Fatal idea, which incessantly excites and foments social war amongst us! This idea must be extirpated; for on its extirpation depends social peace, and, in her train, liberty, security, prosperity, dignity, all the benefits, material or moral, which social peace alone can ensure. The following are the causes to which the word _democracy_ owes its power. It is the banner of all the social hopes and ambitions of man,--pure or impure, noble or base, rational or irrational, possible or chimerical. Now it is the glory of man to be ambitious. He alone, of all created beings, does not passively resign himself to evil; he alone incessantly aspires after good; not only for himself, but for his fellow-creatures. He respects and loves the race to which he belongs; he wishes to find a remedy for their miseries, and redress for their wrongs. But man is no less imperfect than he is ambitious. Amidst his ardent and unceasing struggles to eradicate evil and to achieve good, every one of his virtuous inclinations is accompanied by an evil inclination which treads closely on its heels, or strives with it for precedence. The desire for justice and the desire for vengeance--the spirit of liberty and the spirit of tyranny--the wish to rise and the wish to abase what has risen--the ardent love of truth and the presumptuous temerity of fancied knowledge;--we may fathom all the depths of human nature; we shall find throughout, the same mingled yet conflicting qualities, the same danger from their close and easy approximation. To all these instincts, at once contrary and parallel,--to all indiscriminately, the bad as well as the good,--the word _Democracy_ holds out an interminable vista and infinite promises. It fosters every propensity, it speaks to every passion, of the heart of man; to the most generous and the most shameful, the most moral and the most immoral, the gentlest and the harshest, the most beneficent and the most destructive: to the former it loudly offers, to the latter it secretly and dimly promises, satisfaction. Such is the secret of its power.