The last chapter showed how ideas of administrative competence were entangled with debates over good government in the Founding and the Federalist period. Not only that, the first structures of administrative capacity were being developed at that time. At the end of the chapter, we pointed to how the construction of the Pensions Building in the 1880s reflected a series of commitments that can be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century. The building was a late nineteenth-century construction, but its shape and structure were the product of nearly a century of pensions administration, and more importantly, the democratic aspiration for such a scheme.