directly to the chief magistrate of this nation, the clerks have become, in spite of our fine patriotic ideas, the subsidiaries of the government; their superiors are blown about by the winds of a power called “the administration,” and do not know from day to day where they may be on the morrow.  As the routine of public business must go on, a certain number of indispensable clerks are kept in their places, though they hold these places on sufferance, anxious as they are to retain them.  Bureaucracy, a gigantic power set in motion by dwarfs, was generated in this way.  Though Napoleon, by subordinating all things and all men to his will, retarded for a time the influence of bureaucracy (that ponderous curtain hung between the service to be done and the man who orders it), it was permanently organized under the constitutional government, which was, inevitably, the friend of all mediocrities, the lover of authentic documents and accounts, and as meddlesome as an old tradeswoman.  Delighted to see the various ministers constantly struggling against the four hundred petty minds of the Elected of the Chamber, with their ten or a dozen ambitious and dishonest leaders, the Civil Service officials hastened to make themselves essential to the warfare by adding their quota of assistance under the form of written action; they created a power of inertia and named it “Report.”  Let us explain the Report.

When the kings of France took to themselves ministers, which first happened under Louis XV., they made them render reports on all important questions, instead of holding, as formerly, grand councils of state with the nobles.  Under the constitutional government, the ministers of the various departments were insensibly led by their bureaus to imitate this practice of kings.  Their time being taken up in defending themselves before the two Chambers and the court, they let themselves be guided by the leading-strings of the Report.  Nothing important was ever brought before the government that a minister did not say, even when the case was urgent, “I have called for a report.”  The Report thus became, both as to the matter concerned and for the minister himself, the same as a report to the Chamber of Deputies on a question of laws,—­namely, a disquisition in which the reasons for and against are stated with more or less partiality.  No real result is attained; the minister, like the Chamber, is fully as well prepared before as after the report is rendered.  A determination, in whatever matter, is reached in an instant.  Do what we will, the moment comes when the decision must be made.  The greater the array of reasons for and against, the less sound will be the judgment.  The finest things of which France can boast have been accomplished without reports and where decisions were prompt and spontaneous.  The dominant law of a statesman is to apply precise formula to all cases, after the manner of judges and physicians.