[84] Parental negligence and the
children's lack of respect and consideration had not yet upset the
authority and abolished respect in the family. Useful and natural
associations were not yet stifled in the germ nor arrested in their
development by the systematic hostility of the law. The ease and
cheapness of transportation, the promiscuity of schools, the
excitement of competition, everyone's rush to placement and office,
the increasing excitement of ambition and greed, had not (yet)
immeasurably multiplied the class of irresponsible malcontents and
mischievous nomads. In the political order of things, inaptitude,
envy, brutality were not sovereign; universal suffrage did not exclude
from power the men, born, bred and qualified to exercise it; countless
public posts were not offered as a prey to charlatanism and to the
intrigues of politicians. France was not then, as now-a-days, on a
way to become a vast lodging-house administered by casual managers,
condemned to periodical failures, inhabited by anonymous residents,
indifferent to each other, lacking local ties, lacking engagements and
having no corporate loyalties, merely tenants and passing consumers,
placed in numerical order around a common mess-table where each thinks
only of himself, gets served quickly, consumes what he can lay his
hands on, and ends by finding out that, in a place of this sort, the
best condition, the wisest course, is to put all one's property into
an annuity and live a bachelor.
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