nment of a very ordinary statesman, who could not
foresee, from the very beginning, unpleasant consequences from those
plans, though not the unparalleled disgraces and disasters which really
did attend them: for they were, both principles and measures, wholly new
and out of the common course, without anything apparently very grand in
the conception to justify this total departure from all rule.

For, in the first place, the united sovereigns very much injured their
cause by admitting that they had nothing to do with the interior
arrangements of France,--in contradiction to the whole tenor of the
public law of Europe, and to the correspondent practice of all its
states, from the time we have any history of them. In this particular,
the two German courts seem to have as little consulted the publicists of
Germany as their own true interests, and those of all the sovereigns of
Germany and Europe. This admission of a false principle in the law of
nations brought them into an apparent contradiction, when they insisted
on the reestablishment of the royal authority in France. But this
confused and contradictory proceeding gave rise to a practical error of
worse consequence. It was derived from one and the same root: namely,
that the person of the monarch of France was everything; and the
monarchy, and the intermediate orders of the state, by which the
monarchy was upheld, were nothing. So that, if the united potentates had
succeeded so far as to reestablish the authority of that king, and that
he should be so ill-advised as to confirm all the confiscations, and to
recognize as a lawful body and to class himself with that rabble of
murderers, (and there wanted not persons who would so have advised him,)
there was nothing in the principle or in the proceeding of the united
powers to prevent such an arrangement.

An expedition to free a brother sovereign from prison was undoubtedly a
generous and chivalrous undertaking. But the spirit and generosity would
not have been less, if the policy had been more profound and more
comprehensive,--that is, if it had taken in those considerations and
those persons by whom, and, in some measure, for whom, monarchy exists.
This would become a bottom for a system of solid and permanent policy,
and of operations conformable to that system.

The same fruitful error was the cause why nothing was done to impress
the people of France (so far as we can at all consider the inhabitants
of France as a p