by six men, each of whom is a trained and experienced administrator, and none of whom has any electorate to please, any powerful business interest to placate, or any political party to support. In the former instance the veto rests with one man who may have no more than an amateur’s acquaintance with the question involved; in the latter the veto also rests with one man, but this man is, in practice, guided by the advice of the India Council, a body of from ten to fourteen men, sitting in London, composed as to the majority, of ex-Indian officials of long service and varied administrative experience.”
We are not lacking in material in America; we have the best in the world; energetic, honest, upright, clear-headed, healthy, vigorous, disinterested, patriotic, well-educated men; noble fellows, plenty of them; eager for work; but they are not in politics and never will be there under the present vile régime. It is just because they prize honor and reputation that they stay out of politics. Bryce truly says that “the American system does not succeed in bringing the best men to the top. Yet in Democracy more perhaps than in other governments, seeing it is the most delicate and difficult of governments, it is essential that the best men should come to the top.” What prevents our best men from coming to the top? What prevents our having in this country the purity and efficiency witnessed by Mr. Ireland in ten different jurisdictions? Principally, our political spoils system, whose source and support are manhood suffrage and the controllable vote. Secondarily, our failure to recognize formally and actually the principle of efficiency as the prime essential in government. Such recognition will neither be genuine nor effective unless it begins with requiring an efficient electorate. After that what remains to be done will be comparatively easy and natural. Without it, the cause of substantial reform is practically hopeless.
CHAPTER XVIII
WEAKNESS AND INEFFICIENCY OF OUR MANHOOD SUFFRAGE GOVERNMENT IN ITS FOREIGN RELATIONS
The qualities which render a government popular or successful at home do not always work for efficiency in foreign relations. In home matters the nation discusses, divides, and experiments; in its foreign relations it must act as one man and present to the other nations the same single attitude as would be offered by a dictatorship. Therefore it has been often said that a democracy is apt to be weak in its foreign policy, because it has to reconcile so many opinions before it can effectually act. But this weakness is not inherent in every conceivable democracy; it is possible for a democratic electorate if sufficiently intelligent to select one man or a small group of men to represent it in foreign affairs with firmness and ability. This, however, cannot be expected from an unintelligent constituency such as manhood suffrage provides, much less from an organization for spoils such as it has developed and placed in power in the United States.
The manhood suffrage politicians who have had the popular ear for the past century have not understood the necessities or proprieties of our foreign relations, and have misinformed the people on the subject. They have adopted the cheap newspaper attitude of sneering at skill, tact and secrecy and applauding truculence and bluff in foreign diplomacy. They have never realized the value of trained and cultivated statesmanship. Its importance is however transcendent. As long as the world continues to be composed of many different nations each including large populations, differing more or less in race, religion, habits and prejudices from each of the others, there will be new and delicate situations constantly arising, requiring the practice of tact, statesmanship, diplomacy, and a historical as well as a present day practical knowledge of foreign countries. But under the system of universal suffrage the populace is king, the machine is his chief minister, the cheap daily press is his mouthpiece, and statesmen and diplomats are not valued by either. The inferior newspapers want men in office who depend not on merit but on advertisement; who rely for promotion on journalistic control of a public which gets all its information from the daily press. They prefer politicians who toady to them to statesmen who despise their ignorance, their lies and their vulgarities. It is the custom of both politicians and newspapers to belittle statesmanship, because the politicians have no knowledge of its history and capacities, and because real statesmen are indisposed to tolerate the pretensions and the interference of either newspapers or politicians. All three, populace, press and political machine, would like to see the general policy of the nation, including its foreign affairs, confided to such politicians as would seek guidance rather in the opinions of the mob and the columns of the newspapers than in studies of the history of foreign politics, of economics, of institutions and of the dynamic forces of the time.
There can be no successful diplomatic or even business negotiation without a decent amount of secrecy. The cheap newspapers dislike this precaution. They pretend to see no need for secret diplomacy; they insist that all negotiations between nations should be public. They are not prone to understand pride or delicacy in any quarter, and would like to see made public the private transactions not only of nations but of individuals, so that they might thus satisfy the cheap curiosity of their readers; for this reason they are opposed to the law of libel and to every protection to human privacy. They tell us in their flippant and cock-sure way that diplomacy and secrecy are not necessary parts of the policy or of the procedure of a free nation; that all treaty negotiations should be open; and they are fond of denouncing with a great show of moral indignation the secret diplomacy of the so-called autocracies of the world. But common sense teaches us that as long as national pride continues, and treaties are to be made and war and peace decided upon by governments, that is to say, as long as opposing and warlike nations exist, secrecy will be necessary in the discussion of treaties and in all important international negotiations; and that the government which neglects to use the precaution and to give the guaranty of secrecy will be sometimes left in the lurch.
