The March of Folly (69 page)

Another such scheme used aliens. The Turkish Janissaries were the better-known military arm of a larger body—the Kapi Kullari, or Slave Institution—which filled every civil post from palace cook to Grand Vizier. Made up of Christian children taken from their parents and brought up and exhaustively trained by the Ottoman Turks for official functions in what may have been the most complete educational system ever devised, they were legally slaves of the Sultan, converted to Islam, forbidden to have families or own property. Free of these distractions, it was supposed they would be able to devote themselves singlemindedly to the state and its sovereign, on whom they were entirely dependent for pay and the necessities of life. The Sultan thus acquired a body not
only of first-class administrators, but of strong supporters of his absolutism. Although the system worked to excellent effect, it did not save the Ottoman Empire from slow degeneration; nor, in the end, could the system save itself. In the course of time, the military branch gained growing power, defied the marriage ban and assumed hereditary rights, perpetuated themselves as a permanent and dominant clan, and eventually, in inevitable challenge to the ruler, attempted to seize power in overt revolt. They were slaughtered and destroyed, bringing down the rest of the Slave Institution with them, while the Grand Turk dwindled into dotage.

In 17th-century Europe, after the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, Prussia, when it was still Brandenburg, determined to create a strong state by means of a disciplined army and a trained civil service. Applicants for the civil positions, drawn from commoners in order to offset the nobles’ control of the military, had to complete a course of study covering political theory, law and legal philosophy, economics, history, penology and statutes. Only after passing through various stages of examination and probationary terms of office did they receive definitive appointments and tenure and opportunity for advancement. The higher civil service was a separate branch, not open to promotion from the middle and lower levels.

The Prussian system proved so effective that the state was able to survive both military defeat by Napoleon in 1807 and the revolutionary surge of 1848. But by then it had begun to congeal, like the mandarins, losing many of its most progressive citizens in emigration to America. Prussian energies, however, succeeded in 1871 in uniting the German states in an empire under Prussian hegemony. Its very success contained the seed of ruin, for it nourished the arrogance and power-hunger that from 1914 through 1918 was to bring it down.

Political shock moved the English to give attention to the problem. Neither the loss of America nor the storm waves of the French Revolution shook their system of government, but in the mid-19th century, when the rumble from below was growing louder, the revolutions of 1848 on the Continent had effect. Instead of taking refuge in reactionary panic, as might have been expected, the authorities, with commendable enterprise, ordered an investigation of their own government practices, which were then virtually the private preserve of the propertied class. The result was a report on the need for a permanent civil service to be based on training and specialized skills and designed to provide continuity and maintenance of the long view as against transient issues and political passions. Though strongly
resisted, the system was adopted in 1870. It has produced distinguished civil servants, but also Burgess, MacLean, Philby and Blunt. The history of British government in the last hundred years suggests that factors other than the quality of its civil service determine a country’s fate.

In the United States, the civil service was established chiefly as a barrier to patronage and the pork-barrel, rather than in search of excellence. By 1937, a presidential commission, finding the system inadequate, was urging the development of a “real career service … requiring personnel of the highest order, competent, highly trained, loyal, skilled in their duties by reason of long experience, and assured of continuity.” After much effort and some progress, that goal is still not reached, but even if it had been, it would not affect elected officials and high appointments—that is, government at the top.

In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. When he and six fellow conspirators, as recorded by Herodotus, overthrew the reigning despot, they discussed what kind of government—whether a monarchy of one or an oligarchy of the wisest men—they should establish. Darius argued that they should keep to the rule of one and obtain the best government by choosing “the very best man in the whole state.” Being persuaded, the group agreed to ride out together next morning and he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King. By ruse of a clever groom who tethered a favorite mare at the critical spot, Darius’ horse performed on time and his fortunate master, thus singled out as the best man for the job, ascended the throne.

