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The Fusion of Government and Business

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

J. A. Corry
J. A. Corry*
Affiliation:
The University of Saskatchewan
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Extract

Seventy years ago Bagehot composed his epitaph on the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834. To his own generation, it must have sounded like the last word on attempts to administer any aspect of public affairs by independent authorities without a responsible parliamentary head. The dethronement of the “three kings of Somerset House” demonstrated the prime condition of parliamentary government. The lesson they taught was obvious and the more thoroughgoing of Bagehot's contemporaries were all for denying to bureaucratic irresponsibility the solace even of a last sanctuary at the British Museum.

Even fools, we are told, will learn the lessons of experience but it seems that some still more elementary form of education will have to be devised for political democracies. Parliamentary government has been adopted all over the world but it has always been accompanied by some defiance of basic principle. Some branch of government activity has always been wrongly sheltered from parliamentary discipline and guidance. With the twentieth century, these occasional infractions have become chronic. In England itself, affairs of the gravest national import are being entrusted to bodies without any direct responsibility to Parliament. To the democracy, the story of the “three kings of Somerset House” is a political fairy tale. It laughs and then runs off to play at trains with the London Transport Board. In some such fashion, we may surmise, Bagehot might have reasoned on the facts of to-day.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , August 1936 , pp. 301 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1936

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References

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