Certain phrases and certain sets of ideas gain dominance at certain times. Just now the idea of administrative efficiency is uppermost. It seems necessarily to be the controlling factor in the progress of any business or any people. Certainly, a people should be efficient; but an efficient government may not mean an efficient people,—it may mean quite otherwise or even the reverse. The primary purpose of government in these days, and particularly in this country, is to educate and to develop all the people and to lead them to express themselves freely and to the full, and to partake politically. And this is what governments may not do, and this is where they may fail even when their efficiency in administration is exact. A monarchic form may be executively more efficient than a democratic form; a despotic form may be more efficient than either. The justification of a democratic form of government lies in the fact that it is a means of education.
The final test of government is not executive efficiency. Every movement, every circumstance that takes starting-power and incentive away from the people, even though it makes for exacter administration, is to be challenged. It is specially to be deplored if this loss of starting-power affects the persons who deal first-hand with the surface of the planet and with the products that come directly out of it.
There is a broad political significance to all this. Sooner or later the people rebel against intrenched or bureaucratic groups. Many of you know how they resist even strongly centralized departments of public instruction, and how the effectiveness of such departments may be jeopardized and much lessened by the very perfectness of their organization; and if they were to engage in a custom of extraneous forms of news-giving in the public press, the resentment would be the greater. In our rural work we are in danger of developing a piece of machinery founded on our fundamental industry; and if this ever comes about, we shall find the people organizing to resist it.
The reader will understand that in this discussion I assume the agricultural work to be systematically organized, both in nation and State; this is essential to good effort and to the accomplishing of results: but we must take care that the formal organization does not get in the way of the good workers, hindering and repressing them and wasting their time.
We want governments to be economical and efficient with funds and in the control of affairs; this also is assumed: but we must not overlook the larger issues. In all this new rural effort, we should maintain the spirit of team-work and of co-action, and not make the mistake of depending too much on the routine of centralized control.
In this country we are much criticised for the cost of government and for the supposed control of affairs by monopoly. The cost is undoubtedly too great, but it is the price we pay for the satisfaction of using democratic forms. As to the other disability, let us consider that society lies between two dangers,—the danger of monopoly and the danger of bureaucracy. On the one side is the control of the necessities of life by commercial organization. On the other side is the control of the necessities of life, and even of life itself, by intrenched groups that ostensibly represent the people and which it may be impossible to dislodge. Here are the Scylla and the Charybdis between which human society must pick its devious way.
Both are evil. Of the two, monopoly may be the lesser: it may be more easily brought under control; it tends to be more progressive; it extends less far; it may be the less hateful. They are only two expressions of one thing, one possibly worse than the other. Probably there are peoples who pride themselves on more or less complete escape from monopoly who are nevertheless suffering from the most deadening bureaucracy.
Agriculture is in the foundation of the political, economic, and social structure. If we cannot develop starting-power in the background people, we cannot maintain it elsewhere. The greatness of all this rural work is to lie in the results and not in the methods that absorb so much of our energy. If agriculture cannot be democratic, then there is no democracy.