muscles, nerves, and veins with blood in them, and yet the head lost nothing by that.  There was then a France, Monsieur.  The province had an existence, subordinate doubtless, but real, active, and independent.  Each government, each office, each parliamentary centre was a living intellectual focus.  The great provincial institutions and local liberties exercised the intellect on all sides, tempered the character, and developed men.  And now note well, Durocher!  If France had been centralized formerly as to-day, your dear Revolution never would have occurred—­do you understand?  Never! because there would have been no men to make it.  For may I not ask, whence came that prodigious concourse of intelligences all fully armed, and with heroic hearts, which the great social movement of ’78 suddenly brought upon the scene?  Please recall to mind the most illustrious men of that era—­lawyers, orators, soldiers.  How many were from Paris?  All came from the provinces, the fruitful womb of France!  But to-day we have simply need of a deputy, peaceful times; and yet, out of six hundred thousand souls, as we have seen, we can not find one suitable man.  Why is this the case, gentlemen?  Because upon the soil of uncentralized France men grew, while only functionaries germinate in the soil of centralized France.”

“God bless you, Monsieur!” said the Sub-prefect, with a smile.

“Pardon me, my dear Sub-prefect, but you, too, should understand that I really plead your cause as well as my own, when I claim for the provinces, and for all the functions of provincial life, more independence, dignity, and grandeur.  In the state to which these functions are reduced at present, the administration and the judiciary are equally stripped of power, prestige, and patronage.  You smile, Monsieur, but no longer, as formerly, are they the centres of life, of emulation, and of light, civic schools and manly gymnasiums; they have become merely simple, passive clockwork; and that is the case with the rest, Monsieur de Camors.  Our municipal institutions are a mere farce, our provincial assemblies only a name, our local liberties naught!  Consequently, we have not now a man for a deputy.  But why should we complain?  Does not Paris undertake to live, to think for us?  Does she not deign to cast to us, as of yore the Roman Senate cast to the suburban plebeians, our food for the day-bread and vaudevilles—­’panem et circenses’.  Yes, Monsieur, let us turn from the past to the present—­to France of to-day!  A nation of forty millions of people who await each morning from Paris the signal to know whether it is day or night, or whether, indeed, they shall laugh or weep!  A great people, once the noblest, the cleverest in the world, repeating the same day, at the same hour, in all the salons, and at all the crossways in the empire, the same imbecile gabble engendered the evening before in the mire of the boulevards.  I tell you?  Monsieur, it is humiliating that all Europe, once jealous of us,