It is difficult for those Englishmen who have not been brought into business relations with Continental officials to realise the extreme centralisation of their administrative and diplomatic procedures. The tendency of every French central authority is to allow no discretionary power whatever to his subordinate. He wishes, often from a distance, to control every detail of the administration. The tendency of the subordinate, on the other hand, is to lean in everything on superior authority. He does not dare to take any personal responsibility; indeed, it is possible to go further and say that the corroding action of bureaucracy renders those who live under its baneful shadow almost incapable of assuming responsibility. By force of habit and training it has become irksome to them. They fly for refuge to a superior official, who, in his turn, if the case at all admits of the adoption of such a course, hastens to merge his individuality in the voluminous pages of a code or a Government circular.
The British official, on the other hand, whether in England or abroad, is an Englishman first and an official afterwards. He possesses his full share of national characteristics. He is by inheritance an individualist. He lives in a society which, so far from being, as is the case on the Continent, saturated with respect for officialism, is somewhat prone to regard officialism and incompetency as synonymous terms. By such association, any bureaucratic tendency which may exist on the part of the British official is kept in check, whilst his individualism is subjected to a sustained and healthy course of tonic treatment.
Thus, the British system breeds a race of officials who relatively to those holding analogous posts on the Continent, are disposed to exercise their central authority in a manner sympathetic to individualism; who, if they are inclined to err in the sense of over-centralisation, are often held in check by statesmen imbued with the decentralising spirit; and who, under these influences, are inclined to accord to local agents a far wider latitude than those trained in the Continental school of bureaucracy would consider either safe or desirable.
On the other hand, looking to the position and attributes of the local agents themselves, it is singular to observe how the habit of assuming responsibility, coupled with national predispositions acting in the same direction, generates and fosters a capacity for the beneficial exercise of power. This feature is not merely noticeable in comparing British with Continental officials, but also in contrasting various classes of Englishmen _inter se_. The most highly centralised of all our English offices is the War Office. For this reason, and also because a military life necessarily and rightly engenders a habit of implicit obedience to orders, soldiers are generally less disposed than civilians to assume personal responsibility and to act on their own initiative. Nevertheless, whether in military or civil life, it may be said that the spirit of decentralisation pervades the whole British administrative system, and that it has given birth to a class of officials who have both the desire and the capacity to govern, who constitute what Bacon called[14] the _Participes curarum_, namely, "those upon whom Princes doe discharge the greatest weight of their affaires," and who are instruments of incomparable value in the execution of a policy of Imperialism.