Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/158

144 with a monarchical form of government, has managed to exert a very genuine and very important influence, which has obtained for it the possession of all the sinecures in the gift of the people and State. I use the word sinecure in its most comprehensive sense. According to the present conditions of holding and acquiring property, we must consider those public offices which have a certain income attached with limited duties, as presents from the State. All these offices, which require no special capability, which any average man could fill if he once got the chance, which must have been the positions referred to in the saying that when God gives a man an office He gives him sense to fill it, that is, the positions of officers, diplomates, beneficiaries, court dignitaries, etc., are all filled by members of the aristocracy. The State thus favors this small group of privileged individuals and presents them with these fine offices, upon which they have not the slightest reasonable claim; it sets the table for them with an abundant and tempting repast, all because, as Beaumarchais says, they took the trouble to be born.

The fraud of a patent nobility which has managed to creep in to all the historical forms and privileges of a blood aristocracy, whose existence had for justification an anthropological principle, because it was composed of the descendants of the most capable individuals of the race, or of a higher race of conquerors, this fraud is endured and even cherished by mankind, although history and reason are constantly holding up before us the evidences of the imposition. It is the cornerstone of the monarchical form of government. We act as if we believe that some narrow-minded, petty dandy, because he is a Sir This or Sir That, were therefore made of finer stuff than the rest of the people. We act as if we believed