As it soon be came too difficult to invent new offices, the old ones were doubled or trebled that is, divided up among several holders, who exercise their functions in rotation, or who did what the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were too fond of doing, employed a humble subordinate to carry them out "offices were sought, then, with a frenzied energy, and they were created with synicism Desmarets, one of Louis XIV 's Comptroller Generals, had proposed to the King the establishment of some quite futile offices, and the latter asked who would ever consent to buy such situation? 'Your Majesty ' replied Desmarets, 'is forgetting one of the most splendid of the prerogatives of the Kings of France that when the King creates a job God immediately creates an idiot to buy it." (See Theory and Practice of Modern Government Herman Finer page 751) The much desired transformation from patronage to open competition is later development, to which, now, all civilised governments profess commitment.