lculable activity of such a machine in a loquacious
nation where the passion for being something dominates all other
affections, where vanity has more phases than there are starts in the
firmament, where reputations already cost no more than the trouble of
insisting on their being deserved, where society is divided between
mediocrities and their trumpeters who laud them as divinities; where
so few people are content with their lot, where the corner grocer is
prouder of his epaulette than the Grand Conde of his Marshal's baton,
where agitation without object or resources is perpetual, where,
from the floor-scrubber to the dramatist, from the academician to the
simpleton who gets muddled over the evening newspaper, from the witty
courtier down to his philosophic lackey, each one revises Montesquieu
with the self-sufficiency of a child which, because it is learning to
read, deems itself wise; where self-esteem, in disputation, caviling and
sophistication, destroys all sensible conversation; where no one utters
a word, but to teach, never imagining that to learn one must keep quiet;
where the triumphs of a few lunatics entice every crackbrain from his
den; where, with two nonsensical ideas put together out of a book that
is not understood, a man assumes to have principles; where swindlers
talk about morality, women of easy virtue about civism, and the
most infamous of beings about the dignity of the species; where the
discharged valet of a grand seignior calls himself Brutus!" --In
reality, he is Brutus in his own eyes. Let the time come and he will be
so in earnest, especially against his late master; all he has to do is
to give him a thrust with his pike. Until he acts out the part he spouts
it, and grows excited over his own tirades; his common sense gives way
to the bombastic jargon of the revolution and to declamation, which
completes the Utopian performance and eases his brain of its last
modicum of ballast.

It is not merely ideas which the new regime has disturbed, but it has
also disordered sentiments. "Authority is transferred from the Chateau
of Versailles and the courtier's antechamber, with no intermediary or
counterpoise, to the proletariat and its flatterers."[1114] The whole of
the staff of the old government is brusquely set aside, while a general
election has brusquely installed another in is place, offices not being
given to capacity, seniority, and experience, but to self-sufficiency,
intrigue, and exagg