The fundamental principle of Lamartine's political philosophy, and which we regard as his grand error, and the cause at once of his success in the outset and his failure in the end, is the principle of the general innocence and perfectibility of human nature. It is this principle, so directly repugnant to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, that it may be regarded as literally speaking the "banner-cry of hell," which is at the bottom of the whole revolutionary maxims; and it is so flattering to the hopes, and agreeable to the weakness of human nature, that it can scarcely ever fail, when brought forward with earnestness and enforced by eloquence, to captivate the great majority of mankind. Rousseau proclaimed it in the loudest terms in all his works; it was the great secret of his success. According to him, man was born innocent, and with dispositions only to virtue: all his vices arose from the absurdity of the teachers who tortured his youth, all his sufferings from the tyranny of the rulers who oppressed his manhood. Lamartine, taught by the crimes, persuaded by the sufferings of the first Revolution, has modified this principle without abandoning its main doctrines, and thus succeeded in rendering it more practically dangerous, because less repugnant to the common sense and general experience of mankind. His principle is, that _démagogie_ is always selfish and dangerous; _démocratie_ always safe and elevating. The ascendency of a few ambitious or worthless leaders precipitates the masses, when they first rise against their oppressors, into acts of violence, which throw a stain upon the cause of freedom, and often retard for a season its advance. But that advance is inevitable: it is only suspended for a time by the reaction against bloodshed; and in the progressive elevation of the millions of mankind to general intelligence, and the direction of affairs, he sees the practical development of the doctrines of the gospel, and the only secure foundation for general felicity. He is no friend to the extreme doctrines of the Socialists and Communists, and is a stanch supporter of the rights of property--and the most important of all rights, those of marriage and family. But he sees in the sway of the multitude the only real basis of general happiness, and the only security against the inroads of selfishness; and he regards the advances towards this grand consummation as being certain and irresistible as the advance of the tide upon the sand, or the progress from night to morning. In this way he hopes to reconcile the grand doctrine of human perfectibility with the universal failure of all attempts at its practical establishment; and continues to dream of the irresistible and blessed march of democracy, while recounting alike the weakness of the Girondists, and the crimes of the Jacobins--the woful result of the Revolution of 1789--and the still more rapid and signal failure of that which convulsed the world sixty years afterwards.