"As I predicted in my last speech in the tribune of the Peers, the Monarchy of July is in an absolute condition of glory or of laws of exception; it lives by the press, and the press is killing it; devoid of glory, it will be devoured by liberty; if it attack that liberty, it will perish. It would be a fine thing if, after driving out three Kings with barricades, on behalf of the liberty of the press, we were to be seen erecting new barricades against that liberty! And yet, what is to be done? Will the redoubled action of the tribunals and the laws suffice to restrain the writers? A new government is a child that can walk only in leading-strings. Are we to put back the nation into swaddling-clothes? Will that terrible nursling, which has sucked blood in the arms of victory at so many bivouacs, not burst its bandages? There was but one old stock, deeply rooted in the past, which could have withstood with impunity the gales blowing from the liberty of the press. . . . . . . . . . . . "To listen to the declamations of the moment, it seems that the exiles of Edinburgh are the poorest fellows living and that they are nowhere missed. The present, to-day, lacks nothing but the past: a small thing! As though the centuries did not make use of each other as pedestals, and as though the last comer could support itself in mid-air!... It is useless for our vanity to take offense at memories, to erase the fleurs-de-lys, to proscribe names and persons: that family, the heir of a thousand years, has left an immense void by its withdrawal; one feels it everywhere. Those individuals, so paltry in our eyes, have shaken Europe in their fall. To however small a degree events produce their natural effects and bring about their rigorous consequences, Charles X., in abdicating, will have made all those Gothic kings, the grand vassals of the past under the suzerainty of the Capets, abdicate with him. . . . . . . . . . . . "We are marching towards a general revolution. If the transformation which is being effected follows its inclination and meets with no obstacles, if popular reason continues its progressive development, if the education of the middle classes suffers no interruption, the nations will become levelled in a uniform liberty; if that transformation is stayed, the nations will become levelled in a uniform despotism. This despotism will not last long, because of the advanced age of intelligence, but it will be harsh, and a long social dissolution will follow it. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [Sidenote: Extracts from my pamphlet.] "Preoccupied as I am with these ideas, it is clear why I was; bound, as an individual, to remain true to what seemed to me; the best safeguard of the public liberties, the least perilous road by which to attain the complement of those liberties.