There are times in the history of nations as in the history of individual man, when the only possibility of safety and health lies in the rigorous application of the knife. Such a state of disease the body politic had reached in France, as it seemed to Richelieu, in the seventeenth century. The poison of separation and anarchy had been imbedded too deep in the system by the civil wars of the last century, for the ordinary remedies of steady and firm government to have any effect. As long as the Huguenots were forming themselves into a political organisation in rivalry to the government of France, and as long as the nobles were bent upon making all government impossible in order that they might personally profit from the evils of anarchy, there was a cancer eating into the heart of France which made national death inevitable. The only hope of saving life lay in the unsparing excision of the malignant tissue. If only one fibre was left it would soon become a fresh root of the fell disease. For it must be remembered that Richelieu had to deal with a nation which had no power of defending itself against the evils which threatened to destroy it. There was too little cohesion among the various provinces seignories and towns, of which France was made up, to admit of any united action. Excepting so far as the royal authority made itself felt, the administration of the country districts was still feudal, in the hands of the seigneurs and their officers, and that of the towns was aristocratic, in the hands of the richer citizens and their officers. The whole of the local administration was thus absorbed by the aristocracy and the official classes. Intensely jealous both of the king above them and of the people below them, they were still too divided in rank and too narrow in sympathies to take the direction of affairs into their own hands. When they met together as in the States-General of 1614 they disclosed the most deep-seated rivalries. The days of the political triumphs of their natural leaders, the great nobles, had been the darkest and most miserable which France had ever experienced. Incapable of good they were potent only for evil. Their privileges, their authority, their prestige barred the way of the simplest administrative reforms. Equal administration of justice, equal taxation, free circulation of commodities within the country were impossible as long as the seigneurs held their special fiscal and judicial powers in their own districts. From classes whose one idea of government was the maintenance of personal and class privilege nothing could be hoped. They formed an impenetrable barrier of obscurantism in the way of good government. Interested in the maintenance, not in the suppression, of abuse, they kept the people down with one hand in misery and degradation, while with the other they sought to terrify the king into tutelage. Duller eyes than those of Richelieu might easily