One of the difficulties, therefore, which capital has to meet, by the aid of such administrative ability as it can command, is how to keep order when society no longer rests on the cohesive family, but on highly volatilized individuals as incohesive as grains of sand.

It is a faithful picture of the internal state of the French nation in the fourteenth century; a nation in labor of formation, a nation whose elements, as yet scattered and incohesive, though under one and the same name, were fermenting each in its own quarter and independently of the rest, with a tendency to mutual coalescence in a powerful unity, but, as yet, far from succeeding in it.

But France did not contain, as Germany did, several distinct states, independent and pretty strong, though by no means equally so, which could offer to the different creeds a secure asylum, and could form one with another coalitions capable of resisting the head of that incohesive coalition which was called the empire of Germany.