beat with: so evils must be things with which men are beaten; and as we
should not be beaten if we did not deserve it, _argal_, suffering is a
merited punishment. Apart from that common infirmity which leads people
after they have discovered an analogy between two things, to argue from
the properties of the one to those of the other, as if, instead of being
analogous, they were identical, De Maistre was particularly fond of
inferring moral truths from etymologies. He has an argument for the
deterioration of man, drawn from the fact that the Romans expressed in
the same word, _supplicium_, the two ideas of prayer and punishment
(_Soirees, 2ieme entretien_, i. p. 108). His profundity as an
etymologist may be gathered from his analysis of _cadaver_: _ca_-ro,
_da_-ta, _ver_-mibus. There are many others of the same quality.

[8] _Gibbon_, c. xlvi. vol. v. 385.

[9] See the _Examen de la Philosophie de Bacon_, vol. ii. 58 _et seq._

III.

When the waters of the deluge of '89 began to assuage, the best minds
soon satisfied themselves that the event which Bonaparte's restoration
of order enabled them to look back upon with a certain tranquillity and
a certain completeness, had been neither more nor less than a new
irruption of barbarians into the European world. The monarchy, the
nobles, and the Church, with all the ideas that gave each of them life
and power, had fallen before atheists and Jacobins, as the ancient
empire of Rome had fallen before Huns and Goths, Vandals and Lombards.
The leaders of the revolution had succeeded one another, as Attila had
come after Alaric, and as Genseric had been followed by Odoacer. The
problem which presented itself was not new in the history of western
civilisation; the same dissolution of old bonds which perplexed the
foremost men at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had distracted
their predecessors from the fifth to the eighth, though their conditions
and circumstances were widely different. The practical question in both
cases was just the same--how to establish a stable social order which,
resting on principles that should command the assent of all, might
secure the co-operation of all for its harmonious and efficient
maintenance, and might offer a firm basis for the highest and best life
that the moral and intellectual state of the time allowed. There were
two courses open, or which seemed to be open, in this gigantic
enterprise of reconstructing a society. One of