f,
whilst the ranks of society are becoming more equal, the education of
the people remains incomplete, or their spirit the reverse of bold--if
commerce and industry, checked in their growth, afford only slow and
arduous means of making a fortune--the various members of the community,
despairing of ameliorating their own condition, rush to the head of the
State and demand its assistance. To relieve their own necessities at the
cost of the public treasury, appears to them to be the easiest and most
open, if not the only, way they have to rise above a condition which no
longer contents them; place-hunting becomes the most generally followed
of all trades. This must especially be the case, in those great
centralized monarchies in which the number of paid offices is immense,
and the tenure of them tolerably secure, so that no one despairs of
obtaining a place, and of enjoying it as undisturbedly as a hereditary
fortune.

I shall not remark that the universal and inordinate desire for place is
a great social evil; that it destroys the spirit of independence in the
citizen, and diffuses a venal and servile humor throughout the frame
of society; that it stifles the manlier virtues: nor shall I be at
the pains to demonstrate that this kind of traffic only creates an
unproductive activity, which agitates the country without adding to its
resources: all these things are obvious. But I would observe, that a
government which encourages this tendency risks its own tranquillity,
and places its very existence in great jeopardy. I am aware that at a
time like our own, when the love and respect which formerly clung to
authority are seen gradually to decline, it may appear necessary to
those in power to lay a closer hold on every man by his own interest,
and it may seem convenient to use his own passions to keep him in order
and in silence; but this cannot be so long, and what may appear to be a
source of strength for a certain time will assuredly become in the end a
great cause of embarrassment and weakness.

Amongst democratic nations, as well as elsewhere, the number of official
appointments has in the end some limits; but amongst those nations,
the number of aspirants is unlimited; it perpetually increases, with a
gradual and irresistible rise in proportion as social conditions become
more equal, and is only checked by the limits of the population.
Thus, when public employments afford the only outlet for ambition, the
government ne