Such are the general tendencies, modified according to circumstances. There are influences which make certain artisans in England tories, and certain landlords and tenants liberals; and there may be times and places where whole societies may have their characteristics modified; but there is rarely or never a complete departure from the general rule. Landlords and their posse of tenants, called liberal, soon find a point beyond which they cannot go, and from which they tend back into the politics of their order; and there is often but a single step for tory artisans into ultra-radicalism; it turns out to be a spurious toryism. So it is possible that there might have been here and there a democrat in La Vendée in 1793, and a sprinkling of royalists in Lyons in 1817. Yet La Vendée and Linois may be taken as representatives of the two kinds of society. The weaving population of Lyons are, like that of manufacturing towns generally, disposed to irritability by physical uneasiness, nourishing their ideas and feelings by communication, suffering from the consequences of partial knowledge, having glimpses of a better social state, and laying the blame of their adversities on a deficiency of protection by the government; enterprising and nicely skilled in the improvement of their articles of manufacture, and ever full of aspiration. The inhabitants of La Vendée are so diametrically opposite in their social circumstances and characteristics, that their bias in politics is a matter of course. Here is a description of the face of the district at the time that Lyons was as intensely republican as La Vendée was royalist:--