The judicial career came to be pretty strongly hereditary
in a few families, and though the members of these families were, on the
whole, self-respecting, honest, and learned, they held office in their
own right and not as a public trust. So in England members of the House
of Commons, who sat for nomination boroughs, did not, either in fact or
theory, represent the inhabitants of those boroughs, but patrons; and in
like manner French judges could never learn to regard themselves as the
trustees of the civil rights of a nation, but as a component part of a
class who held a status by private title. Looked at as a problem in
dynamics the inherent vice in all this kind of property and in all this
administrative system, was the decay, after 1760, of the physical force
which had engendered it and defended it. As in England the ascendancy of
the landlords passed away when England turned from an agricultural into
an industrial society, so in France priests and nobles fell into
contempt, when most peasants knew that the Church could neither harm by
its curse nor aid by its blessing, and when commissions in the army were
given to children or favorites, as a sort of pension, while the pith of
the nation was excluded from military command because it could not prove
four quarterings of nobility.
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