d positions and views, and all apparently
disposed to act together in goodwill for the advantage of their country.
A strange contradiction in our habits and manners! When social
relations, applicable to mental or worldly pleasures, are alone
involved, there are no longer distinctions of classes, or contests;
differences of situation and opinion cease to exist; we have no thought
but to enjoy and contribute in common our mutual possessions,
pretensions, and recommendations. But let political questions and the
positive interests of life once more spring up,--let us be called upon,
not merely to assemble for enjoyment or recreation, but to assume each
his part in the rights, the affairs, the honours, the advantages, and
the burdens of the social system,--on the instant, all dissensions
re-appear; all pretences, prejudices, susceptibilities, and oppositions
revive; and that society which had seemed so single and united, resumes
all its former divisions and differences.

This melancholy incoherence between the apparent and actual state of
French society revealed itself suddenly in 1815. The reaction provoked
by the Hundred Days destroyed in the twinkling of an eye the work of
social reconciliation carried on in France for sixteen years, and caused
the abrupt explosion of all the passions, good or evil, of the social
system, against all the works, beneficial or mischievous, of the
Revolution.

Attacked also by another difficulty, the party which prevailed at the
opening of the session, in the Chamber of 1815, fell into another
mistake. The aristocratic classes in France, although generously
devoted, in public dangers, to the king and the country, knew not how to
make common cause either with the crown or the people; they have
alternately blamed and opposed, royal power and public liberty.
Isolating themselves in the privileges which satisfied their vanity
without giving them real influence in the State, they had not assumed,
for three centuries, either with the monarch, or at the head of the
nation, the position which seemed naturally to belong to them. After all
they had lost, and in spite of all they ought to have learned at the
Revolution, they found themselves in 1815, when power reverted to their
hands, in the same undefined and shifting position. In its relations
with the great powers of the State, in public discussion, in the
exercise of its peculiar rights, the Chamber of 1815 had the merit of
carrying into vigorous