France one, under the government of one man. It bears a family likeness to the tragedies of Racine and Corneille. Such an idea is great and beautiful as _Horace_ and _Le Cid_. But it owes its grandeur to a simplicity that condemns it to leave out much of political reality, which is indeed as complex and multiform as life itself. Therefore, though it is beautiful, its beauty is bound to be a tragic one. When the concept had become a fact, when Louis XIV could say _l’Etat c’est moi_; when France was at least one under her King, the French monarchy was in the position of the bullet that has been shot right in the bull’s-eye. The aim is perfectly caught, the steely little thing is helplessly stuck there, useless. The funeral knell of absolute monarchy is rung by this identification of the Sovereign with the State. As a political institution it was perfect. Perfection is static and cannot, therefore, belong to life, which moves towards perfection but never is perfect. Politically the feudal nobility was hewn down with the indifference with which a venerable forest is razed to the ground to make a French garden. The trouble was that society is not a garden which once laid down can be kept by a succession of good gardeners in consonancy with the plans of the architect. In France society was to go on living its historical life of eternal alteration and formation. The political abolition of the nobility was a most active ferment to breed more speedily the modifications to come. The French nobility lost its virtues; corrupted by the idleness enforced upon its members, it infested the moral atmosphere and this in spite of the very remarkable men produced by some of the old stocks. Soon the other classes required its social elimination and they wanted it to be as radical as the political annihilation had been. Undoubtedly the kings had been obliged to destroy what should have been their natural support in order to conform with the political conception that had been elaborated by logical French minds. The king and his people making one without the intervening links of classes—no constitution could be more simple; but its realisation required the amputation of what is necessary to the life of any monarchy.