text:  I have lived long in great courts and I know not a few small ones; and I can honestly say that the state of morals among the peasants in country villages has always appeared to me more corrupt than in the highest circles of polite and cultivated society; and I can find little difference in principle between the case of one man intriguing in high circles for _grandes entrees_ and that of another setting a similar machinery to work to obtain the presidency in any church meeting of a small parish or a union of parishes; between one who to attain a selfish object flatters a prince and another who flatters the prefect of a department