So we said good night to this man, our host, who had so regaled us. I may be wrong, but I fancy he was an anti-clerical. He was a hard man, just, eager, and attentive, narrow, as I have said, and unconsciously (as I have also said) building up the nation.

There was the Ironmonger of Bar-le-Duc; and there are hundreds of thousands of the same kind.

A FORCE IN GAUL

There is a force in Gaul which is of prime consequence to all Europe. It has canalized European religion, fixed European law, and latterly launched a renewed political ideal. It is very vigorous to-day.

It was this force which made the massacres of September, which overthrew Robespierre, which elected Napoleon. In a more concentrated form, it was this force which combined into so puissant a whole the separate men--not men of genius--who formed the Committee of Public Safety. It is this force which made the Commune, so that to this day no individual can quite tell you what the Commune was driving at. And it is this force which at the present moment so grievously misunderstands and overestimates the strength of the armies which are the rivals of the French; indeed, in that connexion it might truly be said that the peace of Europe is preserved much more by the German knowledge of what the French army is, even than by French ignorance of what the German army is.

I say the disadvantages of this force or quality in a commonwealth are apparent, for the weakness and disadvantages of something extraneous to ourselves are never difficult to grasp. What is of more moment for us is to understand, with whatever difficulty, the strength which such a quality conveys. Not to have understood that strength, nay, not to have appreciated the existence of the force of which I speak, has made nearly all the English histories of France worthless. French turbulence is represented in them as anarchy, and the whole of the great story which has been the central pivot of Western Europe appears as an incongruous series of misfortunes. Even Carlyle, with his astonishing grasp of men and his power of rapid integration from a few details (for he read hardly anything of his subject), never comprehended this force. He could understand a master ordering about a lot of servants; indeed, he would have liked to have been a servant himself, and _was_ one to the best of his ability; but he could not understand self-organization from below. Yet upon the existence of that power depends the whole business of the Revolution. Its strength, then, (and principal advantage), lies in the fact that it makes democracy possible at critical moments, even in a large community.