There is no national "we" aiming collectively at a fixed and final constitution; nor are the successive constitutions of France as such more significant of failure or permanent harm than the successive changes in the professedly unchanged constitution of Great Britain, though the violent kinds of change are as such harmful. If M. Taine had but applied with rigour the logic he once before prescribed, soundly if wittily, for all problems alike, he could not have begun his history with that delusive abstraction of a one-minded community, failing to achieve "their" or "its" purpose. "_Je n'en sais rien_," he remarks with a shrug, over the protest of M. Royer-Collard that certain scientific reasoning will make Frenchmen revolutionary; "_est-ce qu'il y a des Français?_"[3] In dead earnest he now assumes that France consists just of the single species "Frenchmen," whose constitution-building is a corporate attempt to build a French house to live in; when all that is truly historical in his own book goes to show clearly enough that French constitutions, like all others, are products of ever-varying and conflicting passions and interests of sets of people in France who are "Frenchmen" merely when they happen to act in concert against other geographical groups. At no moment were all of the French people consenting parties to any one of the thirteen constitutions. Then there was no collective failure. Of course M. Taine knew this well enough in his capacity of narrator; but as teacher he could not escape from the rut dug for his thought by his fatalism. He must needs make the synthetic abstraction of "we," which excludes the political analysis essential to any practical explanation; and it inevitably followed that his generalisations were merely pseudo-biological, and not what is most wanted in history--sociological truth rooted in psychology and biology. In denuding himself alike of hopes and fears, M. Taine really gave the great illustration of the truth of his own penetrating comment on Mérimée,[4] that he who will be duped by nothing ends in being the dupe of his distrust. He will not be duped by this ideal or that; he will not care enough for any to have a strong wish to see it realised; and so he comes to be duped by the wish to disprove all, to work down all sociology to the plane of cynical pseudo-biology. The enthusiastic amateur can show it, can convict the critic of hearing only the devil's advocate in every moral process,[5] and of becoming at length the historic oracle of those, of all readers, who are most alien to his philosophy.