"They are weak, my son, because they depend on a popular assembly, incapable equally of the large and profound views of a politician, and of the innocent stupidity of an idle king. Ministers are only great if they second, as did Sully, an intelligent prince, or if, like Richelieu, they take the place of the monarch. And who does not feel that Demos will have neither the obstinate prudence of a Henry IV, nor the favourable inertia of a Louis XIII? Even supposing he knows what he wants he will not know how to carry out his wishes, nor even if they be feasible. Ordering ill, he will be badly obeyed, and will always believe himself betrayed. The deputies he will send to his States-General will keep up his illusions by ingenious lies up to the moment of falling under his unjust or legitimate suspicions. These states will perpetuate the same confused mediocrity as the mob from which they spring. They will revolve multiple and obscure thoughts. They will give the heads of government the task of carrying out vague wishes of which they themselves are not conscious, and their ministers, more unhappy than Œdipus in the fable, will be devoured, each in turn, by the Sphinx with a hundred heads for not having guessed the riddle of which the Sphinx herself was ignorant. The source of their greatest unhappiness will be their enforced resignation to impotence, and to talk instead of action. They will become rhetoricians and very bad rhetoricians, for talent, bringing some clarity with it, will be their undoing. They will have to train themselves to speak without saying anything, and the least foolish amongst them will be condemned to lie more than all the others. So, the most intelligent will become the most despicable. And if any are to be found clever enough to conclude treaties, regulate finance, and see to business, their knowledge will serve them nothing, for time will fail them, and time is the stuff of great undertakings.
"These humiliating conditions will discourage the good and lend ambition to the bad. From all sides, ambitious incompetence will rise from the depth of struggling villages to the first posts in the State, and as probity is not natural to mankind, but must be cultivated with great care and long-continued artifice, we shall see clouds of peculators fall on the public treasury. The evil will be much increased by the outburst of scandal, for, as it is difficult to hide anything under popular government, by the fault of some all will become suspect.
"I do not conclude from this, my son, that people will be more unhappy then than they are now, I have told you often enough in our former conversations that I do not think the fate of a nation depends on its prince and its ministers, and it is ascribing too much virtue to laws to make them the source of general prosperity or unhappiness. Nevertheless, the multitude of laws is grievous, and I also fear that the States-General will abuse their legislative powers.
"It is the harmless foible of Colin and Jeannot to frame laws while they keep their sheep, and to say: 'If I were king!' When Jeannot is king he will promulgate more edicts in a year than the Emperor Justinian codified during all his reign. It is in that direction, it seems to me, that Jeannot's reign will prove formidable. But that of kings and emperors was usually so bad one could not fear a worse, and Jeannot, no doubt, will not commit many more follies, nor wickednesses, than all those princes girt with the double or triple crown, who, since the deluge, have covered the world with blood and destruction. His very incapacity and turbulence will have this much good in them that they will render impossible those learned correspondences between country and country we call diplomacy, which end in nothing but in the artistic lighting-up of useless and disastrous wars. The ministers of good man Demos unceasingly kicked, hustled, humiliated, thrown down and assailed with more rotten apples and eggs than the worst harlequin in a booth at a fair, will have no leisure to prepare carnage politely, in the secrecy and peace of the cabinet, on the board of green cloth, by conferences in regard to what is called the balance of Europe, which is but the happy hunting-ground of the diplomat. There will be no more foreign policy, and that will be a great thing for unhappy humanity."
At these words my good master rose up, and continued as follows: "It is time to go in, my son, for I feel the dew penetrate by reason that my clothes are in holes in various places. Also, by remaining any longer under this porch, we risk frightening away the lovers of Catherine and Jeannette, who here await the hour of tryst."
VIII
THE CITY MAGISTRATES
hat evening we betook ourselves, my master and I, to the arbour of the Petit Bacchus, where we found Catherine the lace-maker, the lame cutler, and the father who begot me. They were all seated at the same table before a jug of wine, of which they had taken enough to be pleasant and sociable.
Two magistrates had just been elected according to form, out of four, and my father was talking of it, according to the measure of his lights and his talents.
"The pity is," said he, "that these city magistrates are gentlemen of the long robe, and not cooks, and that they hold their magistracy from the king, and not from the tradesmen, notably not from the corporation of Parisian cooks of which I am the banner-bearer. If they were of my choosing they would abolish tithes and the salt tax, and we should all be happy.... At any rate, if the world does not walk backwards like a crab, a day will come when magistrates will be elected by the tradesmen."