eing left unprovided for, no man who had filled the
office decently would have been refused an ample provision on quitting
it. As for this man, no provision that we could have made for him, if we
had given him three or four millions a year, would have induced him to
give up what he considered a throne which was his by descent. He swore to
the Constitution with an _idee fixe _to destroy it. He attempted to do so
on the 29th of January 1849, not two months after his election.

'I agree with you that the fault of the Constitution was that it allowed
the President to be chosen by universal suffrage; and that the fault of
the people was that they elected a pretender to the throne, whose
ambition, rashness, and faithlessness had been proved.

'No new Constitution can work if the Executive conspires against it. But
deliberating and acting in the midst of _emeutes_, with a Chamber and a
population divided into half a dozen hostile factions, the two Royalist
parties hating one another, the Bonapartists bent on destroying all
freedom, and the Socialists all individual property, what could we do? My
wish and Tocqueville's was to give the election to the Chamber. We found
that out of 650 members we could not hope that our proposition would be
supported by more than 200. You think that we ought to have proposed two
Chambers. The great use of two Chambers is to strengthen the Executive
by enabling it to play one against the other; but we felt that our
Executive was dangerously strong, and we believed, I think truly, that a
single Chamber would resist him better than two could do. The provision
which required more than a bare majority for the revision of the
Constitution was one of those which we borrowed from America. It had
worked well there. In the general instability we wished to have one
anchor, one mooring ring fixed. We did not choose that the whole
framework of our Government should be capable of being suddenly destroyed
by a majority of one, in a moment of excitement and perhaps by a
parliamentary surprise.

'With respect to your complaint that, there being no power of
dissolution, there was no means of taking the opinion of the people, the
answer is, that to give the President power of dissolution would have
been to invite him to a _coup d'etat._ With no Chamber to watch him, he
would have been omnipotent.

'I agree with you that the Constitution was a detestable one. But even
now, looking back to the times, and to the co