Everybody knows that this is one of the most notorious facts of French history from the days of Lewis XI. or Cardinal Richelieu down to Napoleon Bonaparte.  So far from French models encouraging “arrangements based on the minor peculiarities of race and dialect,” France is the first great example in modern history, for good or for evil, of a persevering process of national unification, and the firm suppression of all provincial particularismus.  This is not only true of French political leaders in general:  it is particularly true of the Jacobin leaders.  Rousseau himself, I admit, did in one place point in the direction of confederation; but only in the sense that for freedom on the one hand, and just administration on the other, the unit should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons concerned in the management of their own public affairs.  If the Jacobins had not been overwhelmed by the necessity of keeping out the invaders, they might have developed the germ of truth in Rousseau’s loose way of stating the expediency of decentralisation.  As it was, above all other French schools, the Jacobins dealt most sternly with particularist pretensions.  Of all men, these supposed masters, teachers, and models of mine are least to be called Separatists.  To them more than to any other of the revolutionary parties the great heresy of Federalism was most odious; and if I were a faithful follower of the Jacobin model, I should have least patience with nationalist sentiment whether in Ireland, Scotland, or Wales, and should most rigorously insist on that cast-iron incorporation which, as it happens, in the case of Ireland I believe to be equally hopeless and undesirable.  This explanation, therefore, of my favour for Welsh Disestablishment is as absurdly ignorant as it is far-fetched and irrelevant.

[Footnote 1:  Nov. 3, 1886.]

The logical process is worth an instant’s examination.  The position is no less than this,—­that to attempt truly to appreciate the place and the value in the history of thought and social movements of men who have been a hundred years in their graves, and to sympathise with certain sides and certain effects of their activity under the peculiar circumstances in which French society then found itself, is the same thing as binding yourself to apply their theories and to imitate their activity, under an entirely heterogeneous set of circumstances, in a different country, and in a society with wholly dissimilar requirements.  That is the argument if we straighten it out.  The childishness of any such contention is so obvious, that I should be ashamed of reproducing it, were it not that this very contention has made its appearance at my expense several times a month for the last two years in all sorts of important and respectable prints.