to combine the departments of commerce, police, and finances, or it belied its own name.  To the ministry of foreign affairs belonged the administration of justice, the household of the king, and all that concerned arts, sciences, and belles lettres.  All patronage ought to flow directly from the sovereign.  Such ministries necessitated the supremacy of a council.  Each required the work of two hundred officials, and no more, in its central administration offices, where Rabourdin proposed that they should live, as in former days under the monarchy.  Taking the sum of twelve thousand francs a year for each official as an average, he estimated seven millions as the cost of the whole body of such officials, which actually stood at twenty in the budget.

By thus reducing the ministers to three heads he suppressed departments which had come to be useless, together with the enormous costs of their maintenance in Paris.  He proved that an arrondissement could be managed by ten men; a prefecture by a dozen at the most; which reduced the entire civil service force throughout France to five thousand men, exclusive of the departments of war and justice.  Under this plan the clerks of the court were charged with the system of loans, and the ministry of the interior with that of registration and the management of domains.  Thus Rabourdin united in one centre all divisions that were allied in nature.  The mortgage system, inheritance, and registration did not pass outside of their own sphere of action and only required three additional clerks in the justice courts and three in the royal courts.  The steady application of this principle brought Rabourdin to reforms in the finance system.  He merged the collection of revenue into one channel, taxing consumption in bulk instead of taxing property.  According to his ideas, consumption was the sole thing properly taxable in times of peace.  Land-taxes should always be held in reserve in case of war; for then only could the State justly demand sacrifices from the soil, which was in danger; but in times of peace it was a serious political fault to burden it beyond a certain limit; otherwise it could never be depended on in great emergencies.  Thus a loan should be put on the market when the country was tranquil, for at such times it could be placed at par, instead of at fifty per cent loss as in bad times; in war times resort should be had to a land-tax.

“The invasion of 1814 and 1815,” Rabourdin would say to his friends, “founded in France and practically explained an institution which neither Law nor Napoleon had been able to establish,—­I mean Credit.”