Dwight Waldo, Stephen Bailey, and I, among others who have from time to time expressed admiration for certain litterateurs as sources of wisdom and understanding of the art and science of public administration, will undoubtedly ponder at length a statement in W. Somerset Maugham's latest collection of imponderabilia, Points of View. Maugham says:

Only the very ingenuous can suppose that a work of fiction can give us reliable information on the topics which it is important to us for the conduct of our lives to be apprised of. By the nature of his creative gifts the novelist is incompetent to deal with such matters; his not to reason why, but to feel, to imagine, and to invent. He is biased. The subjects the writer chooses, the characters he creates, and his attitude toward them are conditioned by his bias. What he writes is the expression of his personality and the manifestation of his instincts, his emotions, his intuitions, and his experience. He loads his dice, sometimes not knowing what he is up to, but sometimes knowing very well; and then he uses such skill as he has to prevent the reader from finding him out. Henry James insisted that the writer of fiction should dramatize. That is a telling, though perhaps not very lucid, way of saying that he must so arrange his facts as to capture and hold his reader's attention. This, as everyone knows, is what Henry James consistently did, but, of course, it is not the way a work of scientific or informative value is written. If readers are concerned with the pressing problems of the day, they will do well to read, as Chekhov advised them to do, not novels or short stories, but the works that specifically deal with them.

In 1866 an uncommonly knowledgeable gentleman, Alexis de Tocqueville by name, wrote as follows: “Je pense que dans les siècles démocratiques qui vont s'ouvrir l'indépendence individuelle et les libertés locales seront toujours un produit de l'art. La centralisation sera le gouvernement naturel.” Four score and five years later a distinguished compatriot documented the triumph of nature over art which de Tocqueville contemplated as a possibility, and analyzed at some length the instrumentality through which le gouvernement naturel has established its primacy over les libertés locales. Professor Jean Boulouis has recently pronounced a plaintive requiem for French local self-government culminating in these words: “On pourrait presque avancer, sans beaucoup d'exagération, qu'il n'existe plus de finances locales, mais tout au plus une localisation des finances nationales.”

The two most striking phenomena of local government finance in recent decades are, first, the absolute increase in the amount of money disbursed by local governments, and second, the substantial expansion in the proportion of local government disbursements financed from intergovernmental transfers of funds—grants-in-aid, shared taxes, and various other devices by which money is shifted from one level of government to another.

In the summer of 1939, President Charles G. Haines set up this committee and instructed it to study broadly the contribution which political scientists are making to government, their relations with public officials, and how these relations might be made closer and more effective. The problem assigned to the committee is one of great importance to the future of political science. The challenge to political scientists to make an effective contribution to the improvement of government processes and institutions was never so real and so great as it is today. The preservation of democratic institutions, in the long run, will depend in large measure upon scientific study and research, and intelligent, imaginative, and constructive consideration of governmental problems. If political scientists are not making their full contribution to the development and improvement of government—and we believe they are not—it is time to stop and take stock, and to set about purposefully to attune political science to the needs of modern society. We are not unmindful of the very great contribution which all social sciences may make, but we believe that the responsibility of the political scientist is especially great.