speculations of political science. Further, I should like to say that the principles to which I propose to refer are not necessarily confined to British administration. They would, I consider, be equally applicable to any form of indigenous administration, or to any organized administration in any civilized country.

Now administration is an art to which, like other arts, such as painting or music, some people come qualified by natural ability and others by the confidence which only experience can give, while the more successful require both brains and study and practice. Administration moreover deals not with inanimate things, but with mankind; and it is not a mere collection of arbitrary orders based upon a mere fortuitous collection of circumstances. If administration is to be of any value and of any permanency, it must be based on principles. It has been well said by more than one great man in reviewing either his own work or the work of others, that the principles must be reasonably simple; they must be principles which any reasonably intelligent person can follow; and if any such administrator is to secure an intelligent application of such principles at the hands of his officers, the principles must be capable of expression in intelligible language. It is of course impossible to give an exhaustive statement of such principles, for that would mean the running of the whole gamut of human nature and of all conceivable contingencies; but I think it is possible to explain to you some of those principles, the application of which occurs with tolerable frequency and the importance of which is comparatively great.

Consider first what is the difference between a body of trained soldiers and an equal body of persons taken from a crowd, say, at a street corner. The essential difference is that the first body, the soldiers, are subject to, and imbued with, discipline. Consider what discipline means. Most schoolboys think that discipline only means punishment for doing wrong; but that is only one

facet of the precious stone of discipline. The derivation from the Latin word "discipulus" is obvious to you in India; it means the relationship of the chela to his guru. Discipline means primarily instruction, and next recognition of, and subjection to, constituted authority; it is the recognition that some human beings are fated to command and some to obey. In the army the private soldier obeys various subordinate officers, who in their turn take their orders from the Captain and the Major, while the Colonel of a regiment obeys the General; and thus the chain in the army is complete from the lowest camp follower to the supreme power in a country. You see it in the subordination of boys to a prefect in the school room; and in the authority of the superintendent in a hostel. If you apply the analogy of the military world to civil administration, you will see that if any ordered body of men is to succeed, the principle which binds them as one whole is that there must be a recognized chain of authority; in this country it is from the village watchman to the viceroy.

This principle of co-ordinated subordination does not, however, exhaust the application of discipline. There is a corollary which is not so obvious; but it is of considerable importance. The principle which I ask you to consider next is that, if any one does become a member of an organized system of civil administration (under which term I include every branch which deals with the public welfare), he, the official, must to some extent abandon his independence as an individual. Please do not misinterpret me here; an official is a servant. As Lord Bacon has laid down, men in great places are thrice servants : servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business. It is not desired, and it is not desirable, that just because he is an official he should meekly surrender his own power of thinking. Far from it; what I mean is only another form of the surrender of the individual which you meet in civic life, as for example in the

bye-laws of a municipality. No one in a modern civilized state can do exactly as he pleases: the modern state is a community organized for public service. Indeed the whole problem of modern democracy is to combine liberty with discipline of the individual. Any one of the municipalities in your own land will give you an example of this. The public body has an obligation to the members of the public in providing the amenities of modern life, so far as it can clean roads, flushed drains, pure water. But the individual members of the community have also their obligations. They must not throw rubbish on the road ; they must not take an elephant along certain streets; they must not pollute the air with noxious vapours. A man may say that he is a free man: why may he not do this or that? But in Persian literature is to be found the reflection:-does civilization really make us free, or does it forge for us a thousand fetters? The answer is that for the good of the community and by virtue of the reciprocal obligation the individual must submit to some personal restraint. So in any organized administrative system, each unit which joins it has to exercise some restraint on what he would personally like to do or say, in view of the fact that he is not a self-centred individual, but is a link in the chain, a cogwheel in the machine, a portion of the whole fabric.

These two principles of co-ordinated subordination and of partial surrender of individuality are what may be termed repressive principles. But mankind is human, and requires encouragement. It is the hope of reward that sweetens labour; and hence we require some supporting principles. One is that, given a body of men organized for a definite administrative object-whether it be the collection of revenue or the work of the Post Office, or the repression of crime or the other numerous objects of civilized government-this body can best give satisfactory service if the members are contented; and contentment follows normally from the provision of reasonable

prospects of advancement and from treatment with humanity and justice. There are many factors in settling this: the number of men available for certain public services; the competitive value of labour, whether mental or physical, in the open market, and the comparison with other forms of public service. But expressed broadly, the working principle is that in an organized body of workers-and this applies equally to work other than Government work-the workers should be rewarded in accordance with their labours; that while the inefficient have to be reproved and if necessary punished or removed, the virtuous workers should be encouraged and in special cases rewarded.

Another very broad principle of administration is frequently mentioned in the Press and in public writings. You need not be a great newspaper reader to notice from time to time the phrase-" Trust the man on the spot." Now this is an expression of a principle which is viewed in different ways according to the temperament of the persons studying it. One type of mind, consciously or unconsciously, is suspicious and apprehensive that things that it does not see are not going right. It is for ever digging up a plant to see whether it is growing. This type of mind when represented at the top of an organized system of administration, requires to be reassured that the people at the bottom are doing what is right; and has a tendency to demand not only complete information but a submission of reports for examination and for the issue of orders by higher authority. Another type of mind is represented by extreme complacency; that type which is styled as easygoing. It is content after instructions have been given to a subordinate to leave him alone, and indeed to assume that all will go well. It may assume, but it does not necessarily assume, extreme capacity in the person of the subordinate and thoroughgoing confidence on the part of the superior officer. It may be affected by the difficulty or ease of communication; the electric telegraph, for instance,

has created a silent revolution in the form of normal administration. There are some occasions when the agent must be left entirely to himself, when the circumstances are such that no controlling influence can be exercised. The general application of trusting the man on the spot assumes reasonably normal conditions; and in such conditions the application of the principle means that if the agent has been properly selected and if he is sufficiently aware of the limitations of individual human endeavour, his interpretation of local facts and his judgment as to the action to be taken on that interpretation are more likely to be right than that of persons five hundred, or it may be five thousand, miles away. The extreme of the first temperament which I have mentioned may lead to inaction or restiveness under control: the extreme of the other may lead to the complete absence of any control. The ideal administrator on the spot in whom absolute trust may be reposed requires to possess many admirable characteristics, all of which are seldom combined in the highest degree in any one human being; and, when they are, the possessor becomes one of the world's great men. requires to possess the power of initiative, which means insight in what should be done and the courage to do it ; he requires common sense, which means the power to analyse the underlying strata of any structure and the power to reject the upper layers which are accidental; he requires a knowledge of facts present and past and that almost indefinable characteristic which belongs to those who are called born leaders of men. As it is not reasonable or natural to expect such a combination of high qualities in those who hold subordinate posts, it follows that the principle of trusting the man on the spot requires modification according to circumstances.

He

There is another principle which is extensively employed in administration. History shows that it is of wide application in all human affairs,—whether it be in the management of a commercial business, in social intercourse