On the other hand, justice compels us to acknowledge that the leaders of the republic have endeavoured to belie the predictions of its adversaries and the fears of the public. They have respected the faith of men. They have fought--very late, it is true, but at last they have fought--for the existence of society. They have not broken the peace of Europe, and they have striven to maintain the public credit. These meritorious efforts do honour to the men invested with power, and show, moreover, what the general instincts of the country are. But these men can only retard, they cannot arrest, the downward course of the state on a fatal declivity; they can find no firm footing, and lose ground at every step. They have sunk into the revolutionary rut; and though they struggle not to plunge deeper into it, they cannot, or they dare not, quit it. The acts of the republic are not, in all points, what they formerly were; but the republic is what it was. Whether as to social organization or political institutions, the conditions of order or the securities for liberty, the republic has nothing better to offer than what she offered fifty years ago. There are the same ideas, the same crude and rash experiments, often even the same forms and the same words. Strange spectacle! The authors of the republic are afraid of their own work, and would fain change its character and aspect; but they can produce nothing but a copy. How long, whatever be its ultimate success or failure, the present attempt will last, nobody knows. But hitherto France has evidently reason to fear that its first and paramount interests--social peace and political liberty--will be placed, or left, by the Democratic Republic, in immense danger. CHAPTER IV. OF THE SOCIAL REPUBLIC. The Social Republic promises to solve the difficulty. “All systems, all governments,” it declares, “have been tried and found wanting. My ideas alone are new, and have not yet been put to the test. My day is come.” This is a mistake. The ideas propounded by the Social Republic are not new. They are as old as the world. They have risen up in the midst of all the great moral and social crises, whether in the East or the West, in the ancient or the modern world. The second and third centuries in Africa, and especially in Egypt, during the agitations caused by the propagation of Christianity--the middle ages during their confused, stormy fermentation--the sixteenth century in Germany, in the course of the Reformation--and the seventeenth in England during the political revolution,--had their Socialists and their Communists, thinking, speaking, and acting precisely like those of our own day. It is a phase of human nature that reappears at epochs when society is like a boiling caldron, in which every ingredient is thrown to the surface and exposed to view.