As it was the opposite conduct from this, and the moral weakness of the depositaries of power, which mainly induced the revolutions of 1848, and rendered them so formidable, so those causes which have at length arrested that terrible convulsion seem to have been no other but the moral laws of nature, destined for the correction of wickedness and the coercion of passion, when they have risen to such a pitch as seriously to endanger the existence of society. And, without presuming to scan too deeply the intentions of Providence, or the great system by which evil is brought out of good, and an irresistible power says to the madness of the people, as to the storms of the ocean, "Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be staid," we may probably discover, humanly speaking, the means by which the evil has been arrested. The first circumstance which has produced the reaction, and arrested the progress of evil so much more rapidly than was the case in the former great convulsion, is the memory of that convulsion itself. It is no doubt true, that every generation is taught by its own and none by its predecessors' sufferings; but, in the case of the first French Revolution, the suffering was so long-continued and dreadful, that the memory of it descended to the next generation. It was impossible that the sons of the men who had been guillotined, exiled, or mown down by the conscription, who had seen their estates and honours torn from them by the ruthless hand of Revolutionary violence, should not retain a vivid sense of the sufferings they had experienced, and the wrongs they had undergone. All classes, not excluding even those who had been most ardent and active in support of the first Revolution, had writhed alike under the calamities and exactions of the latter years of the war, and the ignominious conquest in which it had terminated, which was only felt the more keenly from the unparalleled triumphs to which the nation had so long been habituated. Add to this, that the attention of all the intelligent classes of society in Europe generally, and in France in particular, had been long, and to an extent of which in this country we can scarcely form an idea, riveted on the events of the first Revolution. The Reign of Terror was not forgotten; the prophecy of the historian[3] proved true:--"A second French Revolution, of the same character as the former, and the age in which it is to arise must be ignorant of the first." Its heartstirring incidents, its mournful catastrophes, its tragic events, its heroic virtue, its appalling wickedness, its streams of blood, were indelibly engraven on the hearts of a considerable, and that too the most influential, part of the people. The revolutionists, indeed, in every country--the Red Republicans in France, the Chartists in England, the Rebels in Ireland, the Carbonari in Italy, the _Illuminés_ in Germany, were perfectly prepared to renew for their