Bureaucracy, Honoré de Balzac [best classic books to read .txt] 📗

off Poiret's coat] "will appreciate this delicate shade of meaning. And so, papa Poiret, don't you see it is clear that the government clerk comes to a final end at the head of a division? Now that question once settled, there is no longer any uncertainty; the government clerk who has hitherto seemed undefinable is defined."

Poiret. "Yes, that appears to me beyond a doubt."

Bixiou. "Nevertheless, do me the kindness to answer the following question: A judge being irremovable, and consequently debarred from being, according to your subtle distinction, a functionary, and receiving a salary which is not the equivalent of the work he does, is he to be included in the class of clerks?"

Poiret [gazing at the cornice]. "Monsieur, I don't follow you."

Bixiou [getting off the fourth button]. "I wanted to prove to you, monsieur, that nothing is simple; but above all--and what I am going to say is intended for philosophers--I wish (if you'll allow me to misquote a saying of Louis XVIII.),--I wish to make you see that definitions lead to muddles."

Poiret [wiping his forehead]. "Excuse me, I am sick at my stomach" [tries to button his coat]. "Ah! you have cut off all my buttons!"

Bixiou. "But the point is, /do you understand me/?"

Poiret [angrily]. "Yes, monsieur, I do; I understand that you have been playing me a shameful trick and twisting off my buttons while I have been standing here unconscious of it."

Bixiou [solemnly]. "Old man, you are mistaken! I wished to stamp upon your brain the clearest possible image of constitutional government" [all the clerks look at Bixiou; Poiret, stupefied, gazes at him uneasily], "and also to keep my word to you. In so doing I employed the parabolical method of savages. Listen and comprehend: While the ministers start discussions in the Chambers that are just about as useful and as conclusive as the one we are engaged in, the administration cuts the buttons off the tax-payers."

All. "Bravo, Bixiou!"

Poiret [who comprehends]. "I don't regret my buttons."

Bixiou. "I shall follow Minard's example; I won't pocket such a paltry salary as mine any longer; I shall deprive the government of my co-operation." [Departs amid general laughter.]

Another scene was taking place in the minister's reception-room, more instructive than the one we have just related, because it shows how great ideas are allowed to perish in the higher regions of State affairs, and in what way statesmen console themselves.

Des Lupeaulx was presenting the new director, Monsieur Baudoyer, to the minister. A number of persons were assembled in the salon,--two or three ministerial deputies, a few men of influence, and Monsieur Clergeot (whose division was now merged with La Billardiere's under Baudoyer's direction), to whom the minister was promising an honorable pension. After a few general remarks, the great event of the day was brought up.

A deputy. "So you lose Rabourdin?"

Des Lupeaulx. "He has resigned."

Clergeot. "They say he wanted to reform the administration."

The Minister [looking at the deputies]. "Salaries are not really in proportion to the exigencies of the civil service."

De la Briere. "According to Monsieur Rabourdin, one hundred clerks with a salary of twelve thousand francs would do better and quicker work than a thousand clerks at twelve hundred."

Clergeot. "Perhaps he is right."

The Minister. "But what is to be done? The machine is built in that way. Must we take it to pieces and remake it? No one would have the courage to attempt that in face of the Chamber, and the foolish outcries of the Opposition, and the fierce denunciations of the press. It follows that there will happen, one of these days, some damaging 'solution of continuity' between the government and the administration."

A deputy. "In what way?"

The Minister. "In many ways. A minister will want to serve the public good, and will not be allowed to do so. You will create interminable delays between things and their results. You may perhaps render the theft of a penny actually impossible, but you cannot prevent the buying and selling of influence, the collusions of self-interest. The day will come when nothing will be conceded without secret stipulations, which may never see the light. Moreover, the clerks, one and all, from the least to the greatest, are acquiring opinions of their own; they will soon be no longer the hands of a brain, the scribes of governmental thought; the Opposition even now tends towards giving them a right to judge the government and to talk and vote against it."

Baudoyer [in a low voice, but meaning to be heard]. "Monseigneur is really fine."

Des Lupeaulx. "Of course bureaucracy has its defects. I myself think it slow and insolent; it hampers ministerial action, stifles projects, and arrests progress. But, after all, French administration is amazingly useful."

Baudoyer. "Certainly!"

Des Lupeaulx. "If only to maintain the paper and stamp industries! Suppose it is rather fussy and provoking, like all good housekeepers,--it can at any moment render an account of its disbursements. Where is the merchant who would not gladly give five per cent of his entire capital if he could insure himself against /leakage/?"

The Deputy [a manufacturer]. "The manufacturing interests of all nations would joyfully unite against that evil genius of theirs called leakage."

