[Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac]@TWC D-Link bookBureaucracy CHAPTER I 21/43
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.
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