Unfortunately, it is also true that the official domestic policy of the Republic is not informed by a genuinely national spirit.  Just as the English national interest demands the temporary loosening of traditional bonds for the sake of securing national cohesion at a smaller sacrifice of popular vitality, so, on the contrary, the French national interest demands more of the English spirit of compromise for the sake of national consistency.  The wounds dealt to the integrity of French national life by the domestic conflicts of four generations require binding and healing.  The Third Republic has on the whole been more national in its domestic policy than were any of the preceding French governments for over two hundred years; but it has still fallen far short of its duty in that respect.  The healing of one wound has always been followed by the opening of another.  Irreconcilable differences of opinion still subsist; and they are rarely bridged or dissolved by any fundamental loyalty of patriotic feeling.  The French have as yet been unable to find in their democracy any conscious ideal of mutual loyalty which provides a sufficient substitute for a merely instinctive national tradition.  They have not yet come to realize that the success of their whole democratic experiment depends upon their ability to reach a good understanding with their fellow-countrymen, and, that just in so far as their democracy fails to be nationally constructive, it is ignoring the most essential condition of its own vitality and perpetuity.

The French democracy is confronted by an economic, as well as a political, problem of peculiar difficulty.  The effects of the Revolution were no less important upon the distribution of wealth in France than upon the distribution of political power.  The people came into the ownership of the land; and in the course of time the area of this distribution has been increased rather than diminished.  Furthermore, the laws under which property in France is inherited have promoted a similarly wide distribution of personal estate.  France is a rich country; and its riches are much more evenly divided than is the case in Great Britain, Germany, or the United States.  There are fewer large fortunes, and fewer cases of poverty.  The average Frenchman is a small, but extremely thrifty proprietor, who abhors speculation and is always managing to add something to his accumulations; and the French economic system is adapted to this peculiar distribution of wealth.  The scarcity in France of iron and coal has checked the tendency to industrial organization on a huge scale.  The strength of the French industrial system does not consist in the large and efficient use of machinery, but in its multitude of skilled craftsmen and the excellence of their handiwork.  In a system of this kind, labor naturally receives a large percentage of the gross product, and a larger proportion of wage-earners reach an independent economic position.  At first sight it looks as if France was something like a genuine economic democracy, and ought to escape the evils which threaten other countries from an economic organization, in which concentrated capital plays a more important part.