De Maistre traces the probable course of the counter-revolution. He sagaciously demonstrates the unreasonableness of the supposition that it can only be the outcome of the will of the people. Very possibly a minority of four or five persons, he says, will give France a king. Letters from Paris will announce to the provinces that the country has a king, and the provinces will shout: _Vive le roi!_ With his obstinate faith in providence he foretells the restoration (even in its details) at a time when all hopes of such an event seemed indeed to be built upon sand, and in process of so doing exhibits a fascinating combination of excessive enthusiasm for the pre-revolutionary conditions with a practical political sagacity which avoids any overstraining of principle that would make the restoration of these conditions impossible. On the delicate question, whether or not the restoration of the monarchy will entail the return of the national property to its original owners, he expresses himself with a caution which is strikingly at variance with the generally confident, defiant tone of the book. He explains that a revolutionary government is, by its very nature, an unsteady government. Under it nothing is certain. As the ownership of national property is not yet, in the opinion of the general public, free from the reproach originally attaching to it, a government which considered itself in no way debarred from undoing what it had done would in all probability lay hands on this property as soon as it could. "But under a steady, permanent government everything is permanent, so that even for the acquirers of national property it is important that the monarchy should be restored; they will then know what they have to rely upon." In other words, he has at least so much regard for actual circumstances as to acknowledge that it will not be possible to reign after the Revolution in exactly the same manner as before it. His fundamental political doctrine is that the state is an organism, that as an organism it possesses real unity, and lives its life by virtue of a far-off past, from which it refreshes itself as from a perennial source, and by virtue of an inward, secret fountain of life. It is not the outcome of discussion and arrangement, but of an unfathomable mystery. Hence a written constitution signifies nothing. It is the soul of the nation which gives the nation unity and permanence, and this soul is the love of the nation for itself and its national memories. France is not thirty millions of human beings living between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, but a thousand millions who have lived there. Our country is nought else but the unity of those who live, those who have lived, and those who will live in the days to come on the same fragment of the earth's surface. The fact that one family is the symbol of the continued existence of this nation leads De Maistre to monarchy.