screpancies in status remained, while
commensurately the physical or imaginative force which had once
sustained inequality declined, until the social equilibrium grew to be
extremely unstable. Add to this that France, under the monarchy, was ill
consolidated. The provinces and towns retained the administrative
complexity of an archaic age, even to local tariffs. Thus under the
monarchy privilege and inequality pervaded every phase of life, and, as
the judiciary must be, more or less, the mouthpiece of society, the
judiciary came to be the incarnation of caste.

Speaking broadly, the judicial office, under the monarchy, was vendible.
In legal language, it was an incorporeal hereditament. It could be
bought and sold and inherited like an advowson, or right to dispose of a
cure of souls in the English Church, or of a commission in the English
army. The system was well recognized and widespread in the eighteenth
century, and worked fairly well with the French judiciary for about
three hundred years, but it was not adapted to an industrial
environment. The judicial career came to be pretty strongly hereditary
in a few families, and though the members of these families were, on the
whole, self-respecting, honest, and learned, they held office in their
own right and not as a public trust. So in England members of the House
of Commons, who sat for nomination boroughs, did not, either in fact or
theory, represent the inhabitants of those boroughs, but patrons; and in
like manner French judges could never learn to regard themselves as the
trustees of the civil rights of a nation, but as a component part of a
class who held a status by private title. Looked at as a problem in
dynamics the inherent vice in all this kind of property and in all this
administrative system, was the decay, after 1760, of the physical force
which had engendered it and defended it. As in England the ascendancy of
the landlords passed away when England turned from an agricultural into
an industrial society, so in France priests and nobles fell into
contempt, when most peasants knew that the Church could neither harm by
its curse nor aid by its blessing, and when commissions in the army were
given to children or favorites, as a sort of pension, while the pith of
the nation was excluded from military command because it could not prove
four quarterings of nobility. Hardly an aristocrat in France had shown
military talent for a generation, while, when the revol