of our melancholy education, of our manners and customs which drive
men of intellect into disgust, and genius to despair.

What a difficult undertaking is the rehabilitation of the Civil
Service while the liberal cries aloud in his newspapers that the
salaries of clerks are a standing theft, calls the items of the budget
a cluster of leeches, and every year demands why the nation should be
saddled with a thousand millions of taxes. In Monsieur Rabourdin's
eyes the clerk in relation to the budget was very much what the
gambler is to the game; that which he wins he puts back again. All
remuneration implies something furnished. To pay a man a thousand
francs a year and demand his whole time was surely to organize theft
and poverty. A galley-slave costs nearly as much, and does less. But
to expect a man whom the State remunerated with twelve thousand francs
a year to devote himself to his country was a profitable contract for
both sides, fit to allure all capacities.

These reflections had led Rabourdin to desire the recasting of the
clerical official staff. To employ fewer man, to double or treble
salaries, and do away with pensions, to choose only young clerks (as
did Napoleon, Louis XIV., Richelieu, and Ximenes), but to keep them
long and train them for the higher offices and greatest honors, these
were the chief features of a reform which if carried out would be as
beneficial to the State as to the clerks themselves. It is difficult
to recount in detail, chapter by chapter, a plan which embraced the
whole budget and continued down through the minutest details of
administration in order to keep the whole synthetical; but perhaps a
slight sketch of the principal reforms will suffice for those who
understand such matters, as well as for those who are wholly ignorant
of the administrative system. Though the historian's position is