But, in continental Europe, the people formed no more an object, in the general polity of nations, than a submarine mountain takes its place in a map of the ocean. It had an existence, but no recognition; it had a place, but the ship of the State passed over it without casting the lead or shifting a sail. The government of all foreign nations existed only in the Council Chamber. The king was at once the author and the agent of all measures; the decrees of the administration were as mysterious, as inscrutable, and as unexpected, as Oracles. Men saw nothing in the political world but kingdoms--masses of power--revolving before the eye of the politician and the philosopher, as the planets revolved, with irresistible force, with vast and various splendour, but by laws as much beyond human dispute as the Laws of Nature. The maxim which in our day is felt to contain the consummation of despotism, _L'Etat--c'est moi_, was once the _motto_ of every throne, the essential character of dominion, the crown jewel, the substance of the sceptre. Whether that maxim is to be revived--whether the struggle between popular power and the throne is once more to be tried--whether the monarchies of Europe, unwarned by the rents already made in their ramparts by the comparatively slight incursions of the popular surge, are prepared to defy the ocean in its strength, must be left to the future. But there can be no doubt in the prediction, that whenever the ultimate conflict arrives, it will be tremendous; it will shake all the old barriers of power, and either cover society with ruin, or sweep away the ruin itself, for a total renovation. It is difficult to touch upon this subject without some reference to that country which, for the last fifty years, has gone the whole round of revolution--has lived in an atmosphere of fiery vapours--has been acclimated to epidemics of overthrow--and reckons her years by the flight of monarchs, the fabrication of hollow governments, and the crush of constitutions. France seems resolved on making the dreadful experiment of Despotism. It failed before, and its failure consigned the Imperial experimentalist to a fate so singular and so condign, as to seem a direct punishment from Providence for daring to counteract its purposes in the progress of man. With his successor to his principles, the experiment is but beginning. How will it end? He has invoked a spirit that had been laid these thirty years. Whether, like the magicians of old, he must find employment for the demon, under the penalty of being in his grasp, or he is finally to evade the bond, no man within memory has placed himself and his country in a more trying and threatening dilemma. If he attempts to make war his policy, he will be guilty of every drop of blood shed in the field. If he attempts to re-establish despotism, he has the warning of St Helena before his eyes.