This is how and why it is that the French system of administration, the purest and best on the globe has rendered robbery, as his Excellency has just told you, next to impossible, and as for peculation, it is a myth.

France at this present time possesses a revenue of twelve hundred millions, and she spends it.
That sum enters her treasury, and that sum goes out of it.

She handles, therefore, two thousand four hundred millions, and all she pays for the labor of those who do the work is sixty millions,--two and a half per cent; and for that she obtains the certainty that there is no leakage.
Our political and administrative kitchen costs us sixty millions, but the gendarmerie, the courts of law, the galleys and the police cost just as much, and give no return.

Moreover, we employ a body of men who could do no other work.

Waste and disorder, if such there be, can only be legislative; the Chambers lead to them and render them legal.