behaves like a gentleman,
he considers himself as good as any man; and so he is. But under the
bureaucratic Regime of the Continent, if a man had not "something by
command of the king," he was nothing; and something he naturally wished
to be, even by means of a Government which he disliked and despised. So
in France, where innumerable petty posts were regular articles of sale,
anyone, it seems, who had saved a little money, found it most profitable
to invest it in a beadledom of some kind--to the great detriment of the
country, for he thus withdrew his capital from trade; but to his own
clear gain, for he thereby purchased some immunity from public burdens,
and, as it were, compounded once and for all for his taxes. The petty
German princes, it seems, followed the example of France, and sold their
little beadledoms likewise; but even where offices were not sold, they
must be obtained by any and every means, by everyone who desired not to
be as other men were, and to become Notables, as they were called in
France; so he migrated from the country into the nearest town, and became
a member of some small body-guild, town council, or what not, bodies
which were infinite in number. In one small town M. de Tocqueville
discovers thirty-six such bodies, "separated from each other by
diminutive privileges, the least honourable of which was still a mark of
honour." Quarrelling perpetually with each other for precedence,
despising and oppressing the very _menu peuple_ from whom they had for
the most part sprung, these innumerable small bodies, instead of uniting
their class, only served to split it up more and more; and when the
Revolution broke them up, once and for all, with all other privileges
whatsoever, no bond of union was left; and each man stood alone, proud of
his "individuality"--his complete social isolation; till he discovered
that, in ridding himself of superiors, he had rid himself also of
fellows; fulfilling, every man in his own person, the old fable of the
bundle of sticks; and had to submit, under the Consulate and the Empire,
to a tyranny to which the Ancien Regime was freedom itself.

For, in France at least, the Ancien Regime was no tyranny. The middle
and upper classes had individual liberty--it may be, only too much; the
liberty of disobeying a Government which they did not respect. "However
submissive the French may have been before the Revolution to the will of
the king, one sort of obedience was al