"It is not from a feeling of sentimental devotion, nor from a nurse-like affection, transmitted from the swaddling-clothes of Henry IV. to the cradle of the young Henry, that I plead a cause where everything would again turn against me anew if it triumphed. I am not aiming at romance, or chivalry, or martyrdom; I do not believe in the right divine of royalty; but I do believe in the power of facts and of revolutions. I do not even invoke the Charter: I take my ideas from a higher source; I draw them from the sphere of philosophy of the period at which my life terminates: I propose the Duke of Bordeaux merely as a necessity of a purer kind than that which is now in question. [Sidenote: My speech continued.] "I know that, by passing over this child, it is intended to establish the principle of the sovereignty of the people: an absurdity of the old school, which proves that our veteran Democrats have advanced no further in political knowledge than our superannuated Royalists. There is no absolute sovereignty anywhere; liberty does not flow from political right, as was supposed in the eighteenth century; it is derived from natural right, so that it exists under all forms of government; and a monarchy may be free, nay, much more free than a republic: but this is neither the time nor the place to deliver a political lecture. "I shall content myself with observing that, when the people dispose of thrones, they often dispose also of their own liberty; I shall remark that the principle of an hereditary monarchy, however absurd it may at first appear, has been recognised, in practice, as preferable to that of an elective monarchy. The reasons for this are so obvious that I need not enlarge upon them. You choose one king to-day: who shall hinder you from choosing another to-morrow? The law, you say. The law? And it is you who make it! "There is still a simpler mode of treating the question: it is to say, we repudiate the Elder Branch of the Bourbons. And why? Because we are victorious; we have triumphed in a just and holy cause; we use a double right of conquest. "Very well: you proclaim the sovereignty of might. The take good care of this might; for if, in a few months, escapes from you, you will be in a bad position to complain. Such is human nature! The most enlightened and the purest minds do not always rise above success. Those minds were the first to invoke right in opposition to violence; they supported that right with all the superiority of their talent; and, at the very moment when the truth of what they said has been demonstrated by the most abominable abuse of force and by its signal overthrow, the conquerors recur to those arms they have broken! They will find them to be dangerous weapons, which will wound their own hands without serving their cause.