All this was in the order of nature. When every principle of authority and civil discipline, when every principle which enables some men to command, and disposes others to obey, was extirpated from the mind by atrocious theories, and still more atrocious examples; when every old institution was trampled down with contumely, and every new institution covered in its cradle with blood; when the principle of property itself, the sheet-anchor of society, was annihilated; when in the persons of the new possessors, whom the poverty of language obliges us to call proprietors, it was contaminated in its source by robbery and murder, and it became separated from that education and those manners, from that general presumption of superior knowledge and more scrupulous probity which form its only liberal titles to respect; when the people were taught to despise every thing old, and compelled to detest every thing new, there remained only one principle strong enough to hold society together, a principle utterly incompatible, indeed, with liberty and unfriendly to civilization itself, a tyrannical and barbarous principle; but in that miserable condition of human affairs, a refuge from still more intolerable evils. I mean the principle of military power which gains strength from that confusion and bloodshed in which all the other elements of society are dissolved, and which, in these terrible extremities, is the cement that preserves it from total destruction. Under such circumstances, Bonaparte usurped the supreme power in France. I say _usurped_, because an illegal assumption of power is a usurpation. But usurpation, in its strongest moral sense, is scarcely applicable to a period of lawless and savage anarchy. The guilt of military usurpation, in truth, belongs to the author of those confusions which sooner or later give birth to such a usurpation. Thus, to use the words of the historian: “By recent as well as all ancient example, it became evident that illegal violence, with whatever pretences it may be covered, and whatever object it may pursue, must inevitably end at last in the arbitrary and despotic government of a single person.” But though the government of Bonaparte has silenced the revolutionary factions, it has not and it can not have extinguished them. No human power could re-impress upon the minds of men all those sentiments and opinions which the sophistry and anarchy of fourteen years had obliterated. A faction must exist which breathes the spirit of the code now before you.