exerpt from John Ralston Saul "Voltaire's Bastards" ISBN 014015373x ... One hundred and fifty years later, in 1844, very little had changed. Six hundred thousand of the 912,000 residents of Paris lived in slums. 3 At Montfaucon, in the north of the city, transporters of excrement, who had been collecting door-to-door during the night, dumped their loads into great swamps of the same matter. Men spent their lives living on these shores and wading out every day in search of small objects they might sell. At Lille, in the 1860s, in the working-class district of Saint-Sauveur, 95 percent of the children died before the age of five. The famed Paris sewer system was created over a long period in the second half of the last century. The long delays were largely due to the virulent opposition of the property owners, who did not want to pay to install sanitary piping in their buildings. These people were the New Right of their day. The Prefect of Paris, Monsieur Poubelle, succeeded in forcing garbage cans on the property owners in 1887 only after a ferocious public battle. This governmental interference in the individual's right to throw his garbage into the street -- which was, in reality, the property owner's right to leave his tenants no other option -- made Poubelle into the "cryptosocialist" of the hour. In 1900 the owners were still fighting against the obligations both to put their buildings on the public sewer system and to cooperate in the collection of garbage. In 1904 in the eleventh arrondissement, a working-class district, only two thousand out of eleven thousand buildings had been piped into the sewer system. By 1910 a little over half the city's buildings were on the sewers and only half the cities in France had any sewers at all. Photos of early-twentieth-century Marseilles show great piles of refuse and excrement down the centre of the streets. Cholera outbreaks were common and ravaged the population. In 1954 the last city without, St. Remy de Provence, installed sewers. It was the gradual creation of an effective bureaucracy which brought an end to all this filth and disease, and the public servants did so against the desires of the mass of the middle and upper classes. The free market opposed sanitation. The rich opposed it. The civilized opposed it. Most of the educated opposed it. That was why it took a century to finish what could have been done in ten years. Put in contemporary terms, the market economy angrily and persistently opposed clean public water, sanitation, garbage collection and improved public health because they appeared to be unprofitable enterprises which, in addition, put limits on the individual's freedoms. These are simple historic truths which have been forgotten today thus permitting the fashionable belief that even public water services should be privatised in order that they night benefit from the free-market system. It was the property owners, with their unbelievably narrow selfinterest, who made Marx a man to follow. That there was not some sort of abrupt social revolution in Western Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was due almost entirely to the devotion and gradual success of the administrative class. In effect they saved the property, rights and privileges of those who opposed their reforms. And they did so, despite being poorly paid, only half supported by the politicians, and resented as they are still today by those who had to contribute from their pockets. How then, if the battle fought and won was both just and popular, have the old elites been able to convince so many citizens that public servants and the services they offer are to be looked upon with contempt? In part the explanation has been a spreading realization among those elites who oppose universal services that reason is just a method. It was therefore only a matter of time before people who opposed such things as public sanitation learned how to use the relevant skills, as one might learn how to use a new weapon. More to the point, the men of reason, like Chinese mandarins, have always been for hire. And pools of large capital lying where they do, the bulk of new rational argument is now provided by corporate-sponsored think tanks and foundations. Two centuries after the Encyclopédistes, their victims are busy paying for their own version of the truth to be written. Citizens are nevertheless surprised by the facility with which the rational mechanism is being used to do exactly the opposite of what the eighteenth-century philosophers intended. This inversion has been facilitated by a natural division between elected representatives and administrative elites. Their on-again, off-again cooperation lasted through much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the last quarter century, it has been definitively off. At the best of times it was a fragile alliance which involved temporarily putting aside opposing values and different origins. The main line of reason was always the creation of a new man one who would revolutionise the governing of all men, thanks to a new process, The result of this public-private revolution would be a fair society. Democratic control was not part of the process. And moral belief was there only indirectly, because many eighteenth-century philosophers were convinced their rational structures would fin ally release the full force of morality into the public place. "I sincerely believe," Jefferson wrote in 1814, while Napoleon was still raging across Europe and everything seemed to have gone wrong "in the general existence of a moral instinct. I think it is the brightest gem with which the human character is studded."(4) Almost thirty years before, in 1787, Jefferson had been American ambassador in Paris. In those last moments before the cataclysm, he was the only man of reason on the scene to have applied his ideas to a successful revolution. His house was constantly filled with French thinkers and politicians seeking advice. In that atmosphere, he wrote to a young American: Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed in this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this. The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise.(5) There is no suggestion here that reason and morality were linked. As for the new systems, both American and French, they were experiments, but the idea of representative government had been neither assumed nor sought. Reason was to provide a process thanks to which new, properly trained elites would be able to create a better society. The result would be a just form of authoritarian government. Men of power would be expected to exercise self-control. Failing that, the system itself would limit them.(5) Democracy was an unexpected participant that somehow crashed the events. While the origins of modern reason lay with men principally interested in the uses of power, many of them royal or papal advisers seeking more effective ways to rule, those of democracy stretched back to the freemen of tribal northern Europe living in extended families. Little is known of this period after the decline of Rome. From the beginning, however, the concept of an association among equals runs through the evolution of democracy. The early attempts to reach beyond kinship resulted in gilds in Scandinavia and Germany. These gatherings of freemen began with little more than banquets and the swearing of oaths, but quickly evolved into self-protection, self-help groups. By the eighth century they were widespread in England. The earliest surviving gild statutes date from the first part of the eleventh century. Members swore faithful brotherhood to each other. "If one misdo, let all bear it; let all share the same lot," was the way the Cambridge Gild put it. By the tenth century one could see the next stage -- representative assemblies -- emerging slowly in England with the delegates to the local Courts of Shire and the Hundred. Elsewhere in Europe, somewhat the same process was underway. There was a representative Cortes in Aragon in 1133 and Castile in 1162. .... (4) Jefferson, "The Life". letter to the writer Thomas Law, 13 June 1814, 636 (5) Ibid., Letter to Peter Carr from Paris, 10 August 1787, 429