Certainly no executive holding power by any tenure less independent and secure can ever effect this. That a real basis exists upon which this great work might be carried out in the local life, traditions, ideas and sympathies by which the widely different populations of what used to be known as the different provinces of the Kingdom of France are united among themselves and discriminated from one another, many able and well-informed Frenchmen believe. One of the most hasty and mischievous things done by the infatuated political tinkers of 1790 was to cut and carve up France into arbitrary political departments for the express purpose of disintegrating and destroying those ancient social and political organisms.
This purpose has not been effectually accomplished. What has been accomplished is to superpose upon the ancient organic France another arbitrary and administrative France. This latter arbitrary and administrative France controlled by a legislative oligarchy, which first makes and then uses the French Executive for its own purposes, it is which now calls itself the Third French Republic.
The traits and the tendencies as well as the origin of the Third Republic can be thoroughly studied at Paris. Without Paris the Third Republic never could have existed. It exists now in virtue of the political machinery of which Paris is the centre. That it could not withstand for a day any severe shock given to that machinery was confessed, as I have said, by its own government in the abject panic which followed the victory of General Boulanger at the polls of the capital on January 27, 1889.
The traits and the tendencies of France, on the contrary, must be studied in the provinces. There was always more wit than wisdom in the famous saying of Heine--that to talk about the opinion of the provinces in France was like talking about the opinion of a man's legs--the head being the seat of thought, and Paris being the head. But the saying was uttered during the reign of Louis Philippe, and long before the establishment of universal suffrage by the Second Empire. With universal suffrage and with the development during the past twenty years of the railway and of the telegraphic system throughout France, the importance of the provinces relatively to Paris has greatly and steadily increased. While steam and electricity have, of course, increased the strength of the pressure which an aggressive oligarchy controlling the centralised administrative machinery of the Government at Paris can put upon the opinions and the interests of France, they have also, it must be remembered, increased the power of France to resist and to resent that pressure. They have established return currents, the force of which grows visibly greater every year. The great provincial towns and cities of France, for example, are ceasing to be dependent, as they formerly were, upon the press of Paris for their news and views of which passes in the capital.