Will efficiency then, you may well ask, when driven out of all public employment, find refuge somewhere? Certainly it will. In private employments and in employments paid by public companies. Barristers, solicitors, doctors, business men, manufacturers and authors are not paid by the state, nor are engineers, mechanics, railway employees; and so far from their efficiency being a bar to their employment, it is their most valuable asset. When a man consults his lawyer or his medical adviser he obviously has no interest in their politics, and when a railway company chooses an engineer, it enquires into his qualifications and ability and is quite indifferent as to whether his political views coincide with the general mentality of the people.
It is for this reason, or at least partly for this reason, that democracy tries to nationalise all employment, as a step in the direction of the nationalisation of everything. For instance it can partly nationalise the medical profession by establishing appointments for doctors, at relief offices, schools, and _lycées_. It can also partly nationalise the legal profession by appointing state-paid professors of law.
Already the State has considerable control over this class of person, for most of them have relations in government employment, whom they do not wish to bring into bad odour by seeming hostile to the opinions of the majority. The State, however, wants to hold them in still tighter control by seizing every opportunity of nationalising and socialising them more completely.
The State wants also to destroy all large associations, and to absorb their activities. The state purchase of a railway, for instance, is, in the first place, a means of exploiting the company; for there is always a hope that the State will be able to filch something out of the transaction; but its chief recommendation lies in the fact that it suppresses a whole army of the company's officials and employees, who were under no obligation to please the Government, and who had no other interest but to do their work properly. The State will thus transform this free population into government employees, whose primary duty is to be docile and subservient.
Under the extreme form and under the complete form of this regime, that is to say under socialism, everyone will be a government official.