"We have had the courage and the honour to wage a dangerous war in presence of the liberty of the press, and it was the first time that this noble spectacle was given to the monarchy. We soon repented of our honesty. We had set the newspapers at naught when they could injure only the success of our soldiers and our captains; it became necessary to reduce them to servitude when they dared to speak of the clerks and ministers.... "If those who administer the State seem completely ignorant of the genius of France in serious matters, they are no less foreign to it in those graceful and ornamental matters which are mingled with and beautify the life of civilized nations. "The bounties which the Legitimate Government lavishes upon the arts surpass the aids awarded to them by the Usurping Government; but how are they dispensed? Vowed by nature and taste to oblivion, the distributors of those bounties seem to have an antipathy to renown; so invincible is their obscurity that, when they approach lights, they make them turn pale; one would say that they pour money on the arts to extinguish them, as on our liberties to stifle them...[268] "If even the narrow mechanism within which France is pinched resembled those finished models which one examines through the magnifying-glass in the collector's cabinet, the delicacy of that curiosity might interest one for a moment; but not at all: it is a small thing badly constructed. "We have said that the system followed nowadays by the administration offends against the genius of France: we will try to prove that it also disregards the spirit of our institutions. "The Monarchy has been restored in France without effort, because it has the strength of our whole history, because the crown is worn by a family which has almost seen the nation born, which has formed it, civilized it, which has given it all its liberties, which has made it immortal; but time has reduced that monarchy to its realities. The age of fictions in politics is past: one can no longer have a government of adoration, of cult and of mystery; each one knows his rights; nothing is possible without the limits of reason; and, down to favour, the last illusion of absolute monarchies, everything is weighed, everything valued to-day. "Let us make no mistake; a new era is commencing for the nations; will it be a happier one? Providence knows. As for us, it is given to us only to prepare ourselves for the exigencies of the future. Let us not imagine that we can go back: our only safety lies in the Charter. "The Constitutional Monarchy was not born among us of a written system, even though it has a printed Code; it is the daughter of time and of events, like the Old Monarchy of our fathers.