He hates the priesthood as a lying and mischievous institution, but is ready, so soon as they divest themselves of their malignity and buffoonery, to welcome them with open arms to a nobler vocation, a new but honest profession, and to urge men to pardon their past offenses, conforming in this, as in other acts, to a spirit of universal tolerance. Though not suffering them as priests, he pities and yearns towards them as men; for priests he regards as the assassins of the soul, and in that light esteems them more culpable than those who slay the body. He has passed his life in the hope of seeing the populations ennobled, and to the extent of his power, has championed always and everywhere their rights, but sadly confesses that he has lived partly in a false hope; for more than one nation, raised to freedom and light by Providence, has paltered again with despotism, whose rulers become perhaps even more unjust and arbitrary than the patrician. Still, this man never despairs of the ultimate amelioration of mankind, albeit he is deeply grieved at the slowness of its coming. He regards as the worst enemies of the liberty of the people those democratic _doctrinnaires_ who have preached and still preach revolution, not as a terrible remedy, a stern Nemesis, but as a trade carried on for their own advancement He believes that these same mercenaries of liberty have ruined many republics, and brought dishonor upon the republican system. Of this there is a striking example in the great and glorious French Republic of 1789, which is held up at the present day as a scarecrow by despots and their crew against those who maintain the excellence of the popular system. He defines a perfect republic to be a government of honest and virtuous people by honesty and virtue, and illustrates his definition by pointing to the downfall of all republics when people have eschewed virtue and turned away towards vice. But he does not believe in a republican government composed of five hundred governors. He considers that the liberty of a nation consists in the people choosing their own government, and that this government should be dictatorial or presidential; that is to say, directed by one man alone. To such an institution the greatest people in the world owed their greatness. But woe be to those who, instead of a Cincinnatus, elect a Cæsar! The Dictatorship should be limited to a fixed period, and prolonged only in extraordinary cases, like that in the authority of Abraham Lincoln in the late war of the United States. It must be guarded by popular rights and public opinion from becoming either excessive or hereditary.