CHAPTER III
OFFICIAL THOUGHT
It is obvious, however, that the persons elected under any conceivable system of representation cannot do the whole work of government themselves.
If all elections are held in single member constituencies of a size sufficient to secure a good supply of candidates; if the number of elections is such as to allow the political workers a proper interval for rest and reflection between the campaigns; if each elected body has an area large enough for effective administration, a number of members sufficient for committee work and not too large for debate, and duties sufficiently important to justify the effort and expense of a contest; then one may take about twenty-three thousand as the best number of men and women to be elected by the existing population of the United Kingdom—or rather less than one to every two thousand of the population.[[83]]
This proportion depends mainly on facts in the psychology of the electors, which will change very slowly if they change at all. At present the amount of work to be done in the way of government is rapidly increasing, and seems likely to continue to increase. If so, the number of elected persons available for each unit of work must tend to decrease. The number of persons now elected in the United Kingdom (including, for instance, the Parish Councillors of rural parishes, and the Common Council of the City of London) is, of course, larger than my estimate, though it has been greatly diminished by the Acts of 1888, 1894 and 1902. Owing, however, to the fact that areas and powers are still somewhat uneconomically distributed it represents a smaller actual working power than would be given by the plan which I suggest.
On the other hand, the number of persons (excluding the Army and Navy) given in the Census Returns of 1901 as professionally employed in the central and local government of the United Kingdom was 161,000. This number has certainly grown since 1901 at an increasing rate, and consists of persons who give on an average at least four times as many hours a week to their work as can be expected from the average elected member.
What ought to be the relation between these two bodies, of twenty-three thousand elected, and, say, two hundred thousand non-elected persons? To begin with, ought the elected members be free to appoint the non-elected officials as they like? Most American politicians of Andrew Jackson's time, and a large number of American politicians to-day, would hold, for instance, as a direct corollary from democratic principles, that the elected congressman or senator for a district or State has a right to nominate the local federal officials. There may, he would admit, be some risk in that method, but the risk, he would argue, is one involved in the whole scheme of democracy, and the advantages of democracy as a whole are greater than its disadvantages.