Accordingly some rule of preference must be adopted outside of the opinion that each candidate entertains of himself.

Accordingly, at a very early date, one was established, and there could be no better one, namely, that, among the competitors for the place, the most competent to fill it should be chosen.

Unfortunately, the judge, ordinary, extraordinary and supreme, instituted to decide in this case, was the plurality of male, adult Frenchmen, counted by heads, that is to say a collective being in which the small intelligent, elite body is drowned in the great rude mass; of all juries, the most incompetent, the easiest duped and misled, the least able to comprehend the questions laid before it and the consequences of its answer; the worst informed, the most inattentive, the most blinded by preconceived sympathies or antipathies, the most willingly absent, a mere flock of enlisted sheep always robbed or cheated out of their vote, and whose verdict, forced or simulated, depended on politicians beforehand, above and below, through the clubs as well as through the revolutionary government, the latter, consequently, maneuvering in such a way as to impose itself along with their favorites on the choice of the French people.

Between 1792 and 1799, the republican official staff just described is thus obtained .-- It is only in the army where the daily and keen sense of a common physical and mortal danger ends in dictating the choice of the best, and raises tried merit to the highest rank; and yet it must be noted that Jacobin infatuation bore down as rigorously on the army as elsewhere and on two occasions: at the outset through the election of a superior officer conferred on subordinates, which handed rank over to the noisy disputants and intemperate intriguers of the mess-room; and again during the Reign of Terror, and even later,[3321] in the persecution or dismissal of so many patriotic and deserving officers, which led Gouvion-Saint-Cyr and his comrades, through disgust, to avoid or decline accepting high rank, in the scandalous promotion of club brawlers and docile nullities, in the military dictatorship of the civil proconsuls, in the supremacy conferred on Lechelle and Rossignol, in the subordination forced on Kleber and Marceau, in the absurd plans of a demagogue with huge epaulettes like Cartaux,[3322] in the grotesque orders of the day issued by a swaggering inebriate like Henriot,[3323] in the disgrace of Bonaparte, and in the detention of Hoche .-- In the civil order of things, it was worse.

Not only was the rule of regulating promotion by merit not recognized but it was applied in an inverse sense.