upon the safety of the state, as well as for the
trial of an impeachment proceeding, the Senate may be constituted a
high court of justice.

III. LOCAL GOVERNMENT: DEVELOPMENT SINCE 1789

*374. Stability of Local Institutions.*--Students of political science
are familiar with the fact that governmental systems are, as a rule,
less stable at the top than at the bottom. Local institutions,
embedded in the interests of the community and supported by the native
conservatism of the ordinary man, strike root deeply; the central,
national agencies of law-making and of administration are played upon
by larger, more unsettling forces, with the consequence of greatly
increased likelihood of change. Of this principle the history of
modern France affords notable illustration. Throughout a century of
the most remarkable instability in the organization of the central
government of the nation the scheme of local government which operates
at the present day has been preserved almost intact. The origins of
it, it is true, are to be traced to revolution. In most of its
essentials it was created by the National Assembly of 1789 and by
Napoleon, and it rose upon the wreckage of a system whose operation
had been extended through many centuries of Capetian and Bourbon rule.
Once established, however, it proved sufficiently workable to be
perpetuated under every one of the governmental regimes which, between
1800 and the present day, have filled their successive places in the
history of the nation.

*375. Local Government Under the Old Regime.*--Prior to the Revolution
the French administrative system was centralized and bureaucratic, but
heterogeneous and notoriously ineffective. The provinces had ceased
almost completely to be political units. In but few of them did (p. 342)
the ancient assembly of the estates survive, and nowhere did it
possess more than merely formal administrative powers. The "governments"
of later times, corresponding roughly to the provinces, had fallen
likewise into desuetude and the governors had become inactive
pensioners. Of political units possessing some vitality there were but
two--the _generalite_ and the commune. The _generalite_ was the
jurisdiction of a royal officer known as an _intendant_, to whom was
assigned the conduct of every kind of administrative business. The
number of _generalites_ in the kingdom varied from thirty to forty.
The commune was an irreducible local unit whose history was unbr