Excerpt from The Paternal State in France and Germany IT is almost an impertinence nowadays to remind a reader of past events; we travel so fast through life that Old scenes, if remembered at all, are remembered only as it were by their picturesque features, by their peculiarly Odd or extraordinary forms. Our allotted time is brief, and the past, with its cumbersome civiliza tion, is ever receding from our View. Nevertheless, we all know that nothing' happens by accident in human evolution; that there is a cause behind every phenoms non, be it a physical, a political, or a social one and we know that there is a law connecting the cause with the effect recorded in past annals. It has always struck me that the relations existing be tween some of the most important phenomena of French and German history, and their real, permanent causes, have never been sufficiently examined. If we all know, for instance, why the French nation overthrew its old absolute monarchy in 17 93, we seldom ask ourselves why a still more absolute and despotic republic, and, later on, an absolute and despotic empire, were substituted for it. Again, we all know that the modern French and German people, borrowing parliamentary forms from England. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.