whole being centres in and evolves round agriculture alone. Beef, bread, and man are to him convertible terms, and he regrets to have to admit two out of the three, and would prefer, if it might be so, to take into consideration simply "beef" and himself alone – other "men" are an encumbrance! Paris, therefore, and above all the "Parisians," are a trouble to his mind, and he willingly moves them aside, to meditate only on his pastures, and the means of making outlying useless humankind eat meat more plentifully, and pay dearer for what it eats.
The sameness of classes brought about by the sameness of calling is nowhere better exemplified than in the person of this devotee of the grass lands ; and who does not recognise in the modern herbager of France, since the days of cattle-fattening, the counterpart of our burly north-country grazier of the pre-railway era, who under the most jovial externals dissimulated treasures of Machiavelian finesse, and claimed that the world contained nothing to be compared to "grass," unless, indeed, it might be the beasts it fed?
III.
But the notion of "France," as opposed to that of "Paris," is not complete by the study of the rural constituent alone. Provincial France has its villages, its small towns, and its large cities; and its largest cities, though they are agglomerations of men whose interests are those of citizens, are not "Parisian," any more than are the more uncultivated rustic centres. In the larger cities, on the contrary, a sort of rivalry feeds antagonism, and a Lillois or a Bordelais, a Lyonnais or Rouennais, or, above all, a Marseillais, would fain make you understand that the merits of his own distinguished town are too great to allow him to regard the "supremacy" of the capital as anything save an unjust caprice of fate. The real "provincial" centres are those of the second and third order, where the urban inhabitants have been all – with very few exceptions – drawn from the province itself, and have not yet lost its chief characteristics, what might in a moral and political sense be denominated its "accent."
It must never be lost sight of that the two forces the – centralising and the centrifugal ones – are as nearly as possible equal. Hence the violence of the struggle and the difficulty of unwinding the tangled skeins of human life, wherein citizens and "rurals," Parisians and provincials, are often hopelessly mixed.
In trying to do this, there is an element to be counted that to the same degree exists in no other country in Europe – what is called "l'Administration."
Unless after long years of residence in France, it is utterly impossible to conceive of the full importance of l'Administration Française, for its complexity of nature and unity of power are inconceivable. French administration is a government alongside and underneath the Government, but not always one in spirit with it: it is always the agent of centralisation, but not always Parisian. Democratise the nation as you will, the administrators of her "regulations," rather even than of her laws, will always form a species of
