As the financial embarrassments of the State increased, new offices sprang up, all of which were remunerated by exemptions from taxation and by privileges; and as these offices were produced by the wants of the Treasury, not of the administration, the result was the creation of an almost incredible number of employments which were altogether superfluous or mischievous.[48] As early as 1664, upon an inquiry instituted by Colbert, it was found that the capital invested in this wretched property amounted to nearly five hundred millions of livres. Richelieu had suppressed, it was said, a hundred thousand offices: but they cropped out again under other names.[49] For a little money the State renounced the right of directing, of controlling, and of compelling its own agents. An administrative engine was thus gradually built up so vast, so complicated, so clumsy, and so unproductive, that it came at last to be left swinging on in space, whilst a more simple and handy instrument of government was framed beside it, which really performed the duties these innumerable public officers were supposed to be doing. It is clear that none of these pernicious institutions could have subsisted for twenty years if they could have been brought under discussion. None of them would have been established or aggravated if the Estates had been consulted, or if their remonstrances had been listened to when by chance they were still called together. Rarely as the States-General were convoked in the last ages of the monarchy, they never ceased to protest against these abuses. On several occasions these assemblies pointed out as the origin of all these evils the power of arbitrarily levying taxes which had been arrogated by the King, or, to borrow the identical terms employed by the energetic language of the fifteenth century, ‘the right of enriching himself from the substance of the people without the consent and deliberation of the Three Estates.’ Nor did they confine themselves to their own rights alone; they demanded with energy, and frequently they obtained, greater deference to the rights of the provinces and towns. In every session some voices were raised in those bodies against the inequality of the public burdens. They frequently demanded the abolition of the system of close guilds; they attacked with increasing vigour in each successive age the venality of public employments. ‘He who sells office sells justice, which is infamous,’ was their language. When that venality was established, they still complained of the abusive creation of offices. They denounced so many useless places and dangerous privileges, but always in vain. Three institutions had been previously established against themselves; they had originated in the desire not to convoke these assemblies, and in the necessity of disguising from the French nation the taxation which it was unsafe to exhibit in its real aspect.