Under this system, a township, village or small city is no unwieldy machine, but pretty much what the people see fit to make it, and the fact that it is a phase of government is no sufficient reason why any affairs it may choose to undertake may not be as humanly and flexibly administered as those of a non-political association of equal extent. They often are so administered, and the same is true of great cities wherever a vigorous civic consciousness exists and has had time to work out its instruments. The question is only one of organization, and this confronts non-political associations as well as political; large private incorporations having notoriously about the same experience of formalism, extravagance and malfeasance as the state. There are certain characteristics whose presence in a given function is favorable to state activity, though they cannot be said to indicate clearly where it should begin or end. One of these, naturally, is the inadequacy or harmfulness of other agencies. The fact that a work is deemed necessary and that there is no other adequate way of doing it is the real basis of most state functions; not only the primary ones of waging war and keeping order, but of issuing money, building roads, bridges and harbors, collecting statistics, instituting free schools, controlling monopolies, and so on. Another is that the work in question should be susceptible of comparatively simple and uniform methods; since the more various and intricate a function is, the more difficulty will be found in getting it properly done by the powerful but usually somewhat clumsy mechanism of the state. The reasons that may justify a state post or telegraph, for instance, do not necessarily suffice for the assumption of the far more complicated business of the railways. Again, whatever the state undertakes should be something likely to be watched by public opinion; not necessarily by the whole public, but at least by some powerful group steadfastly interested in efficiency and capable of judging whether it is attained. In the United States, certainly, the successes or failures of government are largely explicable on this ground. Public education works well, in spite of a constant leaning toward formalism, because the people take a close and jealous interest in it, while the monetary and financial functions are in like manner safeguarded by the scrutiny of the commercial world. But in the matter of tariffs the scrutiny of the latter, inadequately balanced by that of any other interest, has produced what is practically class legislation; and something similar may be said of many phases of government action.[175]