Des Lupeaulx. "After all, though statistics are the childish foible of modern statesmen, who think that figures are estimates, we must cipher to estimate. Figures are, moreover, the convincing argument of societies based on self-interest and money, and that is the sort of society the Charter has given us,--in my opinion, at any rate. Nothing convinces the 'intelligent masses' as much as a row of figures. All things in the long run, say the statesmen of the Left, resolve themselves into figures. Well then, let us figure" [the minister here goes off into a corner with a deputy, to whom he talks in a low voice]. "There are forty thousand government clerks in France. The average of their salaries is fifteen hundred francs. Multiply forty thousand by fifteen hundred and you have sixty millions. Now, in the first place, a publicist would call the attention of Russia and China (where all government officials steal), also that of Austria, the American republics, and indeed that of the whole world, to the fact that for this price France possesses the most inquisitorial, fussy, ferreting, scribbling, paper-blotting, fault-finding old housekeeper of a civil service on God's earth. Not a copper farthing of the nation's money is spent or hoarded that is not ordered by a note, proved by vouchers, produced and re-produced on balance-sheets, and receipted for when paid; orders and receipts are registered on the rolls, and checked and verified by an army of men in spectacles. If there is the slightest mistake in the form of these precious documents, the clerk is terrified, for he lives on such minutiae. Some nations would be satisfied to get as far as this; but Napoleon went further. That great organizer appointed supreme magistrates of a court which is absolutely unique in the world. These officials pass their days in verifying money-orders, documents, roles, registers, lists, permits, custom-house receipts, payments, taxes received, taxes spent, etc.; all of which the clerks write or copy. These stern judges push the gift of exactitude, the genius of inquisition, the sharp-sightedness of lynxes, the perspicacity of account-books to the point of going over all the additions in search of subtractions. These sublime martyrs to figures have been known to return to an army commissary, after a delay of two years, some account in which there was an error of two farthings. This is how and why it is that the French system of administration, the purest and best on the globe has rendered robbery, as his Excellency has just told you, next to impossible, and as for peculation, it is a myth. France at this present time possesses a revenue of twelve hundred millions, and she spends it. That sum enters her treasury, and that sum goes out of it. She handles, therefore, two thousand four hundred millions, and all she pays for the labor of those who do the work is sixty millions,--two and a half per cent; and for that she obtains the certainty that there is no leakage. Our political and administrative kitchen costs us sixty millions, but the gendarmerie, the courts of law, the galleys and the police cost just as much, and give no return. Moreover, we employ a body of men who could do no other work. Waste and disorder, if such there be, can only be legislative; the Chambers lead to them and render them legal. Leakage follows in the form of public works which are neither urgent nor necessary; troops re-uniformed and gold-laced over and over again; vessels sent on useless cruises; preparations for war without ever making it; paying the debts of a State, and not requiring reimbursement or insisting on security."

Baudoyer. "But such leakage has nothing to do with the subordinate officials; this bad management of national affairs concerns the statesmen who guide the ship."

The Minister [who has finished his conversation]. "There is a great deal of truth in what des Lupeaulx has just said; but let me tell you" [to Baudoyer], "Monsieur le directeur, that few men see from the standpoint of a statesman. To order expenditure of all kinds, even useless ones, does not constitute bad management. Such acts contribute to the movement of money, the stagnation of which becomes, especially in France, dangerous to the public welfare, by reason of the miserly and profoundly illogical habits of the provinces which hoard their gold."

The Deputy [who listened to des Lupeaulx]. "But it seems to me that if your Excellency was right just now, and if our clever friend here" [takes Lupeaulx by the arm] "was not wrong, it will be difficult to come to any conclusion on the subject."

Des Lupeaulx [after looking at the minister]. "No doubt something ought to be done."

De la Briere [timidly]. "Monsieur Rabourdin seems to have judged rightly."

The Minister. "I will see Rabourdin."

Des Lupeaulx. "The poor man made the blunder of constituting himself supreme judge of the administration and of all the officials who compose it; he wants to do away with the present state of things, and he demands that there be only three ministries."

The Minister. "He must be crazy."

The Deputy. "How do you represent in three ministries the heads of all the parties in the Chamber?"

Baudoyer [with an air that he imagined to be shrewd]. "Perhaps Monsieur Rabourdin desired to change the Constitution, which we owe to our legislative sovereign."

The Minister [thoughtful, takes La Briere's arm and leads him into the study]. "I want to see that work of Rabourdin's, and as you know about it--"

De la Briere. "He has burned it. You allowed him to be dishonored and he has resigned from the ministry. Do not think for a moment, Monseigneur, that Rabourdin ever had the absurd thought (as des Lupeaulx tries to make it believed) to change the admirable centralization of power."

The Minister [to himself]. "I have made a mistake" [is silent a moment]. "No matter; we shall never be lacking in plans for reform."

De la Briere. "It is not ideas, but men capable of executing them that we lack."

Des Lupeaulx, that adroit advocate of abuses came into the minister's study at this moment.

"Monseigneur, I start at once for my election."

"Wait a moment," said his Excellency, leaving the private secretary and taking des Lupeaulx by the arm into the recess of a window. "My dear friend, let me have that arrondissement,--if you will,