The Revolutionary doctrines of the passing age had stimulated France to over-exertion; her leaders were discredited, her people exhausted. The same agitation had stupefied the Italians; but whatever their political disintegration may have been, the Roman chair and throne retained its moral influence as the bond and mainspring of society throughout the whole peninsula; and now the successor of St. Peter was humbled to the dust, willing to escape with the mere semblance of either secular or ecclesiastical independence. It was an exceptional moment, a vacillating, retrogressive hour in the history of Austria, of France, and of Italy. The exceptional man, the vigorous citizen of a new political epoch, the inspired strategist of a new military epoch, the unscrupulous doubter of a new religious epoch--this typical personage was at hand to take advantage of the situation; and he did so, hastening the disintegrating processes already at work, seizing every advantage revealed by the crumbling of old systems, and reaping the harvest of French heedlessness. The opportunity gave the man his chance, but the chance once seized, the man enlarged his sphere with each successive year. This he did by means which were as remarkable as the personage who devised them--and remarkable, too, not for their negative, but for their constructive quality. Broadly stated, the Revolution utterly expunged all the governmental and social guarantees of the preceding monarchy, destroying not merely the absolute power of one man with its sanction of divine right, but all the checks upon it to be found either in the ancient traditions of the people or in their ancient institution of parliaments. It will be clear to the careful student of the Revolutionary governments that while there was a gradual clarifying of opinion antecedent to the Consulate, and a vague longing for guarantees of individual rights higher than the acts of any assembly, however representative it claimed to be, nevertheless great ideas, great conceptions, great outlines, had all remained in their inchoate state, and that of the several succeeding constitutions each had been more worthless than the one before. Almost any kind of a constitution will serve an enlightened nation which has confirmed political habits, if it chooses to support a fundamental law not hostile to them; and none, however ingenious, can stand before recalcitrant populations. The Revolutionary constitutions of France, excepting perhaps that of 1791, were alike feeble; and in the stress applied to the one democratic land of Europe by her dynastic enemies all around, they were not worth the paper and ink used to record them. Under each had developed a pure despotism of one kind or another, on the plea that in war there must be a single head, either an executive committee or an executive man. These persons or person had, on pleas of necessity or expediency, gradually arrogated to the executive all