Alongside of the reform of the parliamentary system stands the reform of officialdom, of the bureaucracy or civil service. The monarchical, Caesarist bureaucracies of the past were aristocratic, & means of ruling. Democratic bureaucracy will work administratively for the people. In the Austrian Empire the lowest of the State Railway officials lorded it over the public, as though to serve them were an act of grace; but, under a truly democratic system, the highest official is himself a free citizen, one of the people working for the people. Bureaucratic delays are to be avoided, affairs to be settled promptly and officials taught not to shun responsibility. Superfluous scribbling has to give place to oral procedure and the whole apparatus of administration to be unified and simplified. A democratic bureaucracy must be upright and clean-handed. Even in the Austrian Empire, civil service reform was long talked of. In our Republic it is all the more urgent. Even after the substitution of the double-tailed Bohemian lion for the two-headed Austrian eagle, something remains to be done. Democracy and the Republic are more than negations of monarchy and absolutism; they are a higher, more positive stage of political development.
Outwardly, in foreign policy, the work of democracy is to organize and strengthen, by methods of friendship, relations between States and nations. Democratic foreign policy all round means peace and freedom all round. The old diplomacy was dynastic and there is an insistent demand for a new diplomacy. Our citizens' new diplomatic representatives will be educated, honourable and free from class spirit; frank, yet tactful and discreet, serving their own nation without trickery in their dealings with other States and nations. The notion that diplomacy is necessarily compounded of cunning is obsolete. Men are beginning to understand that, between nations as between individuals, falsehood is stupid, and that it complicates and retards matters needlessly. Even in politics the method of truth is the most practical. The old régime was a world of illusions and its diplomacy was therefore illusionist.
If the new diplomacy is to be a diplomacy of the whole people its representatives must be accredited to peoples, not merely to heads of States. Logically this would imply that a diplomatic envoy should uphold the interests and the policy of his country in foreign Parliaments. Relations between States and nations might thus, in course of time, be usefully supplemented by inter-parliamentary intercourse.
