The civil servant is not merely an employee of government; he is also a citizen. In our own day, especially, delicate questions have arisen as to the right of the civil servant, or of a person engaged in the armed forces of the state, to enjoy all the normal political privileges of a person in private employ. Is a civil servant, for instance, entitled to enter on a political career with the chance, if it is interrupted, to return to his department? Most modern states, England, for instance, Canada, South Africa, regard political activities as beyond the area within which a civil servant may engage; France, on the other hand, hardly limits its officials in this way, while Germany expressly allows its officials to engage in politics, and some fifty civil servants are now in the Reichstag, with the power to return to their departments if they are defeated. Certainly there are few rights for which the rank and file of officials press so strongly as for this; and they regard the limitation of their political opportunities as an invasion of civic liberty at once unnecessary and unjustifiable. I do not think the problem is a simple one; and I think any solution of it must therefore be complex in character. If a high official of the Foreign Office in England could be elected to Parliament, spend a term there in bitter criticism of the Foreign Secretary and then, on defeat, return to work with the minister whom he had sought to destroy, the latter’s position would, I think, be intolerable. There is, that is to say, a class of civil service work the very nature and associations of which involves exclusion from political life; and if those engaged therein desire a political career, they must terminate their connexion with the civil service. We can, of course, draw a line. I see no reason why all the industrial employees of the government, postmen, for instance, or shipwrights in a national dockyard, should not enjoy all ordinary civil rights. I see no reason, either, to expect any deleterious consequence if civil servants below what we call in England the executive class are allowed ordinary political rights, so long as a decent discretion in their exercise is observed. Those engaged in the making of policy must, in my judgment, accept a self-denying ordinance in this regard. Unless government can be assured that its chief officials are aloof from political ties, it cannot trust them; and all the considerations which create a “spoils system” will then come into play. Since experience makes it evident that a spoils system is incompatible with either honest or efficient administration, a restriction upon the liberty of public officials is, I would argue, justified. It is an inevitable part of their contract of service from the point of view of the end that service is intended to secure.