For, at the moment of its establishment, there exists in Europe a general form of society manifest through features in common; a monarchy - hereditary royalty, dynastic but frequently limited, at least in fact, - a privileged nobility performing military service as a special function, a clergy organized as a Church, proprietary and more or less privileged, local or special bodies also proprietary -provinces, communes, universities, brotherhoods, corporations - laws and customs which base the family on paternal authority, perpetuating it on the natal soil and by social rank; in brief, institutions which modern ideas disturb in every direction, the first effect of which is, while developing the spirit of doubt and investigation, to break down subordination to the king, to the gentleman, to the noble, and, in general, to dissolve society founded on heredity. Such phenomena are already observable everywhere, the ruin of feeble corporations by the state, its constant tendency to interference, to the absorption of every special service and the descent of power into the hands of a numerical majority. - What plan, then, governs these societies in the way of reorganization, and, since they all belong to a common type, what are the common resources and difficulties of adaptation? On what lines must the metamorphosis be effected in order to arrive at a viable creations? And, abandoning the general problem in order to return to contemporary France, grown up and organized under our own eyes, how does the great modern event affect it? How does "this common factor combine with special factors, permanent and temporary," belong to our system? With the French, whose hereditary spirit and character are easily defined, in this society founded on Napoleonic institutions moved by our "administrative mechanism," what are the peculiar tendencies of a leveling democracy which seeks immediate establishment? Among the maladies which are special with us - feeble birth-rate, political instability, absence of local life, slow industrial and commercial development, despondency and pessimism - can an aptitude for transformation which we do not possess be distinguished in the sense demanded by the new milieu ? The knowledge we have of our origins, of our psychology, of our present constitution, of our circumstances, what hopes are warranted?
