NEW DESPOTISM

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 73, 23 September 1930, Page 16

NEW DESPOTISM

THE OFFICIAL CLASS

"SHIELDED BUREAUCRACY"

GERMAN COMPLAINT

"It is easy to conjure up tho vision of an ideal sState, the functions of which appear to bo based on logical principles, but the State in which we arc living is not a guinea-pig for vivisection by theorists, and wo cannot afford tho luxury of paying for wrongheaded ideas merely for the edification of their followers."

This is the view expressed by General yon Secckt in his book on "The Future of tho German Empire."

General yon Seeekt holds very decided views on tho question of poor whites and jobs for pals' and, after a minute examination of their German equivalents, he makes a passionate plea for "a State of independent citizens; not a State of officials, not a Stato of pensioners" such as he sees Germany becoming (writes Colonel Deneys Reitz in the "Cape Times." General yon Seeekt's description of the increase of German officialdom reads so like our own conditions that one is tempted to use a pair of scissors and paste up the whole of his chapter, but a few characteristic phrases must suffice: "The ever-increasing number of laws leads to an ever-increasing number of officials. The consequence of tho present state of things in Germany is an increase, verging on the grotesque, of Stato officials and employees. In placo of a Civil Service actively engaged on behalf of a living State, there arises an atrophied lymphatic Bureaucracy, functioning for its own sake; at pains to find a justification for its existence by the observance of a multitude of unnecessary laws and regulations." DEPARTMENTAL RIVALRIES. Most of our Civil servants in the upper grades and every one of our Ministers or ex-Ministers will endorse tho remarkable insight shown by General yon Seeekt in dealing with the play and interplay of Departmental rivalries, and_ here again one is surprised at the similarity of the conditions ho describes to our own. He says: "The danger of an inflated and shielded bureaucracy not directly concerned with the welfare of the rest of the community should not be,taken too lightly. Any upper-grade Civil servant who attains a position of authority. is handicapped, even if he bring with him an export knowledge of his Department.

"Even where his active brain has promoted him over the heads of his' colleagues, he will have to count on tho .resistance of the men over whose heads he has been promoted. This becomes doubly manifest when ho takes over a Department, unversed in the secret codes cf the clerical staff and tho interconnection of cliques. He will hardly bo aware himself how his views change before they are formulated and how in place of his own views aro substituted those of his subordinates placed before- him," all of which, coming from a Prussian general, is pretty good characterisation. And the following excerpt from tho same source might easily find its way unaltered into a local Civil Service magazine: "Yet another danger threatens tIH; Civil Service. In tho nature of things to-day, it seems to have become an accepted principle for a Government to prefer convinced supporters for its servants, but there is tho danger of mistaking the interests of party for the interests of State. ' When the charge of the appointment of officials for political motives is raised, people are' too fond of quoting a similar propensity under the late regime." EGGS MUST BE BROKEN. His reference to the German police will be read with approva. by some of our own officers: "The resentment against 'polico excesses' may well have its source in a wholesome feeling of personal dignity and a sense of outraged right on tho part of the public, but it is mischievous to subject every action of the polico to examination under the magnifying glass of hostile criticism, and not to understand that whore omelettes aro being made for general consumption you cannot help breaking eggs. There is rarely anything more than a bid for cheap popularity or hostility to all authority behind these attacks."

The Germany army, that ouco allpowerful engine of destruution, occupies but a small corner of the Gonoral's book, and oven then, in deference no doubt to the Kellogg Pact,'it is not callecl an army at all, but is discreetly referred to as a "Defence Force," and the simmering resentment of' tho old warhorso at the new order of things once more flares up when ho bluntly declares that the "Defonce Force" under party government, "has degenerated into ink-spilling and wire-puling of cliques.

"GOVERNED TO SHREDS."

Apparently tho German.. Empire, which most of us have looked upon as an indissoluble whole, is undergoing the same disintegrating, or strengthening, processes (according to the point of view) as the British Empire, and the old Prussian Junker turned philosopher muses as sadly as an imperialist of the Eudyard Kipling school \pon a topsyturvy world in which his beloved Eeieh is being "governed to shreds" as he puts it. "They even want historic Prussian provinces to revert to the status of separate countries just as an urban council might change the name of a street," he declares wrathfully, as ofce of our die-hard imperialists might look upon the loosening bonds of tho Dominions with undisguised dismay. Another unsuspected parallel between Great Britain and Germany which emerges from his book is tho fact, or at any rate what General yon Seeekt considers to be indubitable fact, that Germany cannot support herself in foodstuffs and raw material in peaco or war and he devotes many pages to a discussion of this all-important problem,