265
CHAPTER XX.
THE TRADE OF PLACE-HUNTING IN CERTAIN DEMOCRATIC COUNTRIES.
In the United States as soon as a man has acquired some education
and pecuniary resources, he either endeavours to get rich by
commerce or industry, or he buys land in the bush and turns
pioneer. All that he asks of the State is not to be disturbed in his
toil, and to be secure of his earnings. Among the greater part of
European nations, when a man begins to feel his strength and to
extend his desires, the first thing that occurs to him is to get some
public employment. These opposite effects, originating in the
same cause, deserve our passing notice.
When public employments are few in number, ill-paid and precarious, while the different lines of business are numerous and lucrative, it is to business, and not to official duties, that the new and eager desires engendered by the principle of equality turn from every side. But if, while the ranks of society are becoming more equal, the education of the people remains incomplete, or their spirit the reverse of bold—if commerce and industry, checked in their growth, afford only slow and arduous means of making a fortune—the various members of the community, despairing of ameliorating their own condition, rush to the head of the State and demand its assistance. To relieve their own necessities at the cost of the public treasury appears to them to be the easiest and most open, if not the only way they have to rise above a condition which no longer contents them; place-hunting becomes the most generally followed of all trades.
This must especially be the case, in those great centralized monarchies in which the number of paid offices is immense, and the tenure of them tolerably secure, so that no one despairs of obtaining a place, and of enjoying it as undisturbedly as an hereditary fortune.
I shall not remark that the universal and inordinate desire for
