Bureaucracy | Page 8

before the government that a minister did
not say, even when the case was urgent, "I have called for a report."
The Report thus became, both as to the matter concerned and for the
minister himself, the same as a report to the Chamber of Deputies on a
question of laws,--namely, a disquisition in which the reasons for and
against are stated with more or less partiality. No real result is attained;
the minister, like the Chamber, is fully as well prepared before as after
the report is rendered. A determination, in whatever matter, is reached
in an instant. Do what we will, the moment comes when the decision
must be made. The greater the array of reasons for and against, the less
sound will be the judgment. The finest things of which France can
boast have been accomplished without reports and where decisions
were prompt and spontaneous. The dominant law of a statesman is to
apply precise formula to all cases, after the manner of judges and
physicians.
Rabourdin, who said to himself: "A minister should have decision,
should know public affairs, and direct their course," saw "Report"
rampant throughout France, from the colonel to the marshal, from the
commissary of police to the king, from the prefects to the ministers of
state, from the Chamber to the courts. After 1818 everything was
discussed, compared, and weighed, either in speech or writing; public

business took a literary form. France went to ruin in spite of this array
of documents; dissertations stood in place of action; a million of reports
were written every year; bureaucracy was enthroned! Records, statistics,
documents, failing which France would have been ruined,
circumlocution, without which there could be no advance, increased,
multiplied, and grew majestic. From that day forth bureaucracy used to
its own profit the mistrust that stands between receipts and
expenditures; it degraded the administration for the benefit of the
administrators; in short, it spun those lilliputian threads which have
chained France to Parisian centralization,--as if from 1500 to 1800
France had undertaken nothing for want of thirty thousand government
clerks! In fastening upon public offices, like a mistletoe on a pear-tree,
these officials indemnified themselves amply, and in the following
manner.
The ministers, compelled to obey the princes or the Chambers who
impose upon them the distribution of the public moneys, and forced to
retain the workers in office, proceeded to diminish salaries and increase
the number of those workers, thinking that if more persons were
employed by government the stronger the government would be. And
yet the contrary law is an axiom written on the universe; there is no
vigor except where there are few active principles. Events proved in
July, 1830, the error of the materialism of the Restoration. To plant a
government in the hearts of a nation it is necessary to bind
INTERESTS to it, not MEN. The government-clerks being led to detest
the administrations which lessened both their salaries and their
importance, treated them as a courtesan treats an aged lover, and gave
them mere work for money; a state of things which would have seemed
as intolerable to the administration as to the clerks, had the two parties
dared to feel each other's pulse, or had the higher salaries not succeeded
in stifling the voices of the lower. Thus wholly and solely occupied in
retaining his place, drawing his pay, and securing his pension, the
government official thought everything permissible that conduced to
these results. This state of things led to servility on the part 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.
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