. He may dismiss
the head steward of his domain in a fit of ill-humor, but, if he changes
his stewards, he does not change the system; he is too accustomed to it,
and his indolence demands it; he is not tempted to take care and trouble
on himself, nor is he qualified to become his own intendant.

And what is worse, in the present case the master has forgotten that
he is the owner of his domain, he hardly remembers that he is a
personality. Whether large or small, department or commune, local
society has no longer the consciousness of being a natural body,
composed of involuntarily united members with common interests; this
sentiment, already weakened and drooping at the end of the ancient
regime, lost under the multiplied attacks of the Revolution and under
the prolonged compression of the Empire. During twenty-five years it
has suffered too much; it has been too arbitrarily manufactured or
mutilated, too frequently recast, and made and unmade.--In the
commune, everything has been upset over and over again, the territorial
circumscription, the internal and external system, all collective
property. To the 44,000 municipalities improvised by the Constituent
Assembly, there succeeded under the Directory 6000 or 7000 cantonal
municipalities, a sort of local syndicate, represented in each commune
by a subaltern agent, and then, under the Consulate, 36,000 distinct and
permanent communes. Sovereign at the start, through the improvidence
and abdication of the Constituent Assembly, the communes become, in the
hands of the Convention, so many timorous subjects surrendered to the
brutality of perambulating pashas and resident agas, imposed upon them
by Jacobin tyranny; then under the Empire, a docile herd governed in a
correct way from above, but possessing no authority of their own, and
therefore indifferent to their own affairs and utterly wanting in public
spirit. Other more serious blows affect of the them still more deeply
and acutely. Through a decree of the Legislative Assembly, in every
commune where a third of the inhabitants demand a partition of the
communal property, the commune is stripped, and its time-honored
patrimony is set off in equal lots, in portions according to families
or per head, and converted into small private holdings. (Page
319/584)Through a decree of the Convention, the whole of the communal
fortune, its debts and assets, are swallowed up by the public fortune
and engulfed along with that in the sal