Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/19

Rh the provisions of which traverse and qualify in all kinds of ways the provisions of multitudinous acts on to which they are thrown: the onus of settling what is the law being left to private persons, who lose their property in getting judges' interpretations. And again this system of putting networks of districts over other networks, with their conflicting authorities, is quite consistent with the method under which the reader of the Public Health Act of 1872, who wishes to know what are the powers exercised over him, is referred to twenty-six preceding acts of several classes and numerous dates. So, too, with administrative inertia. Continually there occur cases showing the resistance of officialism to improvements: as by the Admiralty when use of the electric telegraph was proposed, and the reply was, "We have a very good semaphore system"; or as by the Post-Office, which the late Sir William Siemens years ago said had obstructed the employment of improved methods of telegraphing, and since then has impeded the general use of the telephone. Other cases, akin to that above set forth in detail, now and then show how the state with one hand increases evils which with the other hand it tries to diminish: as when it puts a duty on fire-insurances and then makes regulations for the better putting out of fires; dictating, too, certain modes of construction, which, as Captain Shaw shows, entail additional dangers. Again, the absurdities of official routine, rigid where it need not be and lax where it should be rigid, occasionally become glaring enough to cause scandals: as when a secret state document of importance put into the hands of an ill-paid copying-clerk, who is not even in permanent Government employ, is made public by him; or as when the mode of making the Moorsom fuse, which was kept secret even from our highest artillery-officers, was taught to them by the Russians, who had been allowed to learn it; or as when a diagram showing the "distances at which British and foreign ironclads could be perforated by our large guns," communicated by an enterprising attaché to his own Government, then became known "to all the Governments of Europe," while English officers remained ignorant of the facts. So, too, with state-supervision. From time to time it is pointed out that coal-mine explosions continue notwithstanding coal-mine inspection: the only effect being that more inspection and more stringent regulations are demanded. Even where the failure of inspection is most glaring, no notice is taken of it; as instance the terrible catastrophe by which a train full of people was destroyed along with the Tay Bridge. Countless denunciations, loud and unsparing, were vented against engineer and contractor; but little, if anything, was said about the government officer from whom the