No, certainly: society is not a federation of professions, classes, and opinions, which treat, by their several delegates, of the affairs which are common to them all; any more than it is a uniform mass of exactly similar elements, which send their representatives to the centre of government only because they cannot all repair thither themselves, and are compelled to reduce themselves to a number which can meet in one place and deliberate in common. Social unity requires that there should be but one government; but the diversity of the social elements equally requires that this government should not be one sole power. There is a natural process of attraction and concentration at work in the heart of society, and among the numberless particular associations which it contains (such as families, professions, classes, and parties), by which all the smaller associations are successively absorbed into the larger. The multitude of particular and different elements are thus reduced to a small number of principal and essential elements, which include and represent all the rest. I do not think that these principal elements of society ought to be all specially represented in the government of the state by several authorities; I only maintain that their diversity is inconsistent with the unity of the central power. To this reasoning it has often been confidently replied--that the various elements of society are congregated, by the process of free election, in a single assembly which represents the whole nation; and which affords them an arena for free discussion, where they can maintain their opinions, their interests and their rights, and exert their proper influence over the resolutions of the assembly, and consequently over the government of the state. We are then to infer from this that we have discharged the claims of the most varied, weighty, and essential social elements when we have said, “Get yourselves elected, then give your opinion, and try to make it the prevalent one!” Election and discussion constitute the entire basis which is to sustain the social edifice; election and discussion afford a sufficient guarantee for all interests, rights, and liberties! Such a theory betrays a strange ignorance of human nature, human society, and the French people.