to day and has
neither funds nor credit. Nobody dreams of taking back property that is
sold; nothing is more opposed to the spirit of the new Regime: not only
would this be a robbery as before, since its buyers have paid for it and
got their receipts, but again, in disputing their title the government
would invalidate its own. For its authority is derived from the same
source as their property: it is established on the same principle as
their rights of possession and by virtue of the same accomplished facts

* because things are as they are and could not be different,

* because ten years of revolution and eight years of war bear down on
the present with too heavy a weight,

* because too many and too deep interests are involved and enlisted on
the same side,

* because the interests of twelve hundred thousand purchasers are
incorporated with those of the thirty thousand officers to whom
the Revolution has provided a rank, along with that of all the new
functionaries and dignitaries, including the First Consul himself, who,
in this universal transposition of fortunes and ranks, is the greatest
of parvenus and who must maintain the others if he wants to be
maintained by them.

Naturally, he protects everybody, through calculation as well as
sympathy, in the civil as in the military order of things, particularly
the new property-owners, especially the smaller and the average ones,
his best clients, attached to his reign and to his person through love
of property, the strongest passion of the ordinary man, and through love
of the soil, the strongest passion of the peasant.[3186] Their loyalty
depends on their security, and consequently he is lavish of guarantees.
In his constitution of the year VIII,[3187] he declares in the name
of the French nation that after a legally consummated sale of national
property, whatever its origin, the legitimate purchaser cannot be
divested of it." Through the institution of the Legion of Honor he
obliges each member "to swear, on his honor, to devote himself to the
conservation of property sanctioned by the laws of the republic."[3188]
According to the terms of the imperial constitution[3189] "he swears"
himself "to respect and to enforce respect for the irrevocability of the
sale of national possessions."

Unfortunately, a cannon-ball on the battle-field, an infernal machine
in the street, an illness at home, may carry off the guarantor and the
guarantees.[3190] On the other hand,