demn its premises, or to resign yourself to see the terrible logic of party, the austere arms of fortune, deduce its consequences; otherwise, you plant a tree, and refuse to eat its fruits; you form a volcano, and expect to sleep in peace by its side.

"With the exception of the Constituent Assembly, where all understandings were fascinated, where there reigned a sort of sublime delirium, all the subsequent legislatures during the revolution did evil, intending to do good. The abolition of the monarchy was a concession of the Legislative Assembly; the head of the King an offering of the Convention. The Girondists in the Legislative Body, in surrendering the monarchy, thought they were doing the only thing which could save order. Such was their blindness, that they could not see that their own acts had destroyed order, and its last shadow vanished with the fall of the throne. The Plain, or middle party in the Convention, by surrendering Louis to the executioner, thought to satiate the people with that noble blood; and they were punished for it, by being compelled to give their own, and that of all France. It was on the same principle that in our times the peerage has fallen the victim of deplorable concessions. May that great concession, which embraces more interests, and destroys more conservative principles than are generally supposed, which shakes at once all the pillars of the social order, not prepare for those who have occasioned it unavailing regret and deserved punish

ment!

"The divine justice has a sure means of punishing the exactions, the passions, and the weaknesses which subvert society. It consists in allowing the parties who urge on the torrent, to reap the consequences of their actions. Thus they go on, without disquieting themselves as to the career on which they have entered; without once looking behind them; thinking only on the next step they have to make in the revolutionary progress, and always believing that it will be the last. But the weight of committed faults drags them on, and they perish under the rock of Sisyphus.

" I will not attempt to conceal my sentiments: the political and moral state of my country fills me with consternation. When you contemplate its population in general, so calm, so laborious, so desirous to enjoy in peace the blessings which the hand of God has poured so liberally into the bosom of our beautiful France, you are filled with hope, and contemplate with the eye of hope the future state of our country. But if you direct your look to

the region where party strife combats; if you contemplate their incessant efforts to excite in the masses of the population all the bad passions of the social order; to rouse them afresh when they are becoming dormant; to enrol them in regular array when they are floating; to make, for the sake of contending interests, one body, and march together to one prey, which they will dispute in blood: how is it possible to mistake, in that delirium of passion, in that oblivion of the principles of order, in that forgetfulness of the conditions on which it depends, the fatal signs which precede the most violent convulsions! A people in whose bosom, for sixteen months, disorder has marched with its head erect, and its destroying axe in hand, has not yet settled its accounts with the wrath of Heaven.

"While I am yet correcting these lines; while I am considering if they do not make too strong a contrast to the public security-if they do not too strongly express my profound conviction of the dangers of my country-the wrath of heaven has burst upon that France, half blinded, half insane. Fortune has too cruelly justified my sinister presages. Revolt, assassination, civil war, have deluged with blood a great city; and it would be absurd to be astonished at it. We have sown the seeds of anarchy with liberal hands; it is a crop which never fails to yield a plentiful harvest.

"It is to the men of property, of whatever party, that I now address myself: to those who have no inclination for anarchy, whatever may be its promises or its menaces; to those who would fear, by running before it, to surrender the empire to its ravages, and to have to answer to God and man for the disastrous days, the dark futurity of France. I address myself to them, resolved to unfold to the eyes of my country all our wounds; to follow out, even to its inmost recesses, the malady which is devouring us. It will be found, that, in the last result, they all centre in one; and that is the same which has already cleft in two this great body, and brought the country to the brink of ruin. We speak of liberty, and it is the government of the masses of men which we labour to establish. Equality is the object of our passionate desires, and we confound it with levelling. I know not what destiny providence has in reserve for France; but I do not hesitate to assert, that, so long as that double prejudice shall subsist amongst us, we will find no order but under the shadow of despotism, and may bid a final adieu to liberty." - Pp. 20-36.

There is hardly a sentence in this long quotation, that is not precisely applicable to this country, and the revolutionary party so vehemently, at work amongst ourselves. How strikingly applicable are his observations on the destruction of the hereditary peerage, and the periodical creations which will prostrate the Upper House before the power of the democracy, to the similar attempt made by the revolutionary party in this country! But how different has been the resistance made to the attempt to overthrow this last bulwark of order in the two states! In France, the Citizen King, urged on by the movement party, created thirty Peers to subdue that assembly, and by their aid destroyed the hereditary peerage, and knocked from under the throne the last supports of order and freedom. In Great Britain, the same course was urged by an insane populace, and a reckless administration, on the Crown; and an effort, noble indeed, but, it is to be feared, too late, was made by the Crown to resist the sacrifice. The "masses" of mankind, those immense bodies whom it is the policy of the revo

property, for it is an acquisition which order and talent may always command. In such a state of society, is it a crime to insist that power shall not be devolved but to such as have availed themselves of these universal capabilities, and have arrived either at eminence or property; to those who have reached the summit of the ladder in relation to the commune, department, or the state, to which

they belong? No, it is no crime; for if

you cast your eyes over the history of the world, you will find that freedom was never yet acquired but at that price.

