before formulating its constitution. Doubtless
the first operation is much more tedious and difficult than the second.
How much time, how much study, how many observations rectified one by
the other, how many researches in the past and the present, over all
the domains of thought and of action, what manifold and age-long labors
before we can obtain an accurate and complete idea of a great people. A
people which has lived a people's age, and which still lives! But it is
the only way to avoid the unsound construction based on a meaningless
planning. I promised myself that, for my own part, if I should some day
undertake to form a political opinion, it would be only after having
studied France.

What is contemporary France? To answer this question we must know how
this France is formed, or, what is still better, to act as spectator at
its formation. At the end of the last century (in 1789), like a molting
insect, it underwent a metamorphosis. Its ancient organization is
dissolved; it tears away its most precious tissues and falls into
convulsions, which seem mortal. Then, after multiplied throes and a
painful lethargy, it re-establishes itself. But its organization is no
longer the same: by silent interior travail a new being is substituted
for the old. In 1808, its leading characteristics are decreed and
defined: departments, arondissements, cantons and communes, no change
have since taken place in its exterior divisions and functions.
Concordat, Code, Tribunals, University, Institute, Prefects, Council of
State, Taxes, Collectors, Cours des Comptes, a uniform and centralized
administration, its principal organs, are still the same. Nobility,
commoners, artisans, peasants, each class has henceforth the position,
the sentiments, the traditions which we see at the present day (1875).
Thus the new creature is at once stable and complete; consequently its
structure, its instincts and its faculties mark in advance the circle
within which its thought and its action will be stimulated. Around
it, other nations, some more advanced, others less developed, all
with greater caution, some with better results, attempt similarly a
transformation from a feudal to a modern state; the process takes place
everywhere and all but simultaneously. But, under this new system as
beneath the ancient, the weak is always the prey of the strong. Woe to
those (nations) whose retarded evolution exposes them to the neighbor
suddenly emancipated from hi