The landlord’s first mistake is to suppose that he governs a building. He governs, rather, a collection of expectations temporarily housed in brick. The staircase, the kitchen, the little republic of the refrigerator—with its disputed frontiers and archaeological strata of abandoned food—are merely the places where those expectations acquire material form.
Already, in this modest establishment, we have the outline of the larger affair.
For governance begins wherever one person’s convenience becomes another person’s condition of life. The landlord who declines to address a disturbance has not preserved neutrality. He has allocated its cost. His abstention is a decision wearing the pale gloves of innocence.
Enlarge the house.
Give it several streets, a school, a public garden whose gate has developed an expensive squeak. The landlord’s personal knowledge no longer suffices. He cannot remember every promise, inspect every grievance, distinguish every injured citizen from every accomplished collector of injuries. What depended upon his attention must now acquire a form independent of it: a rule, a record, an office, an avenue of appeal.
This is a necessary surrender. To govern a larger community well, he must cease to be indispensable to every transaction within it. The excellent ruler does not merely make sound decisions; he helps construct an order in which sound decisions remain possible during his absence, his fatigue, and, that most neglected constitutional emergency, his bad mood.
Enlarge it again.
The streets become a city. Most inhabitants will never meet the people whose decisions arrange their mornings. A signature in an office becomes a longer journey to work, a repaired water pipe, a rent that can or cannot be paid. Power acquires distance, and distance offers it a peculiar temptation: to confuse the neatness of its account with the condition of the lives being accounted for.