"It is the law of nature that societies and nations should move like individuals; that the head should direct the whole.

Then only it is that the power of intelligence, the moral force, is enabled to govern; and the perfection of such moral and intellectual combinations is freedom. The party in France who support a republic, do so because they consider it as synonymous with democracy. They are in the right. Democracy, without the most powerful counterpoises, leads necessarily to popular anarchy. It has but one way to avoid that destiny, and that is despotism; and thence it is that it invariably terminates, weary and bloody, by reposing beneath its shade."-P. 44, 45.

Salvandy gives the basis on which alone, in his opinion, the social edifice can with safety be reconstructed. His observations are singularly applicable to the future balance which must obtain in the British empire:

The more democratic the French population becomes from its manners and its laws, the more material it is that its

government should incline in the opposite and reflux of free and equal citizens. The

1

"For eighteen months the greatest po

litical lessons have been taught to France. On the one hand, we have seen what it has cost its rulers to have attempted to subvert the laws; on the other, what such a catastrophe costs a nation, even when it is most innocently involved in it. The state, shaken to its centre, does not settle down without long efforts. The farther the imagination of the people has been carried, the more extravagant the expectations they have been permitted to form, the more difficulty have the unchained passions to submit to the yoke of constituted authority, or legal freedom.

Real

liberty, patient, wise, and regular, irritates as a fetter, those who, having conquered by the sword, cannot conceive any better arbiter for human affairs. To in

surrection for the laws, succeeds every

where, and without intermission, insurrection against the laws. From all quarters, the desire is manifested for new conquests, a new futurity; and that devouring disquietude knows no barrier, before which the ambitions, the hatreds, the theories, the destruction of men, may be arrested. It appears to the reformers, that all rights should perish, because one has fallen. There is no longer an institution which they do not attack, nor an interest which does not feel itself compromised. The disorder of ideas becomes universal; the anxiety of minds irresistible. A city, with 100,000 armed men in the streets, no longer feels itself in safety. Should the public spirit arouse itself, it is only to fall under the weight of popular excesses, and still more disquieting apprehension. For long will prevail that universal and irresistible languor; hardly in a generation will the political body regain its life, its security, its confidence in itself. What has occasioned this calamitous state of things? Simply this. Force-popular force, has usurped a place in the destinies of the nation, and its appearance necessarily inflicts a fatal wound on the regular order of human society. Every existence has been endangered when that principle was proclaimed." Pp. 50, 51.

England has done the same to its sovereign as the legislators of July; and God has since granted to that nation one hundred and forty years of prosperity and glory. But let it be observed, that when it abandoned the principle of legitimacy, England made no change in its social institutions. The Aristocracy still retained their ascendency: though the keystone of the arch was thrown down, they removed none of its foundations. But suppose that the English people had proceeded, at the same time that they overthrew the Stuarts, to overturn their ci

vil laws and hereditary peerage-to force through Parliamentary Reform, remodel juries, bind all authorities beneath the yoke of the populace, extend fundamental changes into the State, the Church, and the Army: had it tolerated a doctrine which is anarchy itself, the doctrine of universal suffrage: suppose, in fine, that it had been in the first fervour of the revolutionary intoxication, that Parliament had laid the axe to all subsisting institutions: then, I say, that the Revolution of 1688 would most certainly have led the English people to their ruin; that it would have brought forth nothing but tyranny, or been stifled in blood and tears." - Pp. 59, 60.

The real state of France, under the

Restoration, has been the subject of gross misrepresentation from all the liberal writers in Europe. Let us hear the testimony of this supporter of the Revolution of July, to its practical operation.

"The government of the Restoration was a constitutional, an aristocratic, and a free monarchy. It was monarchical in its essence, and in the prerogatives which it reserved to the Crown. It was free, that is no longer contested. Inviolability of persons and property; personal freedom; the liberty of the press; equality in the eye of law; the institution of juries; independence in the judiciary body; responsibility in the agents of power; comprised every thing that was ever known of freedom in the universe. Public freedom consisted in the division of the legislative authority between the king and the people--the independence of both Chambers---the annual voting of supplies the freedom of the periodical press-the establishment of a representative government.

