le societies may have their characteristics modified;
but there is rarely or never a complete departure from the general rule.
Landlords and their posse of tenants, called liberal, soon find a point
beyond which they cannot go, and from which they tend back into the
politics of their order; and there is often but a single step for tory
artisans into ultra-radicalism; it turns out to be a spurious toryism.
So it is possible that there might have been here and there a democrat
in La Vendee in 1793, and a sprinkling of royalists in Lyons in 1817.
Yet La Vendee and Linois may be taken as representatives of the two
kinds of society. The weaving population of Lyons are, like that of
manufacturing towns generally, disposed to irritability by physical
uneasiness, nourishing their ideas and feelings by communication,
suffering from the consequences of partial knowledge, having glimpses of
a better social state, and laying the blame of their adversities on a
deficiency of protection by the government; enterprising and nicely
skilled in the improvement of their articles of manufacture, and ever
full of aspiration. The inhabitants of La Vendee are so diametrically
opposite in their social circumstances and characteristics, that their
bias in politics is a matter of course. Here is a description of the
face of the district at the time that Lyons was as intensely republican
as La Vendee was royalist:--

"Only two great roads traversed this sequestered region, running nearly
parallel, at a distance of more than seventy miles from each other. The
country, though rather thickly peopled, contained, as may be supposed,
few large towns; and the inhabitants, devoted almost entirely to rural
occupations, enjoyed a great deal of leisure. The noblesse or gentry of
the country were very generally resident on their estates, where they
lived in a style of simplicity and homeliness which had long disappeared
from every other part of the kingdom. No grand parks, fine gardens, or
ornamented villas; but spacious clumsy chateaux, surrounded with farm
offices, and cottages for the labourers. Their manners and way of life,
too, partook of the same primitive rusticity. There was great
cordiality, and even much familiarity, in the intercourse of the
seigneurs with their dependants: they were followed by large trains of
them in their hunting expeditions, which occupied so great a part of
their time. Every man had his fowling-piece, and was a marksman of fam