while in a neighboring department another head
stays on its shoulders though guilty of a crime identically the same,
and often more horrible? We ask for equality in life, and inequality
reigns in law and in the death penalty!

When the population of a town falls below a certain figure the
administrative system is no longer the same. There are perhaps a hundred
cities in France where the laws are vigorously enforced, and there the
intelligence of the citizens rises to the conception of the problem of
public welfare and future security which the law seeks to solve; but
throughout the rest of France nothing is comprehended beyond immediate
gratification; people rebel against all that lessens it. Therefore in
nearly one half of France we find a power of inertia which defeats all
legal action, both municipal and governmental. This resistance, be it
understood, does not affect the essential things of public polity.
The collection of taxes, recruiting, punishment of great crimes, as a
general thing do systematically go on; but outside of such recognized
necessities, all legislative decrees which affect customs, morals,
private interests, and certain abuses, are a dead letter, owing to the
sullen opposition of the people. At the very moment when this book
is going to press, this dumb resistance, which opposed Louis XIV. in
Brittany, may still be seen and felt. See the unfortunate results of
the game-laws, to which we are now sacrificing yearly the lives of some
twenty or thirty men for the sake of preserving a few animals.

In France the law is, to at least twenty million of inhabitants, nothing
more than a bit of white paper posted on the doors of the church and the
town-hall. That gives rise to the term "papers," which Mouche used to
express legality. Many mayors of cantons (not to speak of the district
mayors) put up their bundles of seeds and herbs with the printed
statutes. As for the district mayors, the number of those who do not
know how to read and write is really alarming, and the manner in which
the civil records are kept is even more so. The danger of this state of
things, well-known to the governing powers, is doubtless diminishing;
but what centralization (against which every one declaims, as it is
the fashion in France to declaim against all things good and useful and
strong),--what centralization cannot touch, the Power against which it
will forever fling itself in vain, is that which the general was now
about