[Sidenote: Universal Conservatism of Women.] The intention of the passages quoted is to depreciate the love of reform in modern life, and is therefore unfriendly to popular government as we know it, but this unfriendly intention does not deprive the quotations of their truth. All that, and much more written by the same author on that subject, is strictly true. He went on to point to the intense and universal conservatism of women, “in all communities the strictest conservators of usage and the sternest censors of departure from accepted rules of morals, manners, and fashions.” [Sidenote: Rarity of the Reforming Impulses.] This constant strength of conservative instinct is not counterbalanced by any equivalent reforming instinct. It is not our hereditary habit of mind that leads us to reform, but our occasional fits of reasoning and of intellectual unrest. [Sidenote: French Tendency to a Democratic Conservatism.] My belief about the French is that their real tendency is decidedly not revolutionary but towards a democratic conservatism, and that they move towards this end by gradually including first one thing and then another in the catalogue of fixed usages. [Sidenote: A French Theory of ultimate Civilisations.] [Sidenote: France thought to be approaching her Complete Development.] An intelligent French writer has maintained that every race in the world advances towards a certain ultimate civilisation which is naturally its own, and that when this civilisation is attained there may be an end to change for centuries, or even, as in China, for thousands of years. He believed that France was rapidly approaching the complete development of that peculiar kind of civilisation for which the French genius is fitted, and might afterwards enter upon a changeless time of very long duration. [Sidenote: Example of the Decimal Systems.] The decimal system of weights and measures and the decimal coinage are good examples of a recent innovation established at first by law and already protected by conservative usage. I never met with a Frenchman who desired to go back to the old complicated system; indeed the facility of calculation by the decimal method has spoiled the French for any other. I see no reason why the present decimal systems should not endure with French civilisation. They are exactly in accordance with the scientific turn of the race, and with its love of promptitude, clearness, rapidity, and uniformity.[30] [Sidenote: Division of France into Departments.] Then there is the division of the country into departments. The old historical provinces were too large for administrative purposes, the departments are highly convenient. Being named after the natural features of the country, they at once convey to the mind an idea of their situation in physical geography. The division could not have been better done; it has now become as familiar to the French as division by counties is to the English, and the two may be equally durable.