This measure cost the towns at once their freedom and their well-being; for if the practice of the sale of commissions for a public employment sometimes proved useful in its effects when applied to the courts of justice--since the first condition of the good administration of justice is the complete independence of the judge--this system never failed to be extremely mischievous whenever it was applied to posts of administrative duty, which demand, above all things, responsibility, subordination, and zeal. The Government of the old French monarchy was perfectly aware of the real effects of such a system. It took great care not to adopt for itself the same mode of proceeding which it applied to the towns, and scrupulously abstained from putting up to sale the commissions of its own Intendants and Sub-delegates. And it well deserves the whole scorn of history that this great change was accomplished without any political motive. Louis XI. had curtailed the municipal liberties of the towns, because he was alarmed by their democratic character;[22] Louis XIV. destroyed them under no such fears. The proof is that he restored these rights to all the towns which were rich enough to buy them back again. In reality, his object was not to abolish them, but to traffic in them; and if they were actually abolished, it was, without meaning it, by a mere fiscal expedient. The same thing was carried on for more than eighty years. Seven times within that period the Crown resold to the towns the right of electing their magistrates, and as soon as they had once more tasted this blessing, it was snatched away to be sold to them once more. The motive of the measure was always the same, and frequently avowed. ‘Our financial necessities,’ says the preamble to an edict of 1722, ‘compel us to have recourse to the most effectual means of relieving them.’ The mode was effectual, but it was ruinous to those who bore this strange impost. ‘I am struck with the enormity of the sums which have been paid at all times to purchase back the municipal offices,’ writes an Intendant to the Comptroller-General in 1764. ‘The amount of these sums spent in useful improvements would have turned to the advantage of the town, which has, on the contrary, felt nothing but the weight of authority and the privileges of these offices.’ I have not detected a more shameful feature in the whole aspect of the government of France before the Revolution. It seems difficult to say with precision at the present time how the towns of France were governed in the eighteenth century; for, besides that the origin of the municipal authorities fluctuated incessantly, as has just been stated, each town still preserved some fragments of its former constitution and its peculiar customs. There were not, perhaps, two towns in France in which everything was exactly similar; but this apparent diversity is fallacious, and conceals a general resemblance.[23]