ces favorable to him.--His principle of
apportionment.--He exacts proportion in what he grants.

The other group of needs, dating from long before 1789, involve wants
which have survived the Revolution, because the Revolution has not
satisfied these. The first, the most tenacious, the most profound,
the most inveterate, the most frustrated of all is the desire for
distributive justice.--In political society, as in every other society,
there are burdens and benefits to be allotted. When the apportionment
of these is unbiased, it takes place according to a very simple,
self-evident principle:

For each individual the costs must be in proportion to the benefits and
the benefits to the costs, so that, for each one, the final expense
and the final receipt may exactly compensate each other, the larger or
smaller share of expense being always equal to the larger or smaller
share of profits.

Now, in France, this proportion had been wanting for many centuries; it
had even given way to the inverse proportion. If, towards the middle
of the eighteenth century, two sum-totals of the budget, material and
moral, had been calculated, assets on one side and liabilities on the
other:

On the one hand the sum of the apportionments exacted by the State,
taxes in ready money, enforced labor, military service, civil
subordination, every species of obedience and subjection, in short,
every sacrifice of leisure, comfort and self-esteem.

On the other hand the sum of dividends distributed by the State of
whatever kind or shape, security for persons and property, use and
convenience of roads, delegations of public authority land liens on the
public treasury, dignities, ranks, grades, honors, lucrative salaries,
sinecures, pensions, and the like, that is to say, every gratification
belonging to leisure, comfort, or pride--one might have concluded that
the more a man contributed to the receipts the less would his dividend
be, and the greater his dividend the less would he furnish to the
general contribution.

Consequently, every social or local group consisted of two other
groups: a majority which suffered for the benefit of the minority, and
a minority which benefited at the expense of the majority, to such an
extent that the privations of the greatest number defrayed the luxury
of the small number. This was the case in all compartments as on every
story, owing to the multitude, enormity and diversity of honorific
or useful privileg