on.' De Tocqueville had thoroughly mastered the constitutional
system, as had also Lacordaire and Montalembert, and he, as well as
they, joined the so-called republican movement of 1848, hoping that
constitutionalism would triumph at last. But he soon saw that European
Democrats or Red Republicans did not comprehend the idea;--that, in
fact, they meant absolutism, though democratic; and he retired in
disappointment, though calm hopefulness, to his estate, and there wrote
his 'Ancient Regime.'

True, the Red Republicans issued high-sounding phrases about liberty,
rights of man, and the right of the people to govern. But they meant
rights of man independent of God, and the right of the people to be
absolute; and they continued the system of centralism, or government by
bureaucracy, without God. The French have learned by sad experience that
there is a thousand times more danger of change, turbulence, and
disruption, under democratic absolutism than under autocratic
absolutism. Louis Napoleon knows it well, and hence his significant
phrase, 'The empire is peace.' It is the strong iron band around a mass
of antagonistic atoms, which have lost, at least in the sphere of
politics, the cohesive principle of harmony: union with each other by
virtue of union with the God-man.

Through all the terrific scenes of turbulence and carnage, the frequent
dynastic changes, and the fearful scourgings of the French empire since
the days of Louis the Fourteenth, the nation itself has not been
destroyed, because, after all, there was and is a vast deal of virtue in
the people as individuals. God never destroyed a nation for its public
or national sins until the people themselves had become individually
thoroughly corrupt. The city of Sodom itself would have been spared had
even _five_ good men been found therein. And so the French nation does
not go to pieces, as the Roman empire did, because, notwithstanding the
vice of Paris, of which we hear and read so much, and the godlessness of
French statesmanship and French literature, the great body of the
people, even in Paris, still retain their integrity, and a wholesome
fear of God. But because their current literature is heathenish, and
their statesmanship has ignored honesty and the divine origin of man's
rights, those intermediary institutions, which were developed by
Christian charity from the idea that man's rights are sacred because
God-given and dignified by the God-man, have been unde