ance, from the colonel to the marshal, from the commissary
of police to the king, from the prefects to the ministers of state,
from the Chamber to the courts. After 1818 everything was discussed,
compared, and weighed, either in speech or writing; public business
took a literary form. France went to ruin in spite of this array of
documents; dissertations stood in place of action; a million of reports
were written every year; bureaucracy was enthroned! Records, statistics,
documents, failing which France would have been ruined, circumlocution,
without which there could be no advance, increased, multiplied, and grew
majestic. From that day forth bureaucracy used to its own profit the
mistrust that stands between receipts and expenditures; it degraded the
administration for the benefit of the administrators; in short, it
spun those lilliputian threads which have chained France to Parisian
centralization,--as if from 1500 to 1800 France had undertaken nothing
for want of thirty thousand government clerks! In fastening upon public
offices, like a mistletoe on a pear-tree, these officials indemnified
themselves amply, and in the following manner.

The ministers, compelled to obey the princes or the Chambers who impose
upon them the distribution of the public moneys, and forced to retain
the workers in office, proceeded to diminish salaries and increase the
number of those workers, thinking that if more persons were employed by
government the stronger the government would be. And yet the contrary
law is an axiom written on the universe; there is no vigor except where
there are few active principles. Events proved in July, 1830, the error
of the materialism of the Restoration. To plant a government in the
hearts of a nation it is necessary to bind INTERESTS to it, not MEN. The
government-clerks being led to detest the administrations which lessened
both their salaries and their importance, treated them as a courtesan
treats an aged lover, and gave them mere work for money; a state of
things which would have seemed as intolerable to the administration as
to the clerks, had the two parties dared to feel each other's pulse,
or had the higher salaries not succeeded in stifling the voices of the
lower. Thus wholly and solely occupied in retaining his place, drawing
his pay, and securing his pension, the government official thought
everything permissible that conduced to these results. This state
of things led to servility on the part