A great deal has been said about unity and social fraternity. These are sublime words, but they ought not to make us forget facts. Nothing has a more certain tendency to ruin a people than a habit of accepting words and appearances as realities. Whilst the shouts of unity and fraternity resound among us, they are responded to by social war, flagrant or imminent, terrible from the evils it causes, or from those it seems likely to cause. I will not dwell on this grievous wound. Yet in order to cure, we ought to touch, and even to probe it. It is an old wound. The history of France is filled with the struggle between the different classes of society, of which the Revolution of 1789 was the most general and mighty explosion. The contests between nobility and commonalty, aristocracy and democracy, masters and workmen, those possessing property and those dependent on wages, are all different forms and phases of the social struggle which has so long agitated France. And it is at the very moment when we are boasting of having reached the summit of civilization--it is while the most humane words that can issue from the lips of man are ringing in our ears, that this struggle is revived more violently, more fiercely than ever! This is a curse and a shame, of which we, and the age we live in, must rid ourselves. Internal peace, peace among all classes of citizens, is the paramount want, the only chance for the salvation of France. Will the Democratic Republic give us this peace? It did not begin well. When scarcely born, a civil war was its first necessity--most unfortunately for the republic. Governments find great difficulty in rising out of their cradles. Will the Democratic Republic succeed in the attempt? If time is allowed to it, will it restore social peace? There is one circumstance which strikes me powerfully, and causes me great anxiety: that is, the ardour manifested by the republic to be expressly and officially called democratic. The United States of America are universally admitted to be the model of a Republic and a Democracy. Did it ever enter the head of the American people to call the United States a Democratic Republic?