throne amidst the derision and contempt of mankind. “If absolute power,” says M. De Tocqueville, “shall re-establish itself in whatever hands, in any of the democratic states of Europe, I have no doubt it will assume a form unknown to our fathers. When the great families and the spirit of clanship prevailed, the individual who had to contend with tyranny never found himself alone—he was supported by his clients, his relations, his friends. But when the estates are divided, and races confounded, where shall we find the spirit of family? What form will remain in the influences of habit among a people changing perpetually, where every act of tyranny will find a precedent in previous disorders, where every crime can be justified by an example; where nothing exists of sufficient antiquity to render its destruction an object of dread, and nothing can be figured so new that men are afraid to engage in it? What resistance would manners afford which have already received so many shocks? What would public opinion do, when twenty persons do not exist bound together by any common tie; when you can no more meet with a man, a family, a body corporate, or a class of society, which could represent or act upon that opinion; where each citizen is equally poor, equally impotent, equally isolated, _and can only oppose his individual weakness to the organised strength of the Central Government_? To figure any thing equal TO THE DESPOTISM which would then be established amongst us, we would require to recur not to our own annals; we would be forced to go back to those frightful periods of tyranny, when, manners being corrupted, old recollections effaced, habits destroyed, opinions wavering, liberty deprived of its asylum under the laws, men made a sport of the people, and princes wore out the clemency of heaven rather than the patience of their subjects. They are blind indeed who look for democratic equality in the monarchy of Henry IV. and Louis XIV.”[14] What a commentary on this terrible prophecy have recent events supplied! The revolutionists say, that France is entering the last phase of the revolution.—It is true, it is entering it; but it is the last phase of punishment to which it is blindly hurrying. The sins of the fathers are about to be visited on the third generation. To talk of real freedom, stable institutions, protected industry, social happiness, in such a country, is out of the question. With their own hands, in the first great convulsion, they destroyed all the bulwarks of freedom in the land, and nothing remains to them, after the madness of socialism has run its course, but the equality of despotism. They have thrown off the laws of God and man, and Providence will leave their punishment to their own hands. “The Romans,” says Gibbon, “aspired to be equal: they were levelled _by the equality of Asiatic bondage_.”