of the clerks and to endless
intrigues within the various departments, where the humbler clerks
struggled vainly against degenerate members of the aristocracy, who
sought positions in the government bureaus for their ruined sons.

Superior men could scarcely bring themselves to tread these tortuous
ways, to stoop, to cringe, and creep through the mire of these cloacas,
where the presence of a fine mind only alarmed the other denizens. The
ambitious man of genius grows old in obtaining his triple crown; he does
not follow in the steps of Sixtus the Fifth merely to become head of
a bureau. No one comes or stays in the government offices but idlers,
incapables, or fools. Thus the mediocrity of French administration has
slowly come about. Bureaucracy, made up entirely of petty minds, stands
as an obstacle to the prosperity of the nation; delays for seven years,
by its machinery, the project of a canal which would have stimulated
the production of a province; is afraid of everything, prolongs
procrastination, and perpetuates the abuses which in turn perpetuate and
consolidate itself. Bureaucracy holds all things and the administration
itself in leading strings; it stifles men of talent who are bold enough
to be independent of it or to enlighten it on its own follies. About the
time of which we write the pension list had just been issued, and on it
Rabourdin saw the name of an underling in office rated for a larger sum
than the old colonels, maimed and wounded for their country. In that
fact lies the whole history of bureaucracy.

Another evil, brought about by modern customs, which Rabourdin counted
among the causes of this secret demoralization, was the fact that
there is no real subordination in the administration in Paris; complete
equality reigns between the head of an important division and the
humblest copying-clerk; one is as powerful as the other in an arena
outside of which each lords it in his own way. Education, equally
distributed through the masses, brings the son of a porter into a
government office to decide the fate of some man of merit or some landed
proprietor whose door-bell his father may have answered. The last comer
is therefore on equal terms with the oldest veteran in the service. A
wealthy supernumerary splashes his superior as he drives his tilbury
to Longchamps and points with his whip to the poor father of a family,
remarking to the pretty woman at his side, "That's my chief." The
Liberals call