opular rights,
had compressed into the space of twelve months more crimes than the
Kings of France, Merovingian, Carlovingian, and Capetian, had
perpetrated in twelve centuries. Freedom was regarded as a great
delusion. Men were willing to submit to the government of hereditary
princes, of fortunate soldiers, of nobles, of priests; to any government
but that of philosophers and philanthropists. Hence the Imperial
despotism, with its enslaved press and its silent tribune, its dungeons
stronger than the old Bastile, and its tribunals more obsequious than
the old Parliaments. Hence the restoration of the Bourbons and of the
Jesuits, the Chamber of 1815 with its categories of proscription, the
revival of the feudal spirit, the encroachments of the clergy, the
persecution of the Protestants, the appearance of a new breed of De
Montforts and Dominics in the full light of the nineteenth century.
Hence the admission of France into the Holy Alliance, and the war waged
by the old soldiers of the tricolor against the liberties of Spain.
Hence, too, the apprehensions with which, even at the present day, the
most temperate plans for widening the narrow basis of the French
representation are regarded by those who are especially interested in
the security of property and the maintenance of order. Half a century
has not sufficed to obliterate the stain which one year of depravity and
madness has left on the noblest of causes.

Nothing is more ridiculous than the manner in which writers like M.
Hippolyte Carnot defend or excuse the Jacobin administration, while they
declaim against the reaction which followed. That the reaction has
produced, and is still producing, much evil is perfectly true. But what
produced the reaction? The spring flies up with a force proportioned to
that with which it has been pressed down. The pendulum which is drawn
far in one direction swings as far in the other. The joyous madness of
intoxication in the evening is followed by languor and nausea on the
morrow. And so, in politics, it is the sure law that every excess shall
generate its opposite; nor does he deserve the name of a statesman who
strikes a great blow without fully calculating the effect of the
rebound. But such calculation was infinitely beyond the reach of the
authors of the Reign of Terror. Violence, and more violence, blood, and
more blood, made up their whole policy. In a few months these poor
creatures succeeded in bringing about a reaction,