and responsible victim, the real culprit, monarchy, emerging from
the darkness, and he retained in his soul a respectful terror of
this immense justice of the people which is almost as impersonal as
the justice of God. The traces which the revolution left upon him
were prodigious, and his memory was a living imprint of these great
years, minute by minute. One day, in the presence of a witness whose
statements we cannot doubt, he corrected from memory the entire letter
A in the list of the Constituent Assembly.
Louis Philippe was an open-air king; during his reign the press was
free, debates were free, conscience and speech were free. The Laws
of September had a clear track. Though he knew the corrosive power
of light upon privileges, he left his throne exposed to the light,
and history will give him credit for this honorable behavior. Louis
Philippe, like all historic men who have quitted the stage, is at the
present day being tried by the human conscience, but this trial has not
yet gone through its first stage. The hour when history speaks with its
venerable and free accent has not yet arrived for him; the moment has
not yet come for the final judgment. Even the stern and illustrious
historian, Louis Blanc, has recently toned down his first verdict.
Louis Philippe was elected by the two hundred and twenty-one deputies
in 1830, that is to say, by a semi-Parliament and a semi-revolution;
and, in any case, we cannot judge him here philosophically, without
making some reservations in the name of the absolute democratic
principle. In the eyes of the absolute, everything is usurpation which
is outside of these two rights,--first, the right of man and in the
next place the right of the people; but what we are able to say at
present is, that in whatever way we may regard him, Louis Philippe,
taken by himself, and looked at from the stand-point of human goodness,
will remain, to employ the old language of old history, one of the
best princes that ever sat on a throne. What has he against him? This
throne; take the king away from Louis Philippe and the man remains.
This man is good, at times so good as to be admirable. Often in the
midst of the gravest cares, after a day's struggle, after the whole
diplomacy of the Continent, he returned to his apartments at night;
and then, though exhausted by fatigue and want of sleep, what did he?
He would take up a list of sentences and spend the night in revising
a criminal trial, considering that it was something to hold his own
against Europe, but even greater to tear a culprit from the hands of
the executioner. He obstinately resisted his keeper of the seals, and
disputed the scaffold inch by inch with his attorney-generals, those
"chatterers of the law," as he called them. At times piles of sentences
covered his table, and he examined them all, and felt an agony at
the thought of abandoning these wretched condemned heads. One day he
said to the witness whom we just now quoted, "I gained seven of them
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