of judges and physicians.

Rabourdin, who said to himself: "A minister should have decision,
should know public affairs, and direct their course," saw "Report"
rampant throughout France, 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