Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/18

10 End? Against whom should be raised "the bitter cry of outcast London"?

The German anthropologist, Bastian, tells us that a sick native of Guinea who causes the fetich to lie by not recovering is strangled; and we may reasonably suppose that among the Guinea people any one audacious enough to call in question the power of the fetich would be promptly sacrificed. In days when governmental authority was enforced by strong measures, there was a kindred danger in saying anything disrespectful of the political fetich. Nowadays, however, the worst punishment to be looked for by one who questions its omnipotence is that he will be reviled as a reactionary who talks laissez-faire. That any facts he may bring forward will appreciably decrease the established faith is not to be expected; for we are daily shown that this faith is proof against all adverse evidence. Let us contemplate a small part of that vast mass of it which passes unheeded.

"A Government office is like an inverted filter; you send in accounts clear and they come out muddy." Such was the comparison I heard made many years ago by the late Sir Charles Fox, who, in the conduct of his business, had considerable experience of public departments. That his opinion was not a singular one, though his comparison was, all men know. Exposures by the press and criticisms in Parliament leave no one in ignorance of the vices of red-tape routine. Its delays, perpetually complained of, and which in the time of Mr. Fox Maule went to the extent that "the commissions of officers in the army" were generally "about two years in arrear," is afresh illustrated by the issue of the first volume of the detailed census of 1881, more than two years after the information was collected. If we seek explanations of such delays, we find one origin to be a scarcely credible confusion. In the case of the delayed census returns, the registrar-general tells us that "the difficulty consists not merely in the vast multitude of different areas that have to be taken into account, but still more in the bewildering complexity of their boundaries ": there being thirty-nine thousand administrative areas of twenty-two different kinds which overlap one another—hundreds, petty sessional divisions, lieutenancy divisions, urban and rural sanitary districts, unions, school-board districts, school-attendance districts, etc. And then, as Mr. W. Rathbone points out, these many superposed sets of areas, with intersecting boundaries, have their respective governing bodies with authorities running into one another's districts. Does any one ask why for each additional administration Parliament has established a fresh set of divisions? The reply which suggests itself is. To preserve consistency of method. For this organized confusion harmonizes completely with that organized confusion which Parliament each year increases by throwing on to the heap of its old acts a hundred new acts,