ers, the gentry who take out a license for which they pay a
thousand crowns, as the privateer takes out his letters of marque, hold
these rare products of the incubations of virtue in such esteem that
they confine them in cages in their counting-houses, much as
governments procure and maintain specimens of strange beasts at their
own charges.

If the cashier is possessed of an imagination or of a fervid
temperament; if, as will sometimes happen to the most complete cashier,
he loves his wife, and that wife grows tired of her lot, has ambitions,
or merely some vanity in her composition, the cashier is undone. Search
the chronicles of the counting-house. You will not find a single
instance of a cashier attaining _a position_, as it is called. They are
sent to the hulks; they go to foreign parts; they vegetate on a second
floor in the Rue Saint-Louis among the market gardens of the Marais.
Some day, when the cashiers of Paris come to a sense of their real
value, a cashier will be hardly obtainable for money. Still, certain it
is that there are people who are fit for nothing but to be cashiers,
just as the bent of a certain order of mind inevitably makes for
rascality. But, oh marvel of our civilization! Society rewards virtue
with an income of a hundred louis in old age, a dwelling on a second
floor, bread sufficient, occasional new bandana handkerchiefs, an
elderly wife and her offspring.

So much for virtue. But for the opposite course, a little boldness, a
faculty for keeping on the windward side of the law, as Turenne
outflanked Montecuculli, and Society will sanction the theft of
millions, shower ribbons upon the thief, cram him with honors, and
smother him with consideration.

Government, moreover, works harmoniously with this profoundly illogical
reasoner--Society. Government levies a conscription on the young
intelligence of the kingdom at the age of seventeen or eighteen, a
conscription of precocious power. Great ability is prematurely
exhausted by excessive brain work before it is sent up to be submitted
to a process of selection. Nurserymen sort and select seeds in much the
same way. To this process the Government brings professional appraisers
of talent, men who can assay brains as experts assay gold at the Mint.
Five hundred such heads, set afire with hope, are sent up annually by
the most progressive portion of the population; and of these the
Government takes one third, puts them in sacks called the Ecole