This being said for the sake of clearness, I need only remind the reader that England preceded France by at least a hundred years in the movement from absolutism to liberty, and that this difference of chronology has exercised a very strong influence on English opinion about French affairs. The English have all along had the advantage of a much riper political experience, and they resemble a mature man who has forgotten the mistakes of his own youth and the violence of his boyish temper, whilst he sees those defects in one who is fifteen years younger than himself. [Sidenote: English Treatment of the French Political Evolution.] During all the difficult time of the French passage from absolutism to liberty, the English had a way of treating the French political evolution which was peculiarly their own. They refused to see anything natural or regular in the remarkable process that was going on before their eyes, and perceived only a series of accidents combined with spasmodic human efforts in one direction or another. They did not discern that, through the accidents and the efforts, a great natural force was acting with real though not always visible constancy, the same force which had abolished absolutism in England itself, and produced the great English experiment in representative government. [Sidenote: W. R. Greg.] I have been struck by a passage in one of Mr. W. R. Greg’s well-known Essays in _Enigmas of Life_, where he speaks with a total absence of sympathy for the growth of free institutions in France, and betrays the curious but common English belief that if somebody had done something which was easy at a particular time, such institutions might have been prevented from taking root in the country. [Sidenote: Quotation from his _Enigmas of Life_.] “In France,” Mr. Greg wrote, “as is every year becoming more recognised by all students of her history, the ochlocracy, which is now driving her to seemingly irretrievable downfall, is traceable to the fatal weakness of monarch and ministers alike in February 1848, when a parliamentary demand for a very moderate extension of a very restricted franchise was allowed to become, first a street riot, and then a mob revolution, though ordinary determination and consistency of purpose among the authorities might have prevented it from ever growing beyond the dimensions of a mere police affair, and have crushed it at the outset.” [Sidenote: The “Ochlocracy.”] [Sidenote: Mirabeau’s answer to Dreux-Brézé.]