We hear a lot about a League of Nations in these days. The greatest and most successful league of sovereign powers ever established was this Union of States by and under a Constitution which was forged and created at Philadelphia in 1787 by some forty educated and propertied gentlemen working in absolute secrecy. Neither the newspapers nor the populace was allowed to be present or to be represented at their deliberations, nor to know what was going on, nor to read or otherwise learn of their debates or processes, therefore the delegates were able to work untrammelled and to produce good results. Absolute secrecy in its construction made our American Constitution possible.
Besides secrecy, great skill is required in the making of treaties and constitutions. The nations whose rulers and diplomatic agents are chosen under a system of universal suffrage, of government by demagogues and platform ranters who are allowed and expected to distribute diplomatic posts among their supporters; such nations will suffer in competition with those whose polity brings to the front and puts in command a set of trained educated statesmen and diplomats. The two greatest triumphs of the United States in its entire history were diplomatic achievements; and both were accomplished by statesmen trained under the old property qualification suffrage system, before manhood suffrage had cheapened our institutions. It was diplomacy, and secret diplomacy at that, which under the astute management of Franklin obtained for the American States the aid of France and made successful the American Revolution. It was diplomacy, secret and highly skilled diplomacy, which procured in 1803 the cession to the United States by France of Louisiana, from which territory nine great states and the greater part of four others were created and which made the United States a real power in the world. The story of that acquisition as described by Fiske is that of one of the greatest diplomatic achievements in history; and, after making all allowances for good luck in the affair, we find there pictured a statesmanship and a patriotism calculated to thrill the heart of every American. The men who were most conspicuous on the American side from first to last in that transaction, were not of the class of politicians who are to-day being chosen for high office by the popular vote; they were Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Robert R. Livingston; all of them men of position, property, good family, descent and education. All but Washington were college graduates. All were brought to the front by a system established upon the votes of a propertied electorate.
As government by the propertied class was successful in diplomacy in those old days, so that of manhood suffrage has been a diplomatic failure in our own time. The most recent and terrible instance of the direful results of lack of governmental efficiency has been that of the episode of the German War just concluded. Democracy was not only unprepared in 1914 for the struggle with Germany, but it completely failed to foresee or even to suspect its approach. The crisis of 1914 found the four great democratic nations of the world deficient in military organization, in preparation for defense, and in international vision and information. Granted the existence of a Germany, armed to the teeth, and sharpening her sword for mischief, Democracy should have had in charge of its foreign affairs men with vision sufficient to enable them to foresee or at least to conjecture her designs. Of these designs her democratic neighbors had no conception, and the United States was as unsuspecting as a child. No effort had been made to study the situation. Our rulers were mere vote-getters, local politicians, with a ridiculously small knowledge of foreign affairs, and of the dreadful impending future no vision whatever. We had then and we have now no adequate foreign affairs organization at Washington or abroad; and no sufficient popular conception of the need of one. It was part of the business of an efficient national government in 1914 to understand thoroughly our foreign relations; and therefore to keep competent representatives in all foreign countries; to measurably understand the policy of Germany and every other first class power and its true significance; the extent of Germany’s military and naval preparations and their object, and the issues involved in the war; it was its business to realize our true interests therein; to keep informed of every phase of the struggle as it proceeded; to lead and advise the press and the representatives of the people on all these matters; to cause due preparation to be made for all eventualities, and to prescribe a consistent and dignified policy for the nation. No one can possibly deny that the Washington administration failed in all and every one of these respects. It did none of these things; and let us haste to say that it is not to be supposed that the opposite party could have done any better. In these important matters Washington could not help but fail, because our political system created by universal suffrage and guided by its paltry spirit makes no provision for statesmanship or diplomacy; for forethought, sagacity and profound policy in foreign affairs; nor for preparation for great wars. Nor were the other great democracies, Great Britain, France, or Italy, much better off, as is shown by the miserable Russian fiasco, when they and ourselves, with an incredible fatuous folly permitted and even aided or encouraged the Bolsheviki and their German assistants to destroy the Russian alliance, by deposing the friendly Czar who was maintaining a government which had fought nobly and effectively for the common cause, and which was the only civilized government possible in Russia. It was then in the power of the Allies backing the Czar to have stamped out Bolshevism. They allowed him to be deposed by a gang of adventurers, while we stupidly applauded and raised the silly cry that Russia was now a democracy; a free country forsooth. Misled by our ignorant and worthless Foreign Office the masses who foolishly believe that freedom consists in merely voting at elections were delighted; our politicians and newspapers really or affectedly joined in this senseless joy; and the few among us who understood what was really being done were unable to get a hearing. Civilization in Russia and the cause of the Allies was betrayed by the ignorance of the politicians who controlled the Allied policies, and the result has been the loss of tens of thousands of American lives and billions of American dollars.