xperience, the French should still persist in
perpetuating this political vice; that all their policy should still be
the policy of Centralization,--a principle which secures the momentary
strength, but ever ends in the abrupt destruction of States. It is, in
fact, the perilous tonic, which seems to brace the system, but
drives the blood to the head,--thus come apoplexy and madness. By
centralization the provinces are weakened, it is true,--but weak to
assist as well as to oppose a government, weak to withstand a mob.
Nowhere, nowadays, is a mob so powerful as in Paris: the political
history of Paris is the history of snobs. Centralization is an excellent
quackery for a despot who desires power to last only his own life,
and who has but a life-interest in the State; but to true liberty
and permanent order centralization is a deadly poison. The more the
provinces govern their own affairs, the more we find everything, even
to roads and post-horses, are left to the people; the more the Municipal
Spirit pervades every vein of the vast body, the more certain may we be
that reform and change must come from universal opinion, which is slow,
and constructs ere it destroys,--not from public clamour, which is
sudden, and not only pulls down the edifice but sells the bricks!

Another peculiarity in the French Constitution struck and perplexed
Maltravers. This people so pervaded by the republican sentiment; this
people, who had sacrificed so much for Freedom; this people, who, in
the name of Freedom, had perpetrated so much crime with Robespierre, and
achieved so much glory with Napoleon,--this people were, as a people,
contented to be utterly excluded from all power and voice in the State!
Out of thirty-three millions of subjects, less than two hundred thousand
electors! Where was there ever an oligarchy equal to this? What a
strange infatuation, to demolish an aristocracy and yet to exclude a
people! What an anomaly in political architecture, to build an inverted
pyramid! Where was the safety-valve of governments, where the natural
vents of excitement in a population so inflammable? The people itself
were left a mob,--no stake in the State, no action in its affairs, no
legislative interest in its security.*

* Has not all this proved prophetic?

On the other hand, it was singular to see how--the aristocracy of birth
broken down--the aristocracy of letters had arisen. A Peerage, half
composed of journalists, philosophers, and