To the above cause may also be traced the temporary reconciliation of the different factions which it was one of the main objects of NAPOLEON's celebrated _Champ de Mai_ to establish. This Convocation of the Popular Representatives, which had in a measure been forced upon the Emperor by the political vantage ground the people had gained during even the short constitutional reign of LOUIS XVIII., and of which they had begun to feel the benefit, did not in any degree fulfil the expectations of its projector. The stern Republicans were dissatisfied with the retention of a Chamber of Peers, which, in the late reign, they had regarded as an English importation; and the Royalists were no less disgusted with the materials out of which such a Chamber had been constructed; while both parties felt it to be a mere semblance of a constitutional body, destined to be composed of the willing slaves of the despot, his ready instruments for counteracting and paralysing the effects of any violent ebullition of the popular will. When it is considered that an overwhelming majority of the members of the new Chamber of Deputies were men of avowed Republican principles, and that in their very first sittings, they evinced by the tone of their debates, and by the tenor of their measures, a determination to uphold the authority vested in them by the people, and to make even the military power of the Emperor subservient to their views of Popular Government; when, also, it is considered that the two predominant Parties in the State, the Republicans and the Royalists, relied upon, and awaited but, the issue of events, for the ultimate success and realisation of their respective principles: it need not excite surprise that NAPOLEON, on quitting the capital to take the Field, should have appeared to feel that he left behind him a power even more dangerous to the stability of his authority, and more destructive of his ambitious projects, than that which he was going personally to confront. He naturally calculated largely upon the enthusiasm of his troops and their devotion to his cause: but he must have entertained serious doubts as to whether this spirit was shared by the great majority of the nation; and must have foreseen that it would only be by means of a successful result of the approaching contest, that he could possibly avert the dangers to which his sovereignty was exposed, as much by the machinations of political opponents at home, as by the combinations of hostile forces abroad. He was now made painfully sensible of the vast change which the result of all his former Wars, the restoration of the legitimate Monarch, and the newly chartered Liberty of the Subject, had gradually wrought in the political feelings and sentiments of the Nation.