nners and customs which drive men of intellect into disgust,
and genius to despair.

What a difficult undertaking is the rehabilitation of the Civil Service
while the liberal cries aloud in his newspapers that the salaries of
clerks are a standing theft, calls the items of the budget a cluster of
leeches, and every year demands why the nation should be saddled with
a thousand millions of taxes. In Monsieur Rabourdin's eyes the clerk in
relation to the budget was very much what the gambler is to the
game; that which he wins he puts back again. All remuneration implies
something furnished. To pay a man a thousand francs a year and demand
his whole time was surely to organize theft and poverty. A galley-slave
costs nearly as much, and does less. But to expect a man whom the State
remunerated with twelve thousand francs a year to devote himself to
his country was a profitable contract for both sides, fit to allure all
capacities.

These reflections had led Rabourdin to desire the recasting of the
clerical official staff. To employ fewer man, to double or treble
salaries, and do away with pensions, to choose only young clerks (as did
Napoleon, Louis XIV., Richelieu, and Ximenes), but to keep them long and
train them for the higher offices and greatest honors, these were the
chief features of a reform which if carried out would be as beneficial
to the State as to the clerks themselves. It is difficult to recount in
detail, chapter by chapter, a plan which embraced the whole budget and
continued down through the minutest details of administration in order
to keep the whole synthetical; but perhaps a slight sketch of the
principal reforms will suffice for those who understand such matters, as
well as for those who are wholly ignorant of the administrative system.
Though the historian's position is rather hazardous in reproducing
a plan which may be thought the politics of a chimney-corner, it is,
nevertheless, necessary to sketch it so as to explain the author of
it by his own work. Were the recital of his efforts to be omitted, the
reader would not believe the narrator's word if he merely declared the
talent and the courage of this official.

Rabourdin's plan divided the government into three ministries, or
departments. He thought that if the France of former days possessed
brains strong enough to comprehend in one system both foreign and
domestic affairs, the France of to-day was not likely to be without its
Mazarin, its S