is bondage here? or stay to inquire whether the
condition of the tradesman thus described is likelier to engender love
or hatred towards mankind.

The _Official_, too, is enslaved. A vast proportion of men on the
Continent are officials. Great efforts and great sacrifices are
undergone to make the hope of the humble house a government servant. And
in France what does this mean? It means to serve a hard master, and to
receive ill wages for the service, to be subject to instant dismissal at
the will of an arbitrary overseer, to pass a life of changes, journeys,
and sudden transportations. A baker's boy at Paris earns more than two
custom-house officers, more than a lieutenant of infantry, more than
many a magistrate, more than the majority of professions; _he earns as
much as six parish schoolmasters_.

"Shame! infamy! The nation that pays the least to those that instruct
the people (let us blush to confess it) is France. I speak of the France
of these days. On the contrary, the true France, that of the Revolution,
declared that teaching was a holy office, that the schoolmaster was
equal to the priest. I do not conceal it; of all the miseries of the
present day, there is not one that grieves me more. The most deserving,
the most miserable, the most neglected man in France is the
schoolmaster. The state, which does not even know what are its true
instruments and its strength, that does not suspect that its most
powerful moral lever is this class of men--the state, I say, abandons
him to the enemy of the state--bondage; heavy bondage! I find it among
the high and the low in every degree, crushing the most worthy, the most
humble, the most deserving!"

The _Rich Man_ and the _Bourgeois_ do not escape the curse that attaches
to every other class: they too are in bondage. The ancient _bourgeoisie_
was characterized by security, the present has no such characteristic.
It lives in timidity and fear. It has risen from the Revolution, aspires
to nobility, feels none, and is jealous of the advancing masses. The
ancient _bourgeois_ was consistent. "He admired himself in his
privileges, wanted to extend them, and looked upwards. Our man looks
downwards: he sees the crowd ascending behind him, even as he ascended;
he does not like it to mount; he retreats, and holds fast to the side of
power. Does he avow to himself his retrograde tendency? Seldom, for his
part is adverse to it; he remains almost always in this contradictory
positi