as a point of honor, with a salary inferior to the interest
of the sum paid by him to acquire his rank or post. Each of these men
received no more than his due; his possessions and his rank were the
savings of his ascendants, the price of social services rendered by
the long file of deserving dead, all that his ancestors, his father and
himself had created or preserved of any stable value; each piece of
gold that remained in the hereditary purse represented the balance of
a lifetime, the enduring labor of some one belonging to his line,
while among these gold pieces, he himself had provided his share.--For,
personal services counted, even among the upper nobility; and all the
more among the lower class, in the Third-Estate, and among the people.
Among the notables of every degree just described, most of them,
in 1789, were fully grown men, many of them mature, a goodly number
advanced in years, and some quite aged; consequently, in justification
of his rank and emoluments, or of his gains and his fortune, each could
allege fifteen, twenty, thirty and forty years of labor and honorability
in private or public situations, the grand-vicar of the diocese as well
as the chief-clerk of the ministry, the intendant of the generalite as
well as the president of the royal tribunal, the village cure, the
noble officer, the office-holder, the lawyer, the procureur, the large
manufacturer, the wholesale dealer, as well as the well-to-do farmer,
and the well-known handicraftsman.--Thus, not only were they an elite
corps, the most valuable portion of the nation, the best timber of the
forest, but again, the wood of each branch belonged to that trunk; it
grew there, and was the product of its own vegetation; it sprung out
of the trunk wholly through the unceasing and spontaneous effort of the
native sap, through time-honored and recent labor, and, on this account,
it merited respect.--Through a double onslaught, at once against
each human branch and against the entire French forest, the Jacobin
wood-choppers seek to clear the ground. Their theory results in this
precept, that not one of the noble trees of this forest, not one
valuable trunk from the finest oak to the smallest sapling, should be
left standing.

VII. Principle of socialist Equality.

All superiorities of rank are illegitimate.--Bearing of this
principle.--Incivique benefits and enjoyments.--How
revolutionary laws reach the lower class.--Whole popula