ntative chamber. The two powers
are represented to us as flatly irreconcilable. "Can society," he asks,
"have two heads? Is the sovereignty divisible? Between the government of
a king and the government of an assembly, is there not a gulf which
every day makes wider? And wherever this dualism exists, are not the
people condemned to fluctuate miserably between a 10th of August and an
18th Brumaire?"--(_Int._, p. 64.) And a little further on, speaking of
the times of Louis XVIII., he writes--"Meanwhile Europe began to be
disquieted on the state of things in France. Foreign sovereigns had
thought to establish peace in our country, by establishing the empire of
the charter, and the political dualism which it consecrates. The error
was great, and they ended by discovering it. M. de Richelieu, who had
been present at the congress at Aix-la-Chapelle, brought back with him a
very lively apprehension of the future fate of the monarchy in France. A
change of the electoral law was proposed. Unhappily, it was not in the
law of the 5th February that lay the danger which occupied the congress
of Aix-la-Chapelle. To consolidate the throne, and raise it above the
storms which threatened it, not this or that electoral law, but the
electoral power itself, should, if possible, be abolished. For in
whatever hands this formidable lever was placed, it was impossible that
royalty could long resist its action. To shift the elective power was
only to give the monarchy other enemies, not to save it. * * * The aim
of the new ministry was to preserve the electoral law; which amounted to
this--the monarchy chose ministers whose programme was the destruction
of monarchy."

On reading such passages, we naturally set about recalling certain
old-fashioned political truisms, bearing on the character and interest
of that middle class of society in which the electoral power is
generally lodged. We recollect that the middle classes have been held to
have an interest as well in preserving, as in checking and controlling
the monarchy. Alone, they could not govern society; and they have a
larger share in the government, as partners with the monarchy, than if
they were absorbed in the general mass of the population. They have
every thing to lose by the abolition of a royalty which they have ceased
to fear, and which they have bound by laws. Such a royalty, with its
sway over the imagination of the multitude, with its strong hand of
military power--hand in whic