Delighted to see the various ministers constantly struggling against the four hundred petty minds of the Elected of the Chamber, with their ten or a dozen ambitious and dishonest leaders, the Civil Service officials hastened to make themselves essential to the warfare by adding their quota of assistance under the form of written action; they created a power of inertia and named it "Report." Let us explain the Report.
When the kings of France took to themselves ministers, which first happened under Louis XV., they made them render reports on all important questions, instead of holding, as formerly, grand councils of state with the nobles.

Under the constitutional government, the ministers of the various departments were insensibly led by their bureaus to imitate this practice of kings.

Their time being taken up in defending themselves before the two Chambers and the court, they let themselves be guided by the leading-strings of the Report.

Nothing important was ever brought 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.