公共行政学经典文选段.docVIP

The field of administration is a field of business. It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics;it at most points stands apart even from the debatable ground of constitutional study. It is a part of political life only as the methods of the manufactured product. But it is,at the same time, raised very far above the dull level of mere technical detail by the face that through its greater principles it is directly connected with the lasting maxims of political wisdom, the permanent truths of political progress. The object of administrative study is to rescue executive methods from the confusion and costliness of empirical experiment and set them upon foundations laid deep in stabel principle. It is for this reason that we must regard civil-service reform in its present stages as but a prelude to a fuller administrative reform. We are now rectifying methods of appointment;we must go on to adjust executive functions more fitly and to prescribe better methods of executive organization and action. Civil-service reform is thus but a moral preparation for what is to follow. It is clearing the moral atmosphere of official life by establishing the sanctity of public office as a public trust,and, by making the service unpartisan, it is opening the way for making it businesslike. By sweeting its motives it is rendering it capable of improving its methods of work. Let me expand a little what I have said of the province of administration. Most important to be observed is the truth already so much and so fortunately insisted upon by our civil-service reformers;namely, that administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Although politics sets the tasks for administration,it should not be suffered to manipulate its offices. This is distinction fo high authority;eminent German writers insist upon it as of course. Biuntschli, for instance,bids us separate administration alike from politics and from law. Politics, he says, is state activity”in things great and unive