“GENTLEMEN: When in compliance with the rules of this house, I announced my intention of addressing you on the concerns of a preceding year, I had not heard the reading of the report of your committee, which I consider a true model of that kind of labor; but such is my conviction that the state of public accounts for former years affords useful data to the discussion of a future budget, I will indulge a few remarks in addition to what has already been said on the subject. “I beg leave in the first place to call your attention to the state of our social organization, for I am undoubtedly one of those who cannot forget that, by the revolution of ’89, a long series of oppressions, arising not only out of hereditary, sacerdotal, and judiciary privileges and institutions, but also from the prostitution of our commercial, agricultural, and domestic interests, have been erased from the codes of France. The seeds of improvement and public welfare, disseminated through almost every class of our countrymen, notwithstanding the baneful influence of persecutions, miseries, and despotisms, have at last been brought to maturity. The return of peace cannot fail to have promoted their development, and the enjoyment of public liberty promises successful and abundant harvest. But whilst nations advance, governments retrograde; and let us consider, gentlemen, what is our present situation. “A redundant luxuriance of ministerial bounties, resting upon factitious administrations, which themselves are founded upon nothing; a multitude of offices created for the sake of emolument, and emoluments for the sake of patronage; every section of France sacrificed to a system of concentration, of which our metropolis, prosperous in so many other respects, presents those deplorable contrasts which our honorable colleague, Mr. Charles Dupin, has lately introduced to your notice; the precious lights of academies, of public lectures and learned schools, above all, of the polytechnic school, dazzling the eyes of a population, who, as some have just observed, are still denied the means of learning the first elements of reading, and in the midst of whom it is yet made a question whether it is proper that the people should be able to read; in a word, an unexampled host of generals, staff officers, privileged bodies, foreign corps, but few soldiers and a nation, formerly one entire army, who for a long time conquered all Europe combined against her independence, but now disorganized and disarmed, as if a conquered people: with this state of things, can it be believed, gentlemen, that a few trifling amendments of committees, and some oratorical criticisms, will be adequate to the thorough reform of a social existence that might be called the inverse ratio of constitutional order!