tiations than any preceding monarch. Never had war so frequently
ended and recommenced; never had peace proved such a transient illusion;
a treaty was nothing but a truce, during which preparations were making
for fresh combats.

It was the same with liberty as with peace. Celebrated and promised, at
first, with enthusiasm, it had quickly disappeared under civil discord,
even before the celebration and the promise had ceased; thus, to
extinguish discord, liberty had also been abolished. At one moment
people became maddened with the word, without caring for the reality of
the fact; at another, to escape a fatal intoxication, the fact and the
word were equally proscribed and forgotten.

True peace and liberty returned with the Restoration. War was not with
the Bourbons a necessity or a passion; they could reign without having
recourse every day to some new development of force, some fresh shock to
the fixed principles of nations. Treating with them, foreign Governments
could and did believe in a sincere and lasting peace. Neither was the
liberty which France recovered in 1814, the triumph of any particular
school in philosophy or party in politics. Turbulent propensities,
obstinate theories and imaginations, at the same time ardent and idle,
were unable to find in it the gratification of their irregular and
unbounded appetites. It was, in truth, social liberty, the practical and
legalized enjoyment of rights, equally essential to the active life of
the citizens and to the moral dignity of the nation.

What were to be the guarantees of liberty, and consequently of all the
interests which liberty itself was intended to guarantee? By what
institutions could the control and influence of the nation in its
government be exercised? In these questions lay the great problem which
the Imperial Senate attempted to solve by its project of a Constitution
in April, 1814, and which, on the 4th of June following, the King, Louis
XVIII., effectually decided by the Charter.

The Senators of 1814 have been much and justly reproached for the
selfishness with which, on overthrowing the Empire, they preserved for
themselves, not only the integrity, but the perpetuity of the material
advantages with which the Empire had endowed them;--a cynical error, and
one of those which most depreciate existing authorities in the
estimation of the people, for they are offensive, at the same time, to
honest feelings and envious passions. The Senate commit