Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/180

public official is an agent of the people, who receives his support, his authority and his position directly from the people. He must consider himself the servant of the community according to this conception, feel his responsibility and constantly keep in remembrance the fact that he is installed to attend to certain interests of the individual members of the community, who can not attend to them personally with the same convenience and certainty. He ought never to forget that he is not theoretically indispensable to the community any more than a servant to a household; each individual could if necessary, black his own boots and fetch the water for himself, and in the same way could attend personally to the administration of the government, so that a recognition of the advantages attending the division of labor is the only cause of the existence of the office holding public. But in reality the office holder considers himself the master, not the servant of the public. He believes that he owes his authority not to the people but to the ruler, he may be either king or president of a republic. He looks upon himself as the dispenser of a part of the supreme governing power. Hence he demands from the citizens the respect and subservience which they owe to the principle of sovereign authority. The public functionary is a more developed form of the steward or overseer, considered historically. The clerk growling at the citizens summoned to his office is the historical descendant of the commandant or overseer appointed by a tyrant of the Dark Ages to superintend his people of slaves, and to keep them in a becoming state of obedience by his body guard of warriors, with the whip and the goad. As the public functionary is a fragment of the royal grace-of-Godness, he lays claim to some of its infallibility. His position is below that of the head of the State, but it is above that of the masses to be governed.