omised land; but he saw it
from the summit of Pisgah. It was not given to Lafayette to witness
the consummation of his wishes in the establishment of a republic
and the extinction of all hereditary rule in France. His principles
were in advance of the age and hemisphere in which he lived. A
Bourbon still reigns on the throne of France, and it is not for us
to scrutinize the title by which he reigns. The principles of
elective and hereditary power, blended in reluctant union in his
person, like the red and white roses of York and Lancaster, may
postpone to aftertime the last conflict to which they must
ultimately come. The life of the patriarch was not long enough for
the development of his whole political system. Its final
accomplishment is in the womb of time.

The anticipation of this event is the more certain, from the
consideration that all the principles for which Lafayette contended
were practical. He never indulged himself in wild and fanciful
speculations. The principle of hereditary power was, in his
opinion, the bane of all republican liberty in Europe. Unable to
extinguish it in the Revolution of 1830, so far as concerned the
chief magistracy of the nation, Lafayette had the satisfaction of
seeing it abolished with reference to the peerage. An hereditary
crown, stript of the support which it may derive from an hereditary
peerage, however compatible with Asiatic despotism, is an anomaly in
the history of the Christian world, and in the theory of free
government. There is no argument producible against the existence
of an hereditary peerage but applies with aggravated weight against
the transmission, from sire to son, of an hereditary crown. The
prejudices and passions of the people of France rejected the
principle of inherited power, in every station of public trust,
excepting the first and highest of them all; but there they clung to
it, as did the Israelites of old to the savory deities of Egypt.

This is not the time nor the place for a disquisition upon the
comparative merits, as a system of government, of a republic, and a
monarchy surrounded by republican institutions. Upon this subject
there is among us no diversity of opinion; and if it should take the
people of France another half century of internal and external war,
of dazzling and delusive glories; of unparalleled triumphs,
humiliating reverses, and bitter disappointments, to settle it to
their satisfaction, the ultimate result can