, it will
shirk this work, for this new service is more or less costly, and,
sooner or later, it seems too costly.--Undoubtedly the State has
promised to defray expenses; sometimes even, like the Constituent and
Legislative assemblies, the revenues for this having been confiscated,
it has to furnish an equivalent; it is bound by contract to make good
the local or special sources of revenue which it has appropriated
or dried up, to furnish in exchange a supply of water from the grand
central reservoir, the public treasury.--But if water becomes low in
this reservoir, if the taxes in arrears stop the regular supply, if
a war happens to open a large breach in it, if the prodigality and
incapacity of the rulers, multiply its fissures and leaks, then there is
no money on hand for accessory and secondary services. The State, which
has adopted this service drops it: we have seen under the Convention
and the Directory how, having taken the property of all corporations,
provinces, and communes, of institutions of education, art, and science,
of churches, hospitals, and asylums, it performed their functions; how,
after having been a despoiler and a robber, it became insolvent and
bankrupt; how its usurpation and bankruptcy ruined and then destroyed
all other services; how, through the double effect of its intervention
and desertion, it annihilated in France education, worship, and charity;
why the streets in the towns were no longer lighted nor swept; why, in
the provinces, roads went to decay, and dikes crumbled; why schools
and churches stood empty or were closed; why, in the asylum and in
the hospital, foundlings died for lack of milk, the infirm for lack
of clothing and food, and the sick for lack of broth, medicines, and
beds.[2205]

In the second place, even when the State respects a service or provides
the means for it, there is a chance that it will pervert this simply
because it comes under its direction.--When rulers lay their hands on an
institution it is almost always for the purpose of making something
out of it for their own advantage and to its detriment: they render
everything subordinate to their interests or theories, they put some
essential piece or wheel out of shape or place; they derange its action
and put the mechanism out of order; they make use of it as a
fiscal, electoral, or doctrinal engine, as a reigning or sectarian
instrument.--Such, in the eighteenth century, was the ecclesiastical
staff with whic