Or, if at the expiration of this national dictatorship, the nation, well governed and guided, found it dangerous or useless to re-establish the throne, what prevented it from saying, I now assume as a definitive government that which I assumed as a dictatorship: I proclaim the French republic as the only government befitting the excitement and energy of a regenerative epoch; for the republic is a dictatorship perpetuated and constituted by the people. What avails a throne? I remain erect: it is the attitude of a people in travail! In a word, the Constituent Assembly, whose light illumined the globe--whose audacity in two years transformed an empire, had but one fault, that of coming to a close. It should have perpetuated itself: it abdicated. A nation that abdicates after a reign of two years, and on heaps of ruins, bequeaths the sceptre to anarchy. The king _could_ reign no longer, the nation _would not_. Thus faction reigned, and the Revolution perished; not because it had gone too far, but because it had not been sufficiently bold. So true is it that the timidity of nations is not less disastrous than the weakness of kings; and that a people who knows not how to seize and guard all that which pertains to it, falls at once into tyranny and anarchy. The Assembly dared to do every thing save to reign: the reign of the Revolution was nought but a republic: and the Assembly left this name to factions, and this form to terror. Such was its fault--it expiated it: and the expiation is not yet ended for France. BOOK VIII. I.