to pursue,--to recognize Louis XVIII., to accept his liberal
concessions, and to act in concert with him while treating with the
foreign Powers. This was absolutely necessary; for the most limited mind
could foresee that the return of the House of Bourbon was an inevitable,
and all but an accomplished fact. Such a course became also a duty, to
promote peace and to afford the best means of counteracting the evils of
invasion; for Louis XVIII. could alone repel them with any show of
authority. An auspicious future was thus opened to liberty; for reason
whispered, and experience demonstrated, that, after what had passed in
France since 1789, despotism could never more be attempted by the
princes of the House of Bourbon--an insurmountable necessity compelled
them to adopt defined and constitutional government,--if they resorted
to extremes, their strength would prove unequal to success. To accept
without hesitation or delay the second restoration, and to place the
King, of his own accord, between France and the rest of Europe, became
the self-evident dictate of patriotism and sound policy.

Not only was this left undone, but every endeavour was used to make it
appear that the Restoration was exclusively the work of foreign
interference, and to bring upon France, in addition to her military
defeat, a political and diplomatic overthrow. It was not independence of
the Empire, or good intentions towards the country, that were wanting
in the Chamber of the Hundred Days, but intelligence and resolution. It
neither lent itself to imperial despotism nor revolutionary violence; it
was not the instrument of either of the extreme parties,--it applied
itself honestly to preserve France, on the brink of that abyss towards
which they had driven her; but it could only pursue a line of negative
policy, it tacked timidly about before the harbour, instead of boldly
entering,--closing its eyes when it approached the narrow channel,
submitting, not from confidence, but from imbecility, to the blindness
or infatuation of the old or new enemies by whom the King was
surrounded, and appearing sometimes, from weakness itself, to consent to
combinations which in reality it tried to elude;--at one moment
proclaiming Napoleon II., and at another any monarch whom the sovereign
people might please to select.

To this fruitless vacillation of the only existing public authority, one
of the most fatally celebrated actors of the worst times of the
Revoluti