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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: themselves into figures. Well then, let us figure" [the minister here
goes off into a corner with a deputy, to whom he talks in a low
voice]. "There are forty thousand government clerks in France. The
average of their salaries is fifteen hundred francs. Multiply forty
thousand by fifteen hundred and you have sixty millions. Now, in the
first place, a publicist would call the attention of Russia and China
(where all government officials steal), also that of Austria, the
American republics, and indeed that of the whole world, to the fact
that for this price France possesses the most inquisitorial, fussy,
ferreting, scribbling, paper-blotting, fault-finding old housekeeper
of a civil service on God's earth. Not a copper farthing of the
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