and experience, but to self-sufficiency, intrigue, and exaggeration.
Not only are legal rights reduced to a common level, but natural
grades are transposed; the social ladder, overthrown, is set up again
bottom upwards; the first effect of the promised regeneration is "to
substitute in the administration of public affairs pettifoggers for
magistrates, ordinary citizens for cabinet ministers, ex-commoners for
ex-nobles, rustics for soldiers, soldiers for captains, captains for
generals, curés for bishops, vicars for curés, monks for vicars,
brokers for financiers, empiricists for administrators, journalists
for political economists, stump-orators for legislators, and the poor
for the rich." - Every species of covetousness is stimulated by this
spectacle. The profusion of offices and the anticipation of vacancies
"has excited the thirst for command, stimulated self-esteem, and
inflamed the hopes of the most inept. A rude and grim presumption
renders the fool and the ignoramus unconscious of their
insignificance. They have deemed themselves capable of anything,
because the law granted public functions merely to capacity. There has
appeared in front of one and all an ambitious perspective; the soldier
thinks only of displacing his captain, the captain of becoming
general, the clerk of supplanting the chief of his department, the
new-fledged attorney of being admitted to the high court, the curé of
being ordained a bishop, the shallow scribbler of seating himself on
the legislative bench. Offices and professions vacated by the
appointment of so many upstarts afford in their turn a vast field for
the ambition of the lower classes." -- Thus, step by step, owing to
the reversal of social positions, is brought about a general
intellectual fever.

"France is transformed into a gaming-table, where, alongside of the
discontented citizen offering his stakes, sits, bold, blustering, and