as the different provinces of the Kingdom of France are united
among themselves and discriminated from one another, many able and
well-informed Frenchmen believe. One of the most hasty and mischievous
things done by the infatuated political tinkers of 1790 was to cut and
carve up France into arbitrary political departments for the express
purpose of disintegrating and destroying those ancient social and
political organisms.

This purpose has not been effectually accomplished. What has been
accomplished is to superpose upon the ancient organic France another
arbitrary and administrative France. This latter arbitrary and
administrative France controlled by a legislative oligarchy, which first
makes and then uses the French Executive for its own purposes, it is
which now calls itself the Third French Republic.

The traits and the tendencies as well as the origin of the Third
Republic can be thoroughly studied at Paris. Without Paris the Third
Republic never could have existed. It exists now in virtue of the
political machinery of which Paris is the centre. That it could not
withstand for a day any severe shock given to that machinery was
confessed, as I have said, by its own government in the abject panic
which followed the victory of General Boulanger at the polls of the
capital on January 27, 1889.

The traits and the tendencies of France, on the contrary, must be
studied in the provinces. There was always more wit than wisdom in the
famous saying of Heine--that to talk about the opinion of the provinces
in France was like talking about the opinion of a man's legs--the head
being the seat of thought, and Paris being the head. But the saying was
uttered during the reign of Louis Philippe, and long before the
establishment of universal suffrage by the Second Empire. With universal
suffrage and with the development during the past twenty years of the
railway and of the telegraphic system throughout France, the importance
of the provinces relatively to Paris has greatly and steadily increased.
While steam and electricity have, of course, increased the strength of
the pressure which an aggressive oligarchy controlling the centralised
administrative machinery of the Government at Paris can put upon the
opinions and the interests of France, they have also, it must be
remembered, increased the power of France to resist and to resent that
pressure. They have established return currents, the force of which
grows visibly greater