[34] See Note XXVIII., Extinction of Loyal Activity. CHAPTER VII. OF ALL EUROPEAN NATIONS FRANCE WAS ALREADY THAT IN WHICH THE METROPOLIS HAD ACQUIRED THE GREATEST PREPONDERANCE OVER THE PROVINCES, AND HAD MOST COMPLETELY ABSORBED THE WHOLE EMPIRE. The political preponderance of capital cities over the rest of the empire is caused neither by their situation, their size, nor their wealth, but by the nature of the government. London, which contains the population of a kingdom, has never hitherto exercised a sovereign influence over the destinies of Great Britain. No citizen of the United States ever imagined that the inhabitants of New York could decide the fate of the American Union. Nay more, no one even in the State of New York conceives that the will of that city alone could direct the affairs of the nation. Yet New York at this moment numbers as many inhabitants as Paris contained when the Revolution broke out. At the time of the wars of religion in France Paris was thickly peopled in proportion to the rest of the kingdom as in 1789. Nevertheless, at that time it had no decisive power. At the time of the Fronde Paris was still no more than the largest city in France. In 1789 it was already France itself. As early as 1740 Montesquieu wrote to one of his friends, ‘Nothing is left in France but Paris and the distant provinces, because Paris has not yet had time to devour them.’ In 1750 the Marquis de Mirabeau, a fanciful but sometimes deep thinker, said, in speaking of Paris without naming it: ‘Capital cities are necessary; but if the head grows too large, the body becomes apoplectic and the whole perishes. What then will be the result, if by giving over the provinces to a sort of direct dependence, and considering their inhabitants only as subjects of the Crown of an inferior order, to whom no means of consideration are left and no career for ambition is open, every man possessing any talent is drawn towards the capital!’ He called this a kind of silent revolution which must deprive the provinces of all their men of rank, business, and talent. The reader who has followed the preceding chapters attentively already knows the causes of this phenomenon; it would be a needless tax on his patience to enumerate them afresh in this place.