574 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
right and duty of bringing their elected representatives to book; the
brunt of the consequent corporate abuse of power by parliaments had
fallen upon their slave-household of civil servants; and the effect of
this arbitrary parliamentary regime on the administrative action of these
latter-day Western civil servants who found themselves in the plight
of an Ottoman Padishah's qullar had been to set up a second impedi-
ment to the decision of cases on their merits; for if the first question
that a conscientious civil servant must ask himself was 'What awkward
precedents for the service might this decision create ?' the second ques-
tion that a cautious civil servant must ask himself was 'What awkward
parliamentary questions for me might this decision evoke ?' There were
thus two irrelevant stumbling-blocks to be surmounted before the
merits of a case could obtain consideration from the civil servant who
would be called to account eventually over the outcome of whatever
action had been taken or been withheld on his advice; and, since, in
becoming a civil servant, he had not ceased to be a human being, it
was inevitable that his conduct should be influenced by a personal
anxiety to be in a strong position in any future reckoning, as well as
by an impersonal concern not to compromise the interests of the public
service by creating an unfortunate precedent.

It was also inevitable that civil servants should take personal advan-
tage, against the public interest, of a notorious trait of parliamentary
psychology. Civil servants had learnt from a long experience that, while
a parliament was usually quick to notice and resent even the slightest
damage to the public interest that might be traceable to a civil servant's
recommendation of some positive action, the same corporate autocrat
could usually be trusted not to visit upon a civil servant any propor-
tionately condign punishment for a sin of omission, even when the
sinner's failure to perform his public duty of recommending that
positive action should be taken had been the cause of a public cata-
strophe. This bad habit of parliaments was as pertinent to the civil
servant's professional work and personal interests as it was irrational in
itself and inimical to the common weal; and a parliamentary practice
of putting a premium upon sins of omission thus worked together with
an administrative concern for the avoidance of awkward precedents to
write *Thou shalt not' into the exordium of each commandment in the
civil servant's decalogue.

It would thus appear that, in the twentieth century, the psychic
steam-roller of a ponderous public administration was crushing the
business man turned civil servant as remorselessly as, in the nineteenth
century, the metallic steam-roller of a ponderous industrial plant had
crushed the husbandman turned machine-tender, A pressure that had
made the industrial worker curl up like a hedgehog had made the civil
servant mortify himself like a monk; two defensive reactions that were
so widely diverse in their outward manifestations were nevertheless
substantially identical in their psychological effect; and this pervasive
psychological consequence of a penetrating technological revolution was
inauspicious for the prospects of the Western Society in whose bosom
this revolution had taken place.