By virtue of this instinct, which is despotic, by virtue of this education, which is classic and Latin, he conceives human associations not in the modern fashion, Germanic and Christian, as a concert of initiations starting from below, but in the antique fashion, pagan and Roman, as a hierarchy of authorities imposed from above.

He puts his own spirit into his civil institutions, the military spirit; consequently, he constructs a huge barracks wherein, to begin with, he lodges thirty million, men, women, and children, and, later on, forty-two million, all the way from Hamburg to Rome.
The edifice is, of course, superb and of a new style.

On comparing it with other societies in surrounding Europe, and particularly France as she was previous to 1789, the contrast is striking .-- Everywhere else the social edifice is a composition of many distinct structures--provinces, cities, seignories, churches, universities, and corporations.

Each has begun by being a more or less isolated block of buildings where, on an enclosed area, a population has lived apart.

Little by little the barriers have given way; either they have been broken in or have tumbled down of their own accord; passages have been made between one and the other and new additions have been put up; at last, these scattered buildings have all become connected and soldered on as annexes to the central pile.