We in England, with our age-long experience of local government, are only too well aware of its drawbacks. But institutions work differently in different countries. And there is no doubt that the over-centralisation of French administration does aggravate the evils of bureaucracy. Of the multiplicity of petty officials Mme. Adam constantly complains in her _Souvenirs_. Would they be reduced if another of her favourite schemes were carried out? With René Bazin,[399] with her dead hero Skobeleff,[400] and other conservative reformers, she would like to see parliamentary government replaced by an assembly elected separately by and representing the various interests of the different classes, professions and trades throughout the country. From such an assembly Mme. Adam would not exclude women. All her life, from the days when she wrote her first book[401] to champion George Sand and Daniel Stern, she has been an ardent feminist. In response to my inquiry as to whether she has in any way modified her feminist principles, she writes— “_Callian Var_, “28.xi.16. “No, I am no less feminist than in the beginning. I have merely proved as editor for twenty years of an important review ... that a woman may be something besides a housekeeper and a _courtisan_.[402] I am not a suffragette, because I am an anti-parliamentarian. I desire to see great professional councils, of which, without any alteration in the law, women in France may become members. We have women bankers, women farmers and women traders. A great national council, composed not of the favourites of the licensed victuallers, but of men chosen by provincial councils and of exceptional women, would not present the lamentable spectacle offered by the parliaments of to-day. “After the war we shall see so many widows, sonless mothers, taking the places of those who are dead. Woman, alas! will have paid dearly for the place to which she has a right, the place which she occupied in the great school of Alexandria and during the Renaissance.” Among the numerous organisations with which Mme. Adam has associated herself since the war is that excellent movement _La Croisade des Femmes Françaises_, the object of which is to deny the calumnies circulated by Germans against Frenchwomen, and intended to prove that the typical woman of France is not, as Teutons have asserted, “a doll without morals, without heart, without courage, a creature of mere coquetry, an instrument of perdition.” It was in the early months of the war that this crusade was initiated. Since then it has been rendered superfluous by the heroism, the endurance, the marvellous adaptability of our French sisters, which, eliciting the admiration of the whole world, has proved them veritable queens of womanhood.