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under the pretense of interstate commerce or of emergency or the"general welfare," the central government has taken jurisdictionover almost every phase of our national life.Against these bureaus a storm of public damnation has broken.And the very word "bureaucrat" has come to express an extremebrand of public odium. As a matter of fact, there is plenty of justificationfor this criticism. At first the growth of this bureaucracywas one of those unplanned strategems which an overworked andbewildered Congress turned to in a spirit of frustration. But nowthe bureaus are defended by a new school which looks upon thisinstitution as the model form of government. This word "bureaucrat"must not be confused with the same word as used in formerdays. Once upon a time anybody working in a public office wascalled a bureaucrat and, in its most odious sense, it described nothingmore than the official who lived on red tape. The present-day meaning,however, comprises a significance of far more serious character.The old bureaucrat was a public employee who carried out the lawsand orders of Congress. But today he is something very much morethan this. Congress, in its impotence to deal with the multitudeof its assignments, delegates to these bureaus great gobs of its ownlegislative power, clothes them with the authority to make lawswhich they call "regulations" and more recently "directives." Butthese regulations and directives are actually laws and have the forceof law. The grand result of this is that the bureau officials who areappointed by the President are answerable to him and pliant in hishands. And as they have this power through "directives" to enactlaws, a vast sector of the power of Congress to legislate has passedto the hand of the executive. Judge Hatton W. Sumners, distinguishedchairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House, saysthat today more law is being enacted by these bureaus than byCongress itself.More recently the President has taken to creating bureaus withoutany authority of Congress and without so much as notifying it.With vast sums of money voted to him in lump sums by Congress,he can allocate any amount he chooses to these bureaus, which exerciseover the lives and fortunes and affairs of the people the mostextensive supervision. This practice has led to a curious experiment241