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The little wooden houses of the coloured squatters that used to alternate freely with the statelier mansions of officialdom are now rapidly disappearing; and some, perhaps, will regret the obliteration of the element of picturesqueness suggested in the quaint contrast.
They do not, it is true, grumble at those of their own standing in the service; nor do they try to out-manoeuvre their fellows of the same department; but, third-class men are jealous of those in the second- class, second-class men of lucky "seniors," hankering after their shoes; and all, alike envious, both individually and collectively, of other branches, unite in one compact band of martyrs against the encroachments and tyrannies of higher officialdom considering chiefs, secretaries of state, and such like birds of ill-omen, as virtual enemies and oppressors, with whom they are bound to prosecute a perpetual guerilla warfare: a warfare in which, alas! they are sadly over-matched.
His sarcasm had no practical result, because the officials never saw it if they had they would have shrugged their fat shoulders and gone to draw their comfortable salaries. But he taught Wagner that officialdom is the curse of the human race; and in after years that certainly had some practical results at the moment calamitous to Wagner; in the long run beneficial to him and the human race.
It is this unholy alliance between Expertise and Officialdom that squanders twenty thousand on an unimpeachable Frans Hals, and forty thousand on a Mabuse for which no minor artist will wish to take credit. For the money a judicious purchaser could have made one of the finest collections in England. The unholy alliance has no use for contemporary art.
In its simplest essence this was politics. Egyptian government, in its broad sense, rested on a class structured society: the aristocracy, the priesthood, officialdom, businessmen, highly trained scientists and engineers, skilled craftsmen and an immense proletariat consisting of tenant farmers, peons, slaves and war captives.
Perhaps it is the manner in which, under the name of authority, compulsion is exercised by subordinate officialdom and in especial by the police, as much as the compulsion itself, which irritates in Germany.
It holds the class schools; the class universities; the examinations for our public services are its class shibboleths; it is the church, the squirearchy, the permanent army class, permanent officialdom; it makes every appointment, it is the fountain of honour; what it does not know is not knowledge, what it cannot do must not be done.
In spite of all he could do, however, a certain grudging spirit hung about the conduct of Piedmontese officialdom towards the volunteers and their chief, but great personal offers were made to Garibaldi the highest military rank, a castle, a ship, the dowry of a princess for his daughter. All was refused.
These arrangements had, of course, been secretly agreed to en bloc before the fighting had been stopped and the abdication proclaimed, and were part and parcel of the elaborate scenery which officialdom always employs in Asia even when it is dealing with matters within the purview of the masses.
So Washington's fashionable society has come to realize, even more clearly than does the rest of the country, that, despite spasmodic struggles and apparent spurts of reaction, power has passed to the plutocracy, and that officialdom is, as a rule, servant verging toward slave. Still, form is a delusion of tenacious hold upon the human mind.
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