Owing to universal suffrage, the poor or half-poor majority which dominate the elections so that the large majority with impunity can overtax the minority.

At Paris, the parliament and the government, elected by this numerical majority, contrive demands in its behalf, force expenditure, augment public works, schools, endowments, gratuities, prizes, a multiplication of offices to increase the number of their clients, while it never tires in decreeing, in the name of principles, works for show, theatrical, ruinous, and dangerous, the cost of which they do not care to know, and of which the social import escapes them.

Democracy, above as well as below, is short-sighted; it seizes whatever food it comes across, like an animal, with open jaws and head down; it refuses to anticipate and to calculate; it burdens the future and wastes every fortune it undertakes to manage, not alone that of the central state, but, again, those of all local societies.

Up to the advent of universal suffrage, the administrators appointed above or elected below, in the department or in the commune, kept tight hold of the purse-strings; since 1848, especially since 1870, and still later, since the passage of the laws of 1882, which, in suppressing the obligatory consent of the heaviest taxed, let slip the last of these strings, this purse, wide open, is emptied in the street .-- In 1851,[4239] the departments, all together, expended 97 millions; in 1869, 192 millions; in 1881, 314 millions.

In 1836, the communes, all together, save Paris, expended 117 millions, in 1862, 450 millions, in 1877, 676 millions.