The field of administration is a field of business. It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics;it at most points stands apart even from the debatable ground of constitutional study. It is a part of political life only as the methods of the manufactured product. But it is,at the same time, raised very far above the dull level of mere technical detail by the face that through its greater principles it is directly connected with the lasting maxims of political wisdom, the permanent truths of political progress.
The object of administrative study is to rescue executive methods from the confusion and costliness of empirical experiment and set them upon foundations laid deep in stabel principle.
It is for this reason that we must regard civil-service reform in its present stages as but a prelude to a fuller administrative reform. We are now rectifying methods of appointment;we must go on to adjust executive functions more fitly and to prescribe better methods of executive organization and action. Civil-service reform is thus but a moral preparation for what is to follow. It is clearing the moral atmosphere of official life by establishing the sanctit
y of public office as a public trust,and, by making the service unpartisan, it is opening the way for making it businesslike. By sweeting its motives it is rendering it capable of improving its methods of work.
Let me expand a little what I have said of the province of administration. Most important to be observed is the truth already so much and so fortunately insisted upon by our civil-service reformers;namely, that administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Although politics sets the tasks for administration,it should not be suffered to manipulate its offices.
This is distinction fo high authority;eminent German writers insist upon it as of course. Biuntschli, for instance,bids us separate administration alike from politics and from law. Politics, he says, is state activity”in things great and universal,” while”administration, on the other hand,” is”the activity of the state in individual and small things. Politics is thus the special province of the statesman, administration of the statesman, administration of the technical official.” “Policy does nothing without the aid of administration”; but administr
ation is not therefore politics. But we do not require German authority for this position; this discrimination between administration and politics is now,happily, too obvious to need further discussion.
There is another distinction which must be worked into all our conclusions, which, though but another side of that between administration and politics, is not quite so easy to keep sighe of: I mean the distinction between constitutional and administrative questions, between those governmental adjustments which are essential to constitutional purposes of a wisely adapting convenience.
One cannot easily make clear to every one just where administration resides in the various departments of any practicable government without entering upon particulars so numerous as to confuse and distinctions so minute as to distract. No lines of demarcation, setting apart administrative from non-administrative functions, can be run between this and that department of government without being run up hill and down dale, over dizzy heights of distinction and through dense jungles of statutory enactment, hither
and thither around “ifs”and “buts,” “whens”and “howevers” until they become altogether lost to the common eye not accustomed to this sort of surveying, and consequently not acquainted with the use of the theodolite of logical discernment. A great deal of administration goes about incognito to most of the world, being confounded now with political “management,” and again with constitutional principle.
Perhaps this ease of confusion may explain such utterances as that of Niebuhr’s:”Liberty,” he says, “depends incomparably more upon administration than upon constitution.” At first sight this appears to be largely true, Apparently facility in the actual exercise of liberty does depend more upon administrative arrangements than upon constitution guarantees; although constitutional guarantees alone secure the existence of liberty. But—upon second thought—is even so much as this true? Liberty no more consists in easy functional movement than intelligence consists in the ease and vigor with which the limbs of a strong man move. The principles that rule within the man, or the constitution, are the vital springs of liberty or servitude. Because dependence and subjection are without chains, are lightened by every easy-working device of considerate, paternal government,t
hey are not thereby transformed into liberty. Liberty cannot live apart from constitutional principle; and no administration, however perfect and liberal its methods, can give men more than a poor counterfeit of liberty if it rest upon illiberal principles of government.
subjectionA clear view of the difference between the province of constitutional law and the province of administrative function ought to leave no room for misconception; and ti is possible to name some roughly definite criteria upon which suchu a view can be built. Public administration is detailed and systematic execution of public law. Every particular application of general law is an act of administration. The assessment and raising of taxes, for instance, the hanging of a criminal, the transportation and delivery of the mails, the equipment and recruiting of the amy, and navy, etc.,are all obviously acts of administration; but the general laws which direct these things to be done are as obviously outside of and above administration. The broad plans of governmental action are not administrative; the detailed execution of suchu plans is administrative. Constitutions, therefore, properly concern themselves only with those instrumentalities of government which are to control general law. Our federal constitution observes this principle in saying
nothing of even the greatest of the purely executive offices, and speaking only of that President of the Union who was to share the legislative and policy-making functions of government, only of those judges of highest jurisdiction who were to interpret and guard its principles, and not of those who were merely to give utterance to them.