This _Annus Mirabilis_, as it may well be called, is at last over, and one cannot but feel glad at getting rid of a year which has been so pregnant with every sort of mischief. Revolutions, ruin, sickness, and death have ravaged the world publicly and privately; every species of folly and wickedness seems to have been let loose to riot on the earth. It would be easy to write a great deal of wise matter, but very little that is new, on these topics. If ever mankind is destined to learn by its own experience, to look at beginnings, middles, and endings, to see what comes of what, and to test the virtue, wisdom, and utility of plausible maxims and high-sounding phrases, this has been the time for mankind's going to school and studying the lessons put before it. We have seen such a stirring up of all the elements of society as nobody ever dreamt of; we have seen a general Saturnalia--ignorance, vanity, insolence, poverty, ambition, escaping from every kind of restraint, ranging over the world and turning it topsy-turvy as it pleased. Every theory and crotchet has had full swing, and powers and dominations have bowed their necks to the yoke and cowered under the misbegotten tyranny which has suddenly changed places with them. Democracy and philanthropy have never before (or hardly ever) had their own way without let or hindrance, _carte blanche_ to work out their own great and fancy designs. This time they leave behind them--and all Europe exhibits the result--a mass of ruin, terror, and despair. Nothing strikes one more than the poverty of invention as well as the egregious folly of the new patriots all over the world. They can think of nothing but overturning everything that exists, and of reconstructing the social and political machine by universal suffrage. To execute the most difficult task which the human mind can have set before it, the task which demands the highest qualities of knowledge, experience, and capacity, it is thought enough to invite masses of men with strong passions and prejudices, without even any of that practical knowledge which might serve, though inadequately, to enable them to play their part in this prodigious operation. Universal suffrage is to pick out the men fit to frame new Constitutions, and when the delegates thus chosen have been brought together--no matter how ignorant, how stupid, how in every way unfit they may be--they expect to be allowed to have their own absurd and ruinous way, and to break up at their caprice and pleasure all the ancient foundations, and tear down the landmarks of society; and this havoc, and ruin, and madness, are dignified with the fine names of constitutional reform. Nor can the excuse be urged that this inundation of wickedness and folly has been brought about by a resistance which stood out too long, and was at last swept away by the effects of its own obstinacy.