bout the perfect formation of representative government
with its various component parts, royalty, aristocracy, and democracy,
each invested with the rights and the strength necessary for their
functions. The end of the struggle has been arrived at; constitutional
monarchy is founded; by the triumph of their language and of their
primitive liberties the English have conquered their conquerors. It is
written in her history, and especially in her history at the date of the
eleventh century, how England found her point of departure and her first
elements of success in the long labor she performed, in order to arrive,
in 1688, at a free, and, in our days, at a liberal government.

France pursued her end by other means and in the teeth of other fortunes.
She always desired and always sought for free government under the form
of constitutional monarchy; and in following her history, step by step,
there will be seen, often disappearing and ever re-appearing, the efforts
made by the country for the accomplishment of her hope. Why then did not
France sooner and more completely attain what she had so often attempted?
Amongst the different causes of this long miscalculation, we will dwell
for the present only on the historical reason just now indicated: France
did not find, as England did, in the primitive elements of French society
the conditions and means of the political system to which she never
ceased to aspire. In order to obtain the moderate measure of internal
order, without which society could not exist; in order to insure the
progress of her civil laws and her material civilization; in order even
to enjoy those pleasures of the mind for which she thirsts so much,--
France was constantly obliged to have recourse to the kingly authority
and to that almost absolute monarchy which was far from satisfying her
even when she could not do without it, and when she worshipped it with an
enthusiasm rather literary than political, as was the case under Louis
XIV. It was through the refined rather than profound development of her
civilization, and through the zeal of her intellectual movement, that
France was at length impelled not only towards the political system to
which she had so long aspired, but into the boundless ambition of the
unlimited revolution which she brought about and with which she
inoculated all Europe. It is in the first steps towards the formation of
the two societies, French and English, and in the elements,