"Besides, if the Legitimacy is a considerable force, the right of election is also a preponderating power, even when it is only fictitious, especially in this country where men live only on vanity: the French passion for equality is flattered by the right of election. "Louis-Philippe's Government abandons itself to a double excess of arbitrariness and obsequiousness which the Government of Charles X. had never dreamt of. This excess is endured; and why? Because the people more easily endure the tyranny of a government which they have created than the lawful strictness of the institutions which are not their work. "Forty years of storms have shattered the strongest souls: apathy is great, egoism almost general; men shrivel up to escape danger, to keep what they possess, to make shift to live in peace. After a revolution, there remain also cankered men who communicate their contamination to everything even as, after a battle, there remain corpses which pollute the air. If, by a mere wish, Henry V. could be transported to the Tuileries without trouble, without a shock, without compromising the slightest interest, we should be very near a restoration; but, in order to effect it, if one had to spend as much as one sleepless night, the chances would decrease. "The results of the Days of July have not turned to the profit of the people, nor to the honour of the army, nor to the advantage of literature, art, commerce or industry. The State has fallen a prey to the professional ministerialists and to the class which sees the country in its stew-pot, public affairs in its domestic economy. It is difficult, Madame, for you at your distance to know what is here called the _juste-milieu_: Your Royal Highness must imagine a complete absence of elevation of soul, of nobility of heart, of dignity of character; you must picture to yourself people swelled up with their importance, bewitched with their employs, doting on their money, determined to die for their pensions: nothing will part them from those; it is a question of life or death to them; they are wedded to them as were the Gauls to their swords, the knights to the Oriflamme, the Huguenots to the white plume of Henry IV., the soldiers of Napoleon to the tricolour; they will die only when they are exhausted of oaths to every form of government, after shedding the last drop of those oaths on their last place. These eunuchs of the sham Legitimacy dogmatize about independence while having the citizens bludgeoned in the streets and the writers crowded into prison; they strike up songs of triumph while evacuating Belgium at the bidding of an English minister and, soon after, Ancona by order of an Austrian corporal. Between the threshold of Sainte-Pélagie and the doors of the Cabinets of