relations of the civil to the spiritual power--these were the
momentous matters about which the lawmakers of the Constituent had
exercised themselves. The parties of the Chamber had for these two
years past been laying mine and countermine among the very deepest
foundations of society. One by one each great corporation of the old
order had been alienated from the new order. It was inevitable that it
should be so. Let us look at one or two examples of this. The monarchy
had imposed administrative centralisation upon France without securing
national unity. Thus the great provinces that had been slowly added one
after the other to the monarchy, while becoming members of the same
kingdom, still retained different institutions and isolated usages. The
time was now come when France should be France, and its inhabitants
Frenchmen, and no longer Bretons, Normans, Gascons, Provencals. The
Assembly by a single decree (1790) redivided the country into
eighty-three departments. It wiped out at a stroke the separate
administrations, the separate parlements, the peculiar privileges, and
even the historic names of the old provinces. We need not dwell on the
significance of this change here, but will only remark in passing that
the stubborn disputes from the time of the Regency downwards between the
Crown and the provincial parlements turned, under other names and in
other forms, upon this very issue of the unification of the law. The
Crown was with the progressive party, but it lacked the strength and
courage to set aside retrograde local sentiment as the Constituent
Assembly was able to set it aside.

Then this prodigious change in the distribution of government was
accompanied by no less prodigious a change in the source of power.
Popular election replaced the old system of territorial privilege and
aristocratic prerogative. The effect of this vital innovation, followed
as it was a few months later by a decree abolishing titles and armorial
bearings, was to complete the estrangement of the old privileged classes
from the revolutionary movement. All that they had meant to concede was
the payment of an equal land tax. What was life worth to the noble, if
common people were to be allowed to wear arms and to command a company
of foot or a troop of horse; if he was no longer to have thousands of
acres left waste for the chase; if he was compelled to sue for a vote
where he had only yesterday reigned as manorial lord; if, in short, he
wa