The consideration of half-a-dozen examples will make this clear. What is all that marvellously dramatic action between Pepin le Bref and the coronation of Hugh but confusion? It ceases to be so when we follow with Fustel de Coulanges the transformation of the Imperial system. You can make nothing of the tenth and eleventh centuries, for all their personal interest, until you have grasped Feudalism, and it is a common-place that the six hundred years that follow are but the development of the Capetian method. It is not in Louis the XI., or in Mazarin, or in Louis XIV. that we find the Force—it is in the French monarchy. Look about you at the present day, ask yourself what has recreated the prosperity of modern France, and you will certainly not be able to find a special man. It is the System that has done the work. Now it is the note of all the Revolution, as we have followed it up to this point, that the Institution was lacking. France without it was France without herself: she dissolved. The cause of this lack was as follows: The monarchy, round which everything had centred, was dying, and the social theories of the time—the great Philosophy on which France was fed—neglected and despised the Institution, relying as it did upon the vague force of general opinion. It was the chief—I had almost said the only—fault of the Jeffersonians in America and the idealist Republicans in France, that they could see neither the necessity of formulæ nor the just power of systems. Nevertheless it was the instinct which remained in the French mind, the “sub-conscious” sense of what the Institution was to France, that made half the violence of the time. I do not mean that the speeches recognised this character openly—on the contrary, the enmities and the divisions seem to turn entirely upon personal hatreds; but I mean that the underlying fear, unexpressed but real, was that such and such a proposition would create a permanent tendency, and that Girondin or Jacobin success meant the deflection of the torrent into one or the other of two divergent channels. Here in England, living under an order which is well established and old, we wonder at the intensity of passion which some abstract resolution could arouse in the Convention. We should wonder no longer were we to comprehend that in the extreme rapidity with which all France was being remoulded, a few words agreed upon, a mere principle, might add a quality to all the future history of the nation.