r, the peasant to the
townsman, the urban population to the municipal oligarchy, corporation
to corporation, parish to parish, neighbor to neighbor. All are
separated by their privileges and their jealousies, by the consciousness
of having been imposed on, or frustrated, for the advantage of another.
The journeyman tailor is embittered against his foreman for preventing
him from doing a day's work in private houses, hairdressers against
their employers for the like reason, the pastry-cook against the baker
who prevents him from baking the pies of housekeepers, the village
spinner against the town spinners who wish to break him up, the rural
wine-growers against the bourgeois who, in the circle of seven leagues,
strives to have their vines pulled up,[5414] the village against the
neighboring village whose reduction of taxation has ruined it, the
overtaxed peasant against the under taxed peasant, one-half of a parish
against its collectors, who, to its detriment, have favored the other
half.

"The nation," says Turgot, mournfully,[5415] "is a society composed of
different orders badly united and of a people whose members have few
mutual liens, nobody, consequently, caring for any interest but his own.
Nowhere is there any sign of an interest in common. Towns and villages
maintain no more relation with each other than the districts to which
they are attached; they are even unable to agree together with a view to
carry out public improvements of great importance to them."

The central power for a hundred and fifty years rules through its
division of power. Men have been kept separate, prevented from acting
in concert, the work being so successful that they no longer understand
each other, each class ignoring the other class, each forming of the
other a chimerical picture, each bestowing on the other the hues of its
own imagination, one composing an idyll, the other framing a melodrama,
one imagining peasants as sentimental swains, the other convinced that
the nobles are horrible tyrants.--Through this mutual misconception
and this secular isolation, the French lose the habit, the art and the
faculty for acting in an entire body. They are no longer capable of
spontaneous agreement and collective action. No one, in the moment of
danger, dares rely on his neighbors or on his equals. No one knows where
to turn to obtain a guide. "A man willing to be responsible for the
smallest district cannot be found; and, more than this, on