eration. Not only are legal rights reduced to a
common level, but natural grades are transposed; the social ladder,
overthrown, is set up again bottom upwards; the first effect of the
promised regeneration is "to substitute in the administration of public
affairs pettifoggers for magistrates, ordinary citizens for cabinet
ministers, ex-commoners for ex-nobles, rustics for soldiers, soldiers
for captains, captains for generals, cures for bishops, vicars for
cures, monks for vicars, brokers for financiers, empiricists for
administrators, journalists for political economists, stump-orators for
legislators, and the poor for the rich."--Every species of covetousness
is stimulated by this spectacle. The profusion of offices and the
anticipation of vacancies "has excited the thirst for command,
stimulated self-esteem, and inflamed the hopes of the most inept. A rude
and grim presumption renders the fool and the ignoramus unconscious of
their insignificance. They have deemed themselves capable of anything,
because the law granted public functions merely to capacity. There has
appeared in front of one and all an ambitious perspective; the soldier
thinks only of displacing his captain, the captain of becoming general,
the clerk of supplanting the chief of his department, the new-fledged
attorney of being admitted to the high court, the cure of being ordained
a bishop, the shallow scribbler of seating himself on the legislative
bench. Offices and professions vacated by the appointment of so many
upstarts afford in their turn a vast field for the ambition of the
lower classes."--Thus, step by step, owing to the reversal of social
positions, is brought about a general intellectual fever.

"France is transformed into a gaming-table, where, alongside of the
discontented citizen offering his stakes, sits, bold, blustering,
and with fermenting brain, the pretentious subaltern rattling his
dice-box... At the sight of a public official rising from nowhere, even
the soul of a bootblack will bound with emulation."--He has merely to
push himself ahead and elbow his way to secure a ticket "in this immense
lottery of popular luck, of preferment without merit, of success
without talent, of apotheoses without virtues, of an infinity of places
distributed by the people wholesale, and enjoyed by the people in
detail."--Political charlatans flock thither from every quarters, those
taking the lead who, being most in earnest, believe in the virtue of