But all these governments, say the republicans, fell, because they departed from the principles of the Revolution, and because they became corrupted by power as soon as they had tasted its sweets. But even supposing this were true,—supposing that Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre, Napoleon, and Louis Philippe were all overthrown, not because they took the only method left open to them to preserve the support of the senators, but because they departed from the principles of the Revolution; do the republicans not see that the very announcement of that fact is the most decisive condemnation of their system of government? Do they expect to find liberals more eloquent than Mirabeau, republicans more energetic than Danton, socialists more ardent than Robespierre, generals more capable than Napoleon, citizen kings more astute than Louis Philippe? Republican power must be committed to some one. Mankind cannot exist an hour without a government: the first act of the infuriated and victorious rabble in the Chamber of Deputies was to name a Provisional one. But if experience has proved that intellect the most powerful, patriotism the most ardent, genius the most transcendent, penetration the most piercing, experience the most extensive, are invariably shipwrecked amidst the temptations and the shoals of newly acquired republican power, do they not see that it is not a form of government adapted for the weakness of humanity; and that if the leaders of revolution are not impelled to destruction by an external and overbearing necessity, they are infallibly seduced into it by the passions which, amidst the novelty of newly acquired power, arise in their own breasts? In either case, a revolution government must terminate in its own destruction,—in private sufferings and public disasters; and so it will be with the government of M. Lamartine and that of the new National Assembly, as it has been with all those which have preceded it.