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… is a passage from a January 13th, 1859, letter from Lord Acton to Richard Simpson; this passage appears on page 517 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality [2]:
Bureaucracy is undoubtedly the weapon and sign of a despotic government, inasmuch as it gives whatever government it serves, despotic power.