friends, assistants, servants and flatterers, and of their helpers. The infection of depravity is focussed in the Court of the despot, whence it radiates in all directions.
Where power is limited, i.e. where many persons take part in it, the number of centres of infection is augmented, for everyone who shares power has his friends, helpers, servants, flatterers and relations.
Where there is universal suffrage, these centres of infection are still more diffused. Every voter becomes the object of flattery and bribery, The character of the power itself is also changed. Instead of power founded on direct violence, we get a monetary power, also founded on violence, not directly, but through a complicated transmission.
So that under representative Governments, instead of one or a few centres of depravity, we get a large number of such centres—that is to say, there springs up a large class of people living idly on others' labour, the class called the "bourgeois," i.e. people who, being protected by violence, arrange for themselves easy and comfortable lives, free from hard work.
But as, when arranging an easy and pleasant life not only for a Monarch and his Court, but for thousands of little kinglets, many things are needed to embellish and to amuse this idle life, it results that whenever power passes from a despotic to a representative Government, inventions appear, facilitating the supply of objects that add to the pleasure and safety of the lives of the wealthy classes.
To produce all these objects, an ever-increasing number of working men are drawn away from agriculture, and have their capacities directed to the production of pleasing trifles used by the rich, or even to some extent by the workers themselves. So there springs up a class of town workers so situated as to be in complete dependence on the wealthy classes. The number of these people grows and grows the longer the power of representative Government endures, and their condition becomes worse and worse. In the United States, out of a population of seventy millions, ten
