reality a mighty river of enterprise rolling in undivided volume
and fed by the superhuman vitality of the First Consul. It was his
inexhaustible curiosity which compelled functionaries to reveal the
secrets of their office: it was his intelligence that seized on the
salient points of every problem and saw the solution: it was his
ardour and mental tenacity which kept his Ministers and committees
hard at work, and by toil of sometimes twenty hours a day supervised
the results: it was, in fine, his passion for thoroughness, his
ambition for France, that nerved every official with something of his
own contempt of difficulties, until, as one of them said, "the
gigantic entered into our very habits of thought."[149]

The first question of political reconstruction which urgently claimed
attention was that of local government. On the very day when it was
certain that the nation had accepted the new constitution, the First
Consul presented to the Legislature a draft of a law for regulating
the affairs of the Departments. It must be admitted that local
self-government, as instituted by the men of 1789 in their
Departmental System, had proved a failure. In that time of buoyant
hope, when every difficulty and abuse seemed about to be charmed away
by the magic of universal suffrage, local self-government of a most
advanced type had been intrusted to an inexperienced populace. There
were elections for the commune or parish, elections for the canton,
elections for the district, elections for the Department, and
elections for the National Assembly, until the rustic brain, after
reeling with excitement, speedily fell back into muddled apathy and
left affairs generally to the wire-pullers of the nearest Jacobin
club. A time of great confusion ensued. Law went according to local
opinion, and the national taxes were often left unpaid. In the Reign
of Terror this lax system was replaced by the despotism of the secret
committees, and the way was thus paved for a return to organized
central control, such as was exercised by the Directory.

The First Consul, as successor to the Directory, therefore found
matters ready to his hand for a drastic measure of centralization, and
it is curious to notice that the men of 1789 had unwittingly cleared
the ground for him. To make way for the "supremacy of the general
will," they abolished the _Parlements_, which had maintained the old
laws, customs, and privileges of their several provinces, and had