Factors other than random selection subdue the influence of the “thinking fire” on public affairs. For the chief of state under modern conditions, a limiting factor is too many subjects and problems in too many areas of government to allow solid understanding of any of them, and too little time to think between fifteen-minute appointments and thirty-page briefs. This leaves the field open to protective stupidity. Meanwhile bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.

Above all, lure of office, known in our country as Potomac fever, stultifies a better performance of government. The bureaucrat dreams of promotion, higher officials want to extend their reach, legislators and the chief of state want re-election; and the guiding principle in
these pursuits is to please as many and offend as few as possible. Intelligent government would require that the persons entrusted with high office should formulate and execute policy according to their best judgment, the best knowledge available and a judicious estimate of the lesser evil. But re-election is on their minds, and that becomes the criterion.

Aware of the controlling power of ambition, corruption and emotion, it may be that in the search for wiser government we should look for the test of character first. And the test should be moral courage. Montaigne adds, “Resolution and valor, not that which is sharpened by ambition but that which wisdom and reason may implant in a well-ordered soul.” The Lilliputians in choosing persons for public employment had similar criteria. “They have more regard for good morals than for great abilities,” reported Gulliver, “for, since government is necessary to mankind, they believe … that Providence never intended to make management of publick affairs a mystery, to be comprehended only by a few persons of sublime genius, of which there are seldom three born in an age. They suppose truth, justice, temperance and the like to be in every man’s power: the practice of which virtues, assisted by experience and a good intention, would qualify any man for service of his country, except where a course of study is required.”

While such virtues may in truth be in every man’s power, they have less chance in our system than money and ruthless ambition to prevail at the ballot box. The problem may be not so much a matter of educating officials for government as educating the electorate to recognize and reward integrity of character and to reject the ersatz. Perhaps better men flourish in better times, and wiser government requires the nourishment of a dynamic rather than a troubled and bewildered society. If John Adams was right, and government is “little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago,” we cannot reasonably expect much improvement. We can only muddle on as we have done in those same three or four thousand years, through patches of brilliance and decline, great endeavor and shadow.

REFERENCE NOTES

1.
JOHN ADAMS:
Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 9 July 1813, in
The Adams-Jefferson Letters
, ed. L. J. Cappon, Chapel Hill, 1959, II, 351.

2.
ENGLISH HISTORIAN, “NOTHING IS
MORE UNFAIR …”:
Denys A. Winstanley,
Lord Chatham and the Whig Opposition
,
Cambridge, 1912, 129
.

3.
PLATO ON PHILOSOPHER-KINGS:
Republic
, V, 473.

4.
HISTORIAN ON PHILIP II
:
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, 14th ed., anon.

5.
OXENSTIERNA
:
Bartlett’s Familar Quotations
.

6.
REHOBOAM:
I Kings 11:43, 12:1 and 4; II Chronicles 9:31, 10:1 and 4.

7.
“AMPLE IN FOLLY”:
Ecclesiasticus (Book of Sirach)
48:6
.

8.
MONTEZUMA:
William H. Prescott,
The Conquest of Mexico
, New York, 1843; C. A. Burland,
Montezuma
, New York, 1973.

9.
THIRTEEN MUSKETS:
New Cambridge Modern History
, I, 442.

10.
VISIGOTHS:
Dr. Rafael Altamira, “Spain Under the Visigoths,” in
Cambridge Medieval History
, II, chap. 6.

11.
SOLON, “LEARNED SOMETHING NEW”:
Plutarch’s Lives.

12.
SCHLESINGER, SR., QUOTED:
The Birth of a Nation
, New York, 1968, 245–6.

13.
VOLTAIRE QUOTED:
M. A. François,
The Age of Louis XIV
, Everyman ed., New York, 1966, 408.

14.
LOUIS XIV AS GOD’S INSTRUMENT:
G.R.R. Treasure,
Seventeenth Century France
, New York, 1966, 368.

15.
DAUPHIN’S CAUTIONS:
G. A. Rothrock,
The Huguenots: Biography of a Minority
,
Chicago, 1973, 173
.

16.
SAINT-SIMON’S COMMENT:
Memoires
in Sanche de Gramont,
The Age of Magnificence
, New York, 1963, 274.

17.
HUGUENOT OFFICERS JOIN WILLIAM
in: Estimate submitted to the King by Marshal Vauban in 1689; Rothrock, op. cit., 179.

