in each election, fixing, apportioning and levying taxes and the militia, laying out and building highways, employing the national police force, distributing succor, regulating cultivation, imposing their tutelage on the parishes, and treating municipal magistrates as valets.  “A village,” says Turgot,[34] “is simply an assemblage of houses and huts, and of inhabitants equally passive. . . .  Your Majesty is obliged to decide wholly by yourself or through your mandataries. . . . Each awaits your special instructions to contribute to the public good, to respect the rights of others, and even sometimes to exercise his own.”  Consequently, adds Necker, “the government of France is carried on in the bureaux. . ..The clerks, relishing their influence, never fail to persuade the minister that he cannot separate himself from command in a single detail.”  Bureaucratic at the center, arbitrariness, exceptions and favors everywhere, such is a summary of the system.  “Sub-delegates, officers of elections, receivers and comptrollers of the vingtièmes, commissaires and collectors of the tailles, officers of the salt-tax, process-servers, voituriers-buralistes, overseers of the corvées, clerks of the excise, of the registry, and of dues reserved, all these men belonging to the tax-service.  Each of these will, aided by his fiscal knowledge and petty authority, so overwhelm the ignorant and inexperienced tax payer that he does not recognize that he is being cheated.” [35] A rude species of centralization with no control over it, with no publicity, without uniformity, thus installs over the whole country an army of petty pashas who, as judges, decide causes in which they are themselves contestants, ruling by delegation, and, to sanction their theft or their insolence, always having on their lips the name of the king, who is obliged to let them do as they please. — In short, the machine, through its complexity, irregularity, and dimensions, escapes from his grasp.  A Frederick II. who rises at four o’clock in the morning, a Napoleon who dictates half the night in his bath, and who works eighteen hours a day, would scarcely suffice for its needs.  Such a régime cannot operate without constant strain, without indefatigable energy, without infallible discernment, without military rigidity, without superior genius; on these conditions alone can one convert twenty-five millions of men into automatons and substitute his own will, lucid throughout, coherent throughout and everywhere present, for the wills of those he abolishes.  Louis XV lets “the good machine” work by itself, while he settles down into apathy.  “They would have it so, they thought it all for the best,"[36] is his manner of speaking when ministerial measures prove unsuccessful.  “If I were a lieutenant of the police,” he would say again, “I would prohibit cabs.”  In vain is he aware of the machine being dislocated, for he can do nothing and he causes nothing to be done.  In the event