Note 2 — THE ABBÉ JÉRÔME COIGNARD

This has been very favourably received, Monsieur Hugues Rebell having admitted that there is such a thing as a charitable scepticism. Referring, not, it is true, to the opinions of Monsieur Coignard, but to some writings drawn from the same source, he has made some remarks of which I may avail myself here:

"An interesting vein of thought might be followed up after reading this work, furnishing, as it does, some valuable teaching: I may be permitted some reflections on it:

"1. The organisation of a particular society does not depend on individual wills, but on the compulsion of nature, or to put it more simply, on the unanimity of the more intelligent beings of which that society is composed who inevitably choose the most agreeable rule of life:

"2. Mankind at any one period, having the same organic constitution and passions as mankind at any other period, can never have entirely differing institutions. It results from this that a political revolution is no more than a rotatory movement, round the ancient ways, which ends where it began; it is just a disease, an interruption in human development. And the result of this law is that all societies live and die in the same way."

Hugues Rebell in l'Ermitage, April 1893.

Monsieur l'Abbé Coignard simply says that a people is not susceptible to more than one form of government at the same period.