isolated, dwindling, and prostrate at the feet of the all-powerful
State, who, due to remote historical causes, and yet more so by
modern legislation, have been made incapable of "spontaneously
grouping around a common interest." Very probably - and of this we may
judge by two sketches of a plan, undoubtedly provisional, but the
ideas of which were long settled in his mind - M. Taine would have
first described this legislation and defined its principles and
general characteristics. He meant to show it more and more systematic,
deliberately hostile to collective enterprise, considering secondary
bodies not as "distinct, special organs," endowed with a life of their
own, "maintained and stimulated by private initiation," but as agents
of the State "which fashions them after a common pattern, imposes on
them their form and prescribes their work." - This done, this defect
pointed out, the author was to enumerate the consequences flowing from
it, the social body entirely changed, "not only in its proportions but
in its innermost texture," every tendency weakened by which
individuals form groups that are to last longer than themselves, each
man reduced to his own self, the egoistic instinct enhanced while the
social instinct wastes away for want of nourishment, his daily
imagination solely concerned with life-long aims, incapacitated for
politics as he is "lacking spheres of action in which he may train
himself according to his experiences and faculties", his mind
weakening in idleness and boredom or in a thirst for pleasure and
personal success, - in short, an organic impoverishment of all
faculties of cohesion, leading to the destruction of the natural
centers of grouping and, consequently, to political instability.[2]

One association of special import remains, the most spontaneous, the
deepest rooted, so old that all others derive from it, so essential
that in any attack upon it we see even the substance of the social