; contemporaries have passed away, and can
no longer profit by the truths which are imparted, or participate in
their recital with personal enjoyment. Such memoirs retain only a moral
and literary value, and excite no feeling beyond idle curiosity.
Although I well know how much experience evaporates in passing from one
generation to another, I cannot believe that it becomes altogether
extinct, or that a correct knowledge of the mistakes of our fathers, and
of the causes of their failures, can be totally profitless to their
descendants. I wish to transmit to those who may succeed me, and who
also will have their trials to undergo, a little of the light I have
derived from mine. I have, alternately, defended liberty against
absolute power, and order against the spirit of revolution,--two leading
causes which, in fact, constitute but one, for their disconnection leads
to the ruin of both. Until liberty boldly separates itself from the
spirit of revolution, and order from absolute power, so long will France
continue to be tossed about from crisis to crisis, and from error to
error. In this is truly comprised the cause of the nation. I am grieved,
but not dismayed, at its reverses. I neither renounce its service, nor
despair of its triumph. Under the severest disappointments, it has ever
been my natural tendency, and for which I thank God as for a blessing,
to preserve great desires, however uncertain or distant might be the
hopes of their accomplishment.

In ancient and in modern times, the greatest of great historians,
Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Caesar, Tacitus, Macchiavelli, and
Clarendon, have written, and some have themselves published, the annals
of the passing age and of the events in which they participated. I do
not venture on such an ambitious work; the day of history has not yet
arrived for us, of complete, free, and unreserved history, either as
relates to facts or men. But my own personal and inward history; what I
have thought, felt, and wished in my connection with the public affairs
of my country; the thoughts, feelings, and wishes of my political
friends and associates, our minds reflected in our actions,--on these
points I can speak freely, and on these I am most desirous to record my
sentiments, that I may be, if not always approved, at least correctly
known and understood. On this foundation, others will hereafter assign
to us our proper places in the history of the age.

I only commenced public life