This was the veritable cause of its preponderance in Europe, which arose to such a pitch, that it became the type of a government not only to sovereigns, but also to nations, during the seventeenth century. And now we ask ourselves, for it is impossible we should do otherwise, how a power so brilliant and so well established as I have represented it, should have so quickly fallen into decay, and how, after having played such a part in Europe, it became in the following century so vacillating, so weak, and so despised? The fact itself is incontestable. In the seventeenth century, the French government was at the head of European civilisation; in the eighteenth, this preponderance disappeared, and it was the French society, separated from its government, often even arrayed against it, that preceded and guided the European world in its advancements. We here discover the incorrigible evil and the inevitable effect of absolute power. I will not enter into any detail as to the faults of Louis XIV.'s government, which committed many and great ones; I will not speak of the war of the Spanish succession, of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, of profligate expenditures, or of various other fatal actions which compromised his fortune. I will take the merits of his government to be such as I have just described them, granting that there was never perhaps an absolute government more grateful to its age and subjects, or that rendered more real services to the civilisation of its country, and of Europe in general. But simply because this government had no other principle than absolute power, and rested upon no other base, its decay was sudden and deserved. The essential deficiency of France under Louis XIV. was the want of institutions, of independent political bodies, subsisting by themselves, and capable of spontaneous action, and of offering resistance. The ancient French institutions, so far as they merited that appellation, no longer subsisted: Louis had succeeded in destroying them. He had no idea of endeavouring to replace them by modern institutions, for they would have annoyed him, and he was not at all disposed to court annoyance. The will and the action of central power are what appear in fullest force at that epoch. The government of Louis XIV. was great, brilliant, and most potent, but without roots. Free institutions are not only the guarantees of wisdom and justice, but also of the durability of governments. There is no system which can have a prolonged existence otherwise than by means of institutions. Wherever absolute power has stood the shocks of time, it has rested upon veritable institutions, sometimes upon the division of society into casts distinctly separated, and at other times upon a system of religious institutions. {238} Under the reign of Louis XIV., power as well as liberty lacked the essential safeguard of institutions. There was nothing in France at that epoch to guarantee either the country against the