that revolution; for he announced that Emile designed to
emigrate, because, from the moral state of the people, a virtuous
revolution had become impossible.[191] The eloquence of Burke was often
oracular; and a speech of Pitt, in 1800, painted the state of Europe as
it was only realised fifteen years afterwards.

But many remarkable predictions have turned out to be false. Whenever
the facts on which the prediction is raised are altered in their
situation, what was relatively true ceases to operate as a general
principle. For instance, to that striking anticipation which Rousseau
formed of the French revolution, he added, by way of note, as remarkable
a prediction on MONARCHY. _Je tiens pour impossible que les grandes
monarchies de l'Europe aient encore long tems a durer; toutes ont brille
et tout etat qui brille est sur son declin._ The predominant
anti-monarchical spirit among our rising generation seems to hasten on
the accomplishment of the prophecy; but if an important alteration has
occurred in the nature of things, we may question the result. If by
looking into the past, Rousseau found facts which sufficiently proved
that nations in the height of their splendour and corruption had closed
their career by falling an easy conquest to barbarous invaders, who
annihilated the most polished people at a single blow; we now find that
no such power any longer exists in the great family of Europe: the state
of the question is therefore changed. It is _now_ how corrupt nations
will act against corrupt nations equally enlightened? But if the citizen
of Geneva drew his prediction of the extinction of monarchy in Europe
from that predilection for democracy which assumes that a republic must
necessarily produce more happiness to the people than a monarchy, then
we say that the fatal experiment was again repeated since the
prediction, and the fact proved not true! The excess of democracy
inevitably terminates in a monarchical state; and were all the
monarchies in Europe at present republics, a philosopher might safely
predict the restoration of monarchy!

If a prediction be raised on facts which our own prejudices induce us to
infer will exist, it must be chimerical. We have an Universal Chronicle
of the Monk Carion, printed in 1532, in which he announces that the
world was about ending,[192] as well as his chronicle of it; that the
Turkish empire would not last many years; that after the death of
Charles the Fifth the empire o