"But," (says your thinker, especially as he advances in age) "man is so made that he _cannot_ otherwise be collectively governed. He cannot collectively be the master, or at any rate permanently the master of his collective destiny, whatever power his reason and free will give him over his individual fate. The nation" (says he), "especially the large nation, certainly has a Will, but it cannot directly express that Will. And if it attempts to do so, whatever machinery it chooses--even the referendum--will but create a gross mechanical parody of that subtle organic thing, the National soul. The oligarchy or the bureaucracy" (he will maintain, and usually maintain justly) "inherit, convey, and maintain the national spirit more truly than would an attempted democratic system." General history, even the general history of Western Europe, is upon the whole on the side of such a criticism. Andorra is a perfect democracy, and has been a perfect democracy for at least a thousand years, perhaps since first men inhabited that isolated valley. But there is no great State which has maintained even for three generations a democratic system undisturbed. Now it is peculiar to the French among the great and independent nations, that they are capable, by some freak in their development, of rapid _communal_ self-expression. It is, I repeat, only in crises that this power appears. But such as it is, it plays a part much more real and much more expressive of the collective will than does the more ordinary organization of other peoples. Those who attacked the Tuileries upon the 10th of August acted in a manner entirely spontaneous, and succeeded. The arrest of the Royal Family at Varennes was not the action of one individual or of two; it was not Drouet nor was it the Saulce family. It was a great number of individuals (the King had been recognized all along the journey), each thinking the same thing under the tension of a particular episode, each vaguely tending to one kind of action and tending with increasing energy towards that action, and all combining, as it were, upon that culminating point in the long journey which was reached at the archway of the little town in Argonne. To have expressed and portrayed this common national power has been the saving of the principal French historians, notably of Michelet. It has furnished them with the key by which alone the history of their country could be made plain. Nothing is easier than to ridicule or deny so mystical a thing. Taine, by temperament intensely anti-national, ridiculed it as he ridiculed the mysteries of the Faith; but with this consequence, that his denial made it impossible for him to write the history of his country, and compelled him throughout his work, but especially in his history of the Revolution, to perpetual, and at last to somewhat crude, forms of falsehood.