m: "Well hast thou grubbed, old mole!"

The Executive power, with its tremendous bureaucratic and military
organization; with its wide-spreading and artificial machinery of
government--an army of office-holders, half a million strong, together
with a military force of another million men--; this fearful body
of parasites, that coils itself like a snake around French society,
stopping all its pores, originated at the time of the absolute monarchy,
along with the decline of feudalism, which it helped to hasten.
The princely privileges of the landed proprietors and cities were
transformed into so many at-tributes of the Executive power; the feudal
dignitaries into paid office-holders; and the confusing design of
conflicting medieval seigniories, into the well regulated plan of a
government, work is subdivided and centralized as in the factory. The
first French revolution, having as a mission to sweep away all local,
territorial, urban and provincial special privileges, with the object
of establishing the civic unity of the nation, was hound to develop what
the absolute monarchy had begun--the work of centralization, together
with the range, the attributes and the menials of government. Napoleon
completed this governmental machinery. The Legitimist and the July
Monarchy contribute nothing thereto, except a greater subdivision of
labor, that grew in the same measure as the division and subdivision of
labor within bourgeois society raised new groups and interests, i.e.,
new material for the administration of government. Each Common interest
was in turn forthwith removed from society, set up against it as a
higher Collective interest, wrested from the individual activity of
the members of society, and turned into a subject for governmental
administration, from the bridges, the school house and the communal
property of a village community, up to the railroads, the national
wealth and the national University of France. Finally, the parliamentary
republic found itself, in its struggle against the revolution,
compelled, with its repressive measures, to strengthen the means and the
centralization of the government. Each overturn, instead of breaking up,
carried this machine to higher perfection. The parties, that alternately
wrestled for supremacy, looked upon the possession of this tremendous
governmental structure as the principal spoils of their victory.

Nevertheless, under the absolute monarchy, was only the means whereby
the