ntious performance of duty, reciprocal loyalty go down;
discipline relaxes, punctuality falters, and, as the saying goes, the
great administrative edifice is no longer a well-kept house, but a
barracks.

Naturally, under the democratic regime, the maintenance and service
of this house becomes more and more costly;[4238] for, owing to the
additional centimes, it is the rich and well-to-do minority which
defrays the larger portion of the expense. Owing to universal suffrage,
the poor or half-poor majority which dominate the elections so that the
large majority with impunity can overtax the minority. At Paris, the
parliament and the government, elected by this numerical majority,
contrive demands in its behalf, force expenditure, augment public works,
schools, endowments, gratuities, prizes, a multiplication of offices to
increase the number of their clients, while it never tires in decreeing,
in the name of principles, works for show, theatrical, ruinous, and
dangerous, the cost of which they do not care to know, and of which
the social import escapes them. Democracy, above as well as below, is
short-sighted; it seizes whatever food it comes across, like an animal,
with open jaws and head down; it refuses to anticipate and to calculate;
it burdens the future and wastes every fortune it undertakes to manage,
not alone that of the central state, but, again, those of all local
societies. Up to the advent of universal suffrage, the administrators
appointed above or elected below, in the department or in the commune,
kept tight hold of the purse-strings; since 1848, especially since
1870, and still later, since the passage of the laws of 1882, which, in
suppressing the obligatory consent of the heaviest taxed, let slip
the last of these strings, this purse, wide open, is emptied in the
street.--In 1851,[4239] the departments, all together, expended 97
millions; in 1869, 192 millions; in 1881, 314 millions. In 1836, the
communes, all together, save Paris, expended 117 millions, in 1862, 450
millions, in 1877, 676 millions. If we examine the receipts covering
this expenditure, we find that the additional centimes which supplied
the local budgets, in 1820, with 80 millions, and, in 1850, with 131
millions, supplied them, in 1870, with 249 millions, in 1880, with
318 millions, and, in 1887, with 364 millions. The annual increase,
therefore, of these superadded centimes to the principal of the direct
taxes is enormous, and finally