Royalty has assuredly played a prodigious part in the history of European civilisation, as a glance at facts will convince us. We see the development of royalty progressing step by step, if I may so say, with that of society itself; at least for a long time the advancement is mutual. And not only so, but whenever society advances towards its definitive and modern character, royalty appears to expand and prosper; so that when the work is achieved, and there remains in none, or nearly none, of the great states of Europe any other important and decisive influence than that of the government and the body of the nation, it is royalty which forms the government. {154} It has thus come to pass not only in France, where the fact is evident, but in the great majority of the countries of Europe; a little earlier or a little later, and under forms somewhat differently modified, the history of society in England, Spain, and Germany offers us the same result. In England, for example, it was under the Tudors that the old particular and local elements of English society were displaced, broken up, and supplanted by the system of public powers; it was likewise the period in which royalty exercised the greatest influence. There have been the same circumstances in Germany, in Spain, and in all the great European states. If we proceed out of Europe, and carry our views to the rest of the world, we encounter an analogous fact. We everywhere find royalty occupying an important station, and appearing as an institution perhaps the most general, the most permanent, and the most difficult to prevent, where it did not previously exist, and to eradicate where it had existed. From time immemorial it has possessed Asia. On the discovery of America, all the great states were there found, in different combinations, subjected to the monarchical system. Even in the interior of Africa, wherever nations of any extent are met with, it is the prevailing regime. And not only has royalty penetrated into all quarters, but it has accommodated itself to situations the most various, to civilisation and barbarism, to the most pacific manners--as in China, for example--and to those in which war or the military spirit held predominance; it has established itself at one time in the heart of the system of castes, in societies the most rigorously classified, and at another in the midst of a system of equality, and in societies the most alien to all legalised and permanent classification. Often despotic and oppressive, and again, elsewhere, favourable to the progress of civilisation and liberty, it seems to be a head fitted for a multitude of different bodies--a fruit which may grow from the most diversified germs.