departments; mark how he asserts the unutterable superiority of his Parisian essence; see how he tosses his head and curls his lip with an infinitely aristocratic air, when he condescends to notice them with a word; and never was Paris more eager in the maintenance of its tyrannical supremacy; never was it more despotically and autocratically disposed; never more aristocratic, to use the pet phrase of the day, than under the rule of _soi-disant_ liberty, and of liberty of opinion, above all other liberties proclaimed by the French republic. What were the expressions of the first republican minister of the interior, that type of republican exclusiveness and despotism, in his famous and rather too famous _bulletins de la republique_, issued to all France as the language and opinions of the government of the day? Paris, they informed the world, was the heart of France, from which all life and living principle emanated, through which every drop of the country's blood must flow, in order that it might beat in unison, and be refreshed with true republican vitality. Paris, they said again, was the hand that had created and fashioned the republic, and that was to direct its steps, lead it vigorously forward in its way--as it was the head that conceived, it was the hand that executed: it was more than all this, it was the _soul_ of France--the pure and true essence emanating from the new deity, the republic. Paris, they asserted in as many direct words, was the mistress whose will was to be obeyed. It is unnecessary to point out how little such declarations were in accordance with republican principles, what little affinity they had with the three great watchwords of the day, "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." Republicanism in France, according to those old traditions, to which those who call themselves the only true and pure republicans seem always to be looking back as the only true and pure models for their admiration and imitation, was always based upon despotism, supported by constraint, compulsion, violence, and even terrorism; and the first efforts of modern republicanism were evidently exerted to place their old, newfangled, statue of bastard liberty upon the same heterogeneous pedestal. The instructions of the same Bashaw-minister to the emissaries whom he despatched as Bashaws of lesser and fewer tails into the provinces, to see that they were duly disposed to fall down and worship the Goddess Republic, that had been set up, were modelled after the same and still rougher fashion.