The first circumstance which must strike every observer, in the contemplation of the terrible crisis through which we have passed, is, that the destruction with which we were threatened was mainly, if not entirely, owing to _want of moral courage_ on the part of the depositaries of power. The Revolution in Paris, it is well known, owed its success entirely to the pusillanimity of the _men_ of the royal family. Louis Philippe, old and enfeebled by disease, was paralysed by a still more fatal source of weakness--the consciousness of a throne won by treason--the terror inspired by the sight of the barricades, behind which his own government had been constructed. His sons who were present showed that the Orleans family had lost, with the possession of a usurped throne, the courage which, for several generations, had constituted the only virtue of their race. The King of Prussia abandoned the contest in Berlin in the moment of victory--a nervous reluctance to the shedding of blood paralysed, as it had done in the days of Louis XVI., the defenders of the throne. In Austria, the known imbecility, physical and moral, of the emperor, rendered him wholly unequal to the crisis in which he was placed--delivered over the empire, undefended, to a set of revolutionary murderers, and rendered a change in the reigning sovereign indispensable. In Rome, the Pope himself began the movement--he first headed the reform crusade; and whatever his unhappy subjects have since suffered is to be ascribed to his blind delusion and weak concessions. Such was the conduct of the kings of Europe--such the front which our sex in high places opposed to the revolutionary tempest. But women often, in the last extremity, exhibit a courage which puts to shame the pusillanimity of the men by whom they are surrounded; and never was this more signally evinced than in the present instance. The Queen of France tried in vain, at the Tuileries, to inspire her husband with her own heroic spirit; the Duchess of Orleans showed it in front of levelled muskets in the Chamber of Deputies; and, that order is still preserved in our country, is to be ascribed in no small degree to the firm conduct of the sovereign on the throne, and the determination with which she inspired her government to risk everything rather than concede one iota to the revolutionists.