Any system of public administration inevitably reflects its environment. - Leonard D. White

One foundation for the future of American democracy is a sound administrative system, able to discharge with competence and integrity the tasks laid upon it by the people. The present system is far in advance of that which sufficed in 1925, but its improvement has no more than kept pace with the added responsibilities heaped upon it.

[ Public administration is merely] a special case of the larger category, administration, a process which is common to all organized human effort and which is highly developed in modern corporate business, in the church, in the Red Cross, in education, and in international bodies, public and private.

Curiously enough, commentators on American political institutions have never produced a systematic analysis of our administrative system except from the point of view of the lawyer. Until the last few years even the text books have obstinately closed their eyes to this enormous terrain, studded with governmental problems of first magnitude and fascinating interest; and even today they dismiss the subject with a casual chapter. But certainly no one pretends that administration can still be put aside “as a practical detail which clerks could arrange after doctors had agreed upon principles."