t. In answer, two of them are hanged, on a new gallows forty feet high,
and the rest driven back to their dens for a time."

Of course. What more exasperating and inexpiable insult to the ruling
powers was possible than this? To persist in being needy and wretched,
when a whole bureaucracy is toiling day and night to make them prosperous
and happy? An insult only to be avenged in blood. Remark meanwhile,
that this centralised bureaucracy was a failure; that after all the
trouble taken to govern these masses, they were not governed, in the
sense of being made better, and not worse. The truth is, that no
centralised bureaucracy, or so-called "paternal government," yet invented
on earth, has been anything but a failure, or is it like to be anything
else: because it is founded on an error; because it regards and treats
men as that which they are not, as things; and not as that which they
are, as persons. If the bureaucracy were a mere Briareus giant, with a
hundred hands, helping the weak throughout the length and breadth of the
empire, the system might be at least tolerable. But what if the
Government were not a Briareus with a hundred hands, but a Hydra with a
hundred heads and mouths, each far more intent on helping itself than on
helping the people? What if sub-delegates and other officials, holding
office at the will of the intendant, had to live, and even provide
against a rainy day? What if intendants, holding office at the will of
the Comptroller-General, had to do more than live, and found it prudent
to realise as large a fortune as possible, not only against disgrace, but
against success, and the dignity fit for a new member of the Noblesse de
la Robe? Would not the system, then, soon become intolerable? Would
there not be evil times for the masses, till they became something more
than masses?

It is an ugly name, that of "The Masses," for the great majority of human
beings in a nation. He who uses it speaks of them not as human beings,
but as things; and as things not bound together in one living body, but
lying in a fortuitous heap. A swarm of ants is not a mass. It has a
polity and a unity. Not the ants but the fir-needles and sticks, of
which the ants have piled their nest, are a mass.

The term, I believe, was invented during the Ancien Regime. Whether it
was or not, it expresses very accurately the life of the many in those
days. No one would speak, if he wished to speak exactly, of the ma