The legs we can generally manage, but it would have been inconvenient to be continually clipping the wings, not to mention possible damage to the stock. For these and other comforts make us duly thankful! “MR. CASS. “My friend Louis Philippe--ah, I had forgotten: I should have said my late friend. “MR. CALHOUN. “The unfortunate are never the friends of the wise man. “MR. CASS. “I was about to say that the Count de Neuilly has often remarked to me that we were fortunate in having so conservative an element as ‘persons held to service or labor’ (I believe I do not venture beyond safe Constitutional ground) mingled in a just proportion with our otherwise too rapidly progressive institutions. There is no duty of a good statesman, he said, at once so difficult and so necessary as that of keeping steadily behind his age. But, however much satisfaction a sound politician who adheres to this theory may reap in the purity of his own conscience, he will find that the dust incident to such a position will sometimes so choke him as to prevent his giving an intelligible answer to the often perplexing questions of his constituents. Yet I know not whether in such exigencies a cough be not the safest, as it is the readiest reply. It is an oracle susceptible of any retrospective interpretation. “MR. CALHOUN. “A politician who renders himself intelligible has put a rope round his own neck, and it would be strange indeed if his opponents should be unable to find a suitable tree. The present Revolutionary Government of France has taken many long strides towards the edge of that precipice which overhangs social and political chaos, but none longer than in bringing Government face to face with the people. That government is the most stable which is the most complicated and the most expensive. Men admire most what they do not understand, and cling tightest to what they have paid or are paying most for. They love to see money spent liberally by other people, and have no idea that every time Uncle Sam unbuttons his pocket, he has previously put his hand into their own. I have great fears for France. The Provisional Government talks too much and too well,--above all things it talks too clearly. In that wild enthusiasm generated by the turmoil of great and sudden social changes, and by contact with the magnetism of excited masses of men, sentiments are often uttered, which, however striking and beautiful they might be if their application were restricted to the Utopias of poetry, are dangerous in their tendencies and results if once brought into contact with the realities of life. Despotisms profited more than the Catholic Church by shutting up Christ in the sepulchre of a dead language. A prudent and