Coming to high considerations and announcing the transformation of the world, I replied to opponents who had said to me, "What! we might be Republicans some day? Senseless chatter! Who dreams of a republic nowadays?" etc. etc.: "Attached by reason to the monarchical order of things," I rejoined, "I regard constitutional monarchy as the best possible government at this epoch of society. "But, if they want to reduce everything to personal interests, if they suppose that, for myself, I think I might have everything to fear in a Republican State, they are mistaken. "Would it treat me worse than the Monarchy has treated me? Twice or three times have I been stripped bare for or by the Monarchy: did the Empire, which would have done everything for me had I been willing, disown me more rudely? I abhor servitude; liberty pleases my natural independence; I prefer that liberty in the monarchical order, but I can conceive it in the popular order of things. Who has less to fear from the future than I? I have that which no revolution can take from me: without place, honours, or fortune, any government which would not be stupid enough to disdain public opinion would be obliged to reckon me for something. Popular governments, above all, are composed of individual existences and make for themselves a general value out of the particular value of every citizen. I shall always be certain of the esteem of the public, because I shall never do anything to lose it, and I should perhaps find more justice among my enemies than among my pretended friends. "Therefore, on computation, I should have no fear of republics, as I should have no antipathy to liberty; I am not a king; I await no crown; it is not my own cause that I plead. "I have said under another ministry, and speaking of that ministry, that one morning we should go to the window to see the Monarchy pass. "I say to the actual ministers: "'If you continue to do as you are doing, the whole revolution might, within a given time, reduce itself to _a new edition of the Charter in which they would content themselves with changing only two or three words._[289]" I have underlined these last phrases to attract the reader's eyes to that striking prediction. Even to-day, when opinions are in full flight, when every man utters at random all that passes through his brain, those Republican ideas expressed by a Royalist during the Restoration still sound daring. In point of the future, the pretended progressive minds have no initiative in anything.