18.
FRENCH HISTORIAN ON “GREAT DESIGNS”:
CPicavet in
La diplomatic au temps de Louis XIV
, 1930; q. Treasure, op. cit., 353.

19.
EMERSON:
Journals, 1820–72
, Boston, 1909–14, IV, 160.

20.
CHARLES
x
WOULD RATHER BE A WOODCUTTER:
Alfred Cobban,
A History of Modern France
, 2 vols., Penguin ed., 1961, II, 72.

21.
300 FRANCS FOR QUALIFICATION
: ibid., II, 77.

22.
CHIEF OF STAFF TO CHANCELLOR, “IT WAS MORE LIKELY …”:
Fritz Fischer,
Germany’s Aims in the First World War
, New York, 1967, 184–5.

23.
BETHMANN, “INEVITABLY CAUSE AMERICA …”:
Speech in Reichstag, 10 Jan 1916, q. Hans Peter Hanssen,
Diary of a Dying Empire
, Bloomington, Indiana Univ. Press, 1955.

24.
“GASPING IN THE REEDS …”:
in Reichstag, 31 Jan 1917, q. Hanssen, op. cit., 165.

25.
HELFFERICH, “LEAD TO RUIN”:
Official German Documents Relating to the World War
, 2 vols., Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, New York, I, 150.

26.
TWO LEADING BANKERS:
Max Warburg and Bernhard Dernburg, see Fischer, op. cit., 307.

27.
ZIMMERMANN, “TO RISK BEING CHEATED …”:
Fischer, op. cit., 299.

28.
CONFERENCE OF
9
JAN
1917,
ALL QUOTATIONS:
A verbatim report of the conference is in
German Documents
, I, 340, 525; II, 1219–77, 1317–21.

29.
BETHMANN, “FINIS GERMANIAE”:
q. G. P. Gooch,
Recent Revelations of European Diplomacy
, London, 1927, 17.

30.
RIEZLER, “GERMANY IS LIKE A PERSON …”:
q. Fritz Stern,
The Responsibility of Power
, ed. L. Krieger, and Stern, New York, 1967, 278.

31.
ADMIRAL YAMAMOTO QUOTED:
Gordon W. Prange,
At Dawn We Slept
, New York, 1981, 10, 15, 16.

32.
ADMIRAL NAGANO DOUBTFUL IF JAPAN WOULD WIN:
from the diary of Marquis Kido, Lord Privy Seal, 31 July 1941, q. Herbert Feis,
The Road to Pearl Harbor
, Princeton, 1950, 252.

WORKS CONSULTED

APOLLODORUS
.
The Library
[
and Epitome
]. 2 vols. Trans. Sir James George Frazer. London and New York, 1921.

ARNOLD, MATTHEW
. “On Translating Homer” in
The Viking Portable Arnold
. New York, 1949.

BOWRA
,
C. M
.
The Greek Experience
. Mentor ed. New York, n.d. (orig. pub. 1957).

DICTYS OF CRETE AND DARES THE PHRYGIAN
.
The Trojan War
. Trans. R. M. Frazer, Jr. Bloomington, Indiana Univ. Press, 1966.

DODDS, E. R
.
The Greeks and the Irrational
. Berkeley, Univ. of California Press,
1951
.

EURIPIDES
.
The Trojan Women
. Trans, with notes, Gilbert Murray. Oxford Univ. Press, 1915.

FINLEY, M. I
.
The World of Odysseus
, rev. ed. New York, 1978.

GRANT, MICHAEL, AND HAZEL, JOHN
.
Gods and Mortals in Classical Mythology. Springfield, Mass., 1973
.

GRAVES, ROBERT
.
The Greek Myths
. 2 vols. Penguin ed. Baltimore, 1955.