tradeswoman. Delighted to see the various ministers constantly
struggling against the four hundred petty minds of the Elected of the
Chamber, with their ten or a dozen ambitious and dishonest leaders,
the Civil Service officials hastened to make themselves essential to
the warfare by adding their quota of assistance under the form of
written action; they created a power of inertia and named it "Report."
Let us explain the Report.

When the kings of France took to themselves ministers, which first
happened under Louis XV., they made them render reports on all
important questions, instead of holding, as formerly, grand councils
of state with the nobles. Under the constitutional government, the
ministers of the various departments were insensibly led by their
bureaus to imitate this practice of kings. Their time being taken up
in defending themselves before the two Chambers and the court, they
let themselves be guided by the leading-strings of the Report. Nothing
important was ever brought before the government that a minister did
not say, even when the case was urgent, "I have called for a report."
The Report thus became, both as to the matter concerned and for the
minister himself, the same as a report to the Chamber of Deputies on a
question of laws,--namely, a disquisition in which the reasons for and
against are stated with more or less partiality. No real result is
attained; the minister, like the Chamber, is fully as well prepared
before as after the report is rendered. A determination, in whatever
matter, is reached in an instant. Do what we will, the moment comes
when the decision must be made. The greater the array of reasons for
and against, the less sound will be the judgment. The finest things of
which France can boast have been accomplished without reports and
where decisions were prompt and spontaneous. The dominant law of a
statesman is to apply precise formula to all cases, after the manner