Is it Montesquieu who writes these odious lines? What! because the vices of Francis I. deranged the public finances, must we sell to ignorant young men the right of deciding upon the honor, fortune, and lives of the people? What! is it good in a monarchy, that the office of magistrate should become a family provision? If this infamy was salutary, some other country would have adopted it as well as France; but there is not another monarchy on earth which has merited the opprobrium. This monstrous anomaly sprang from the prodigality of a ruined and spendthrift monarch, and the vanity of certain citizens whose fathers possessed money; and the wretched abuse has always been weakly attacked, because it was felt that reimbursement would be difficult. It would be a thousand times better, said a great jurisconsult, to sell the treasure of all the convents, and the plate of all the churches, than to sell justice. When Francis I. seized the silver grating of St. Martin, he did harm to no one; St. Martin complained not, and parted very easily with his screen; but to sell the place of judge, and at the same time make the judge swear that he has not bought it, is a base sacrilege. Let us complain that Montesquieu has dishonored his work by such paradoxes--but at the same time let us pardon him. His uncle purchased the office of a provincial president, and bequeathed it to him. Human nature is to be recognized in everything, and there are none of us without weakness. "Behold how industriously the Muscovite government seeks to emerge from despotism." Is it in abolishing the patriarchate and the active militia of the strelitzes; in being the absolute master of the troops, of the revenue, and of the church, of which the functionaries are paid from the public treasury alone? or is it proved by making laws to render that power as sacred as it is mighty? It is melancholy, that in so many citations and so many maxims, the contrary of what is asserted should be almost always the truth. "The luxury of those who possess the necessaries of life only, will be zero; the luxury of those who possess as much again, will be equal to one; of those who possess double the means of the latter, three; and so on." The latter will possess three times the excess beyond the necessaries of life; but it by no means follows that he will possess three times as many luxuries; for he may be thrice as avaricious, or may employ the superfluity in commerce, or in portions to his daughters. These propositions are not affairs of arithmetic, and such calculations are miserable quackery. "The Samnites had a fine custom, which must have produced admirable results. The young man declared the most worthy chose a wife where he pleased; he who had the next number of suffrages in his favor followed, and so on throughout."