You admit the difference, which I endeavoured to show you, between the American constitution and that of any conceivable constitution which may be cooked up for an old European state. I am glad if I have directed your attention, accordingly, to the great mistake of France. She supposes that a feeble, and debauched old gentleman can boil himself in the revolutionary kettle, and emerge in all the tender and enviable freshness of the babe just severed from the maternal mould. Politicians have committed a blunder in not allowing the natural, and hence legitimate, origin of the American constitution in that of its British parent. They have thus favoured the theory that a tolerably permanent constitution can be drafted _a priori_, and imposed upon a state. This is the absurdity that makes revolutions. If the silly French, instead of reading De Tocqueville, would study each for himself the history of our constitution, and see how gradually it grew to be our constitution, before pen was put to paper to draft it, they might perhaps stop their abortive nonsense in time, to save what they can of their national character from the eternal contempt of mankind. But you cannot think the French will find so fair a destiny as a Restoration! Tell me, in what French party, at present existing, there is any inherent strength, save in that of the legitimists? Other parties are mere factions; but the legitimists have got a seminal principle among them, which dies very hard, and of which the nature is to sprout and make roots, and then show itself. I am no admirer of the Bourbons: their intrigues with Jesuitism have been their curse, and are the worst obstacle to their regaining a hold on the sympathies of freemen. The reactionary party have in vain endeavoured to overcome it for fifty years. Yet there is such tenacity of life in legitimacy, that it seems to me destined to outlive all opposition, and to succeed by necessity. The rapid developments of this memorable year strengthen the probability of my prediction. Revolutionism is spasmodic, but not so long in dying as it used to be. I cannot but think this year has done more for a permanent restoration of the Bourbons than any year since Louis XVI. ascended the scaffold. In this respect the Barricades of 1848 may tell more impressively on history than the Allies of 1814, or even the carnage of Waterloo.