Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/498

462 462 HARVARD LAW REVIEW This is not to say that administrative law represents a mis- taken evolution. The most striking change in the poUtical organ- ization of the last half century is the rapidity with which, by the sheer pressure of events, the state has been driven to assume a positive character. We talk less and less in the terms of nine- teenth-century individualism. The absence of governmental re- straint has ceased to seem the ultimate ideal. There is every- where almost anxiety for the extension of governmental functions. It was inevitable that such an evolution should involve a change in the judicial process. Where, for example, great problems like those involved in government insurance are concerned, there is a great convenience in leaving their interpretation to the ofl&cials who administer the Act. They have gained in its appHcation an expert character to which no purely judicial body can pretend; and their opinion has a weight which no community can afford to neglect. The business of the state, in fact, has here become so much like private business that, as Professor Dicey has empha- sized,^^ its ojB&cials need "that freedom of action necessarily pos- sessed by every private person in the management of his own personal concerns." So much is tolerably clear. But history sug- gests that the relation of such executive justice to the slow infiltration of a bureaucratic regime is at each stage more peri- lously close; and the development of administrative law needs to be closely scrutinized in the interests of pubUc liberty. If a gov- ernment department may make regulations of any kind without any judicial tests of fairness or reasonableness being involved, it is clear that a fundamental safeguard upon English liberties has disappeared. If administrative action can escape the review of the courts, there is no reality in official responsibihty; and cases like Entick v. Carrington ^^ become, in such a contest, of merely antiquarian interest. If the Secretary of State, under wide powers, issues a regulation prohibiting the publication of any book or pamphlet he does not like without previous submission to a cen- sor, who may suppress it without assignment of cause, the merest and irresponsible caprice of a jimior clerk may actually be the occasion for the suppression of vital knowledge; ^° nor will there «« 31 L. Quart. Rev. 148, 150.
 * 19 St. Tr. 1030.
 * • Defence of the Realm Act, Order No. 51. CJ. The London Nation, § 8, 1917.