Democracy, in that regime, was, God knows, neither unknown nor disarmed. For in a country where the aristocracy is an hotel, open to whoever can afford to enter it, it as necessarily forms part of the democracy as the head does of the body. The whole body of society has gained the universal admissibility, and the real admission of all to every species of public employment; the complete equality of taxation; the eligibility of all to the electoral body; the inevitable preponderance of the middling orders in the elections; in fine, the entire command of the periodical press.

"At the time of the promulgation of the charter, France had not the least idea of what freedom was. That Revolution of 40 years' duration, which had rolled over us, incessantly resounding with the name of liberty, had passed away without leaving a conception of what it really was. Coups d'etat: that is, strokes by the force of the popular party, composed all its annals, equally with all that was to be learned from it; and these violent measures never revolted the opinion of the public, as being contrary to true freedom, which ever rejects force, and reposes only on justice, but merely spread dismay and horror through the ranks of the opposite party. The only struggle was, who should get the command of these terrible arms. On the one hand, these triumphs were called order; on the other, liberty. No one gave them their true appellation, which was a return to the state of barbarous ages, a restoration of the rule of the strongest." - Pp. 115, 116.

These observations are worthy of the most profound meditation. Historical truth is beginning to emerge from the fury of party ambition. Here we have it admitted by a liberal historian, that throughout the whole course of the French revolution, that is, of the resurrection and rule of the masses, there was not only no trace of liberty established, but no idea of liberty acquired. Successive coups d'etat, perpetual insurrection; a continued struggle for the rule of these formidable bodies of the citizens, constituted its whole history. They fell at last under the yoke of Napoleon, easily and willingly, ly, because they had never tasted of real freedom. That blessing was given to them, for the first time, under a constitutional monarchy and a hereditary peerage; in a word, in a mixed government. How instructive the lesson to those who have made such strenuous en

deavours to overturn the mixed go

vernment of Britain; to establish here the ruinous preponderance of numbers, and beat down the freedom of thought, by the brutal violence of the multitude.

The following observations are singularly striking. Their application need not be pointed out; one would imagine they were written to depict the course to which the Reforming Administration is rapidly approaching.

"There is in the world but two courses of policy: the one is regular, legitimate, cautious: it leans for support, not on the physical strength, but the moral intelli

gence of mankind, and concedes influence less to the numbers than the lights, the stability, the services, the love of order, of the superior class of citizens.

"This lofty and even policy respects. within the laws, and without the rights of nations, which constitutes the moral law of the universe. It conducts mankind slowly and gradually to those ameliorations which God has made as the end of our efforts, and the compensation of our miseries; but it knows that Providence has prescribed two conditions to this progress, -patience and justice.

"The other policy has totally different rules, and an entirely different method of procedure. Force, brutal force, constitutes at once its principle and its law. You will ever distinguish it by these symptoms. In all contests between citizens, parties, or kingdoms, in every time and in every place, it discards the authority of justice, which is called the safety

of the people; that is to say, the prevailing object of popular ambition, or, in other words, mere force, come in its stead. Would you know its internal policy: difference of opinion is considered as a crime; suspicion is arrest; punishment, death: it knows no law but force to govern mankind. Regard its external policy. It regards neither the sanction of treaties nor the rights of neutrals, nor the inviolability of their territories, nor the conditions of their capitulations: its diplomacy is nothing else but war; that is to say, force, its last resource in all emergencies. In its internal government it has recourse to no lengthened discussion, to no delays, no slow deliberations; caprice, anger, murder, cut short all

questions, without permitting the other side to be heard. In a word, in that system, force thinks, deliberates, wishes, and executes. It rejects all the authority of time and the lessons of experience; the past it destroys, the future it devours.

It must invade every thing, overcome every thing, in a single day. Marching at the head of menacing masses, it compels all wishes, all resistance, all genius, all grandeur, all virtue, to bend before those terrible waves, where there is nothing enlightened which is not perverted, nor worthy which is not buried in obscurity. What it calls liberty consists in the power of dicta. ting its caprice to the rest of mankind; to the judge on the seat of justice, to the citizen at his fireside, to the legislator in his curule chair, to the king on his throne. Thus it advances, overturning, destroying. But do not speak to it of building; that is beyond its power. It is the monster of Asia, which can extinguish but not produce existence." -230, 231.