The other group of needs, dating from long before 1789, involve wants which have survived the Revolution, because the Revolution has not satisfied these. The first, the most tenacious, the most profound, the most inveterate, the most frustrated of all is the desire for distributive justice.--In political society, as in every other society, there are burdens and benefits to be allotted. When the apportionment of these is unbiased, it takes place according to a very simple, self-evident principle: For each individual the costs must be in proportion to the benefits and the benefits to the costs, so that, for each one, the final expense and the final receipt may exactly compensate each other, the larger or smaller share of expense being always equal to the larger or smaller share of profits. Now, in France, this proportion had been wanting for many centuries; it had even given way to the inverse proportion. If, towards the middle of the eighteenth century, two sum-totals of the budget, material and moral, had been calculated, assets on one side and liabilities on the other: On the one hand the sum of the apportionments exacted by the State, taxes in ready money, enforced labor, military service, civil subordination, every species of obedience and subjection, in short, every sacrifice of leisure, comfort and self-esteem. On the other hand the sum of dividends distributed by the State of whatever kind or shape, security for persons and property, use and convenience of roads, delegations of public authority land liens on the public treasury, dignities, ranks, grades, honors, lucrative salaries, sinecures, pensions, and the like, that is to say, every gratification belonging to leisure, comfort, or pride--one might have concluded that the more a man contributed to the receipts the less would his dividend be, and the greater his dividend the less would he furnish to the general contribution. Consequently, every social or local group consisted of two other groups: a majority which suffered for the benefit of the minority, and a minority which benefited at the expense of the majority, to such an extent that the privations of the greatest number defrayed the luxury of the small number. This was the case in all compartments as on every story, owing to the multitude, enormity and diversity of honorific or useful privileges, owing to the legal prerogatives and effective preferences by which the court nobles benefited at the expense of the provincial nobility, * the noblesse at the expense of plebeians, * the prelates and beneficiaries at the expense of poorly-paid curés and vicars, * the two highest orders of the clergy at the expense of the third, * the bourgeoisie at the expense of the people, * the towns at the expense of the rural districts, * this or that town or province at the expense of the rest, * the artisan member of a corporation at the expense of the free workman,