But in eighteen years an entirely new generation rises to the active direction of affairs. In 1848, the personal experience, the well-founded fears, the sights of woe which had retained the strength of France round the standards of the Barricades, were forgotten. The fearful contests with anarchy by which the first years of the reign of Louis Philippe had been marked, had passed into the page of history, that is, were become familiar to a tenth part only of the active population. To those who did learn it from this limited source, it was known chiefly from the volumes of M. Louis Blanc, who, in his “Ten years of the reign of Louis Philippe,” painted that monarch in no other light but as one of the most deceitful and sanguinary tyrants who ever disgraced humanity. Thus the lessons of experience were lost to the vast majority of the active citizens. The necessity of keeping at peace, which Louis Philippe so strongly felt, and so energetically asserted, became in the course of years an insupportable restraint upon a people fraught with revolutionary ideas, and heated by the glowing recollections of the Empire. A nation containing six millions of separate landed proprietors,[2] the great majority of whom were at the plough, and not possessed of six pounds a-year in the world, necessarily chafes against any power which imposes the restraints of order and peace on the appetite for plunder and the lust of conquest. This was the true secret of the fall of the dynasties of the Restoration and the Barricades. They fell because they kept the nation at peace with its neighbours, and at peace with itself,—because they terminated the dream of foreign conquest, and checked the visions of internal utopia; because they did not, like Napoleon, open the career of arms to every man in the country capable of carrying a musket; or, like Robespierre, pursue the supposed advantage of the working classes by the destruction of every interest above them in society. Had either Charles X. or Louis Philippe been foreign conquerors, and the state of Europe had permitted of their waging war with success, they would have lived and died on the throne of France, and left an honoured crown to their successors. There never were monarchs who mowed down the population and wasted the resources of France like Napoleon and Louis XIV.; but as long as they were successful, and kept open the career of elevation to the people, they commanded their universal attachment. It was when they grew unfortunate, and could call them only to discharge the mournful duties of adversity, that they became the objects of universal execration. The revolution has ever been true to its polar star, viz.—worldly success.