sons so elected possess afterwards, as a
parliament, unlimited powers. Election, in this case, becomes
separated from representation, and the candidates are candidates for
despotism.[323]

Napoleon once consulted the cleverest among the politicians who served
him, respecting the durability of some of his institutions. "Ask
yourself," was the answer, "what it would cost you to destroy them. If
the destruction would cost no effort, you have created nothing; for
politically, as well as physically, only that which resists endures." In
the year 1802 the same great writer said: "Nothing is more pernicious in
a monarchy than the principles and the forms of democracy, for they
allow no alternative, but despotism and revolutions." With the
additional experience of half a century, a writer not inferior to the
last repeats exactly the same idea:--

Of all societies in the world, those which will always have most
difficulty in permanently escaping absolute government will be
precisely those societies in which aristocracy is no more, and can
no more be.[324]

French constitutionalism was but a form by which the absence of
self-government was concealed. The State was as despotic under Villele
or Guizot as under either of the Bonapartes. The Restoration fenced
itself round with artificial creations, having no root in the condition
or in the sympathies of the people; these creations simply weakened it
by making it unpopular. The hereditary peerage was an anomaly in a
country unused to primogeniture, and so was the revival, in a nation of
sceptics, of the Gallican union between Church and State. The monarchy
of July, which was more suited to the nature of French society, and was
thus enabled to crush a series of insurrections, was at last forced, by
its position and by the necessity of self-preservation, to assume a very
despotic character. After the fortifications of Paris were begun, a
tendency set in which, under a younger sovereign, would have led to a
system hardly distinguishable from that which now prevails; and there
are princes in the House of Orleans whose government would develop the
principle of democracy in a manner not very remote from the institutions
of the second Empire. It is liberalism more than despotism that is
opposed to liberty in France; and it is a most dangerous error to
imagine that the Governments of the French Charter really resemble ours.
There are States without any parliament at al