this powerful
league, which monopolized all duties both public and private, sucked the
resources of the region, and fastened on power like limpets to a
ship, escaped all notice so completely that General Montcornet had
no suspicion of it. The prefect boasted of the prosperity of
Ville-aux-Fayes and its arrondissement; even the minister of the
interior was heard to remark: "There's a model sub-prefecture, which
runs on wheels; we should be lucky indeed if all were like it." Family
designs were so involved with local interests that here, as in many
other little towns and even prefectures, a functionary who did not
belong to the place would have been forced to resign within a year.

When this despotic middle-class cousinry seizes a victim, he is so
carefully gagged and bound that complaint is impossible; he is
smeared with slime and wax like a snail in a beehive. This invisible,
imperceptible tyranny is upheld by powerful reasons,--such as the wish
to be surrounded by their own family, to keep property in their own
hands, the mutual help they ought to lend each other, the guarantees
given to the administration by the fact that their agent is under the
eyes of his fellow-citizens and neighbors. What does all this lead
to? To the fact that local interests supersede all questions of public
interest; the centralized will of Paris is frequently overthrown in the
provinces, the truth of things is disguised, and country communities
snap their fingers at government. In short, after the main public
necessities have been attended to, it will be seen that the laws,
instead of acting upon the masses, receive their impulse from them; the
populations adapt the law to themselves and not themselves to the law.

Whoever has travelled in the south or west of France, or in Alsace, in
any other way than from inn to inn to see buildings and landscapes, will
surely admit the truth of these remarks. The results of middle-class
nepotism may be, at present, merely isolated evils; but the tendency of
existing laws is to increase them. This low-level despotism can and will
cause great disasters, and the events of the drama about to be played in
the valley of Les Aigues will prove it.

The monarchical and imperial systems, more rashly overthrown than people
realize, remedied these abuses by means of certain consecrated lives,
by classifications and categories and by those particular counterpoises
since so absurdly defined as "privileges." There ar