Of those physical means with which you take care to surround yourself, it is opinion which creates, assembles, retains around you, and directs these means. These soldiers, who appear to us, and who are in effect at all times passive and unreflecting agents, these soldiers are men; they have moral faculties, sympathy, sensibility, and a conscience which may awake on a sudden. Opinion has the same empire over them as over the rest of their fellow creatures, and no prescription attacks its empire. See it traversing the French troops in 1789, transforming into citizens men collected from all parts, not only of France but of the world; reanimating minds paralysed by discipline, enervated by debauchery; causing notions of liberty to penetrate amongst them like a prejudice, and breaking, by this new prejudice, the bonds which so many ancient prejudices and rooted habits had interwoven. See afterwards opinion, rapid and changeable, sometimes separating our warriors from their chiefs, sometimes reassembling them around them, rendering them by turns rebels or faithful subjects, sceptics or enthu siasts. See in England, in another sense, the republicans, after the death of Cromwell, concentrating all the forces in their own hands, disposing of the army, the treasure, the civil authorities, the Parliament, and the Courts of Judicature. Dumb opinion only was. against them, that wished to repose itself in royalty. Suddenly all their means are dissolved; every thing totters, every thing falls.

Doubtless a military government is a great scourge; but what are the means to prevent the fear of it? To reinforce the civil authority. Now, to reinforce the civil authority, what is necessary? To rest it upon justice; that is, on liberty. If you rest it upon force, you come back to a military government; for force and the sword are one and the same thing. We make the citizens tremble before us, and we tremble before the Janisaries, in our turn.

I am coming to the last grievance of Ministers, to their invisible associations, to those directing committees who have arrogated to themselves so terrible a power over elections.

If these associations existed, the fault of them would be attributable to authority. Private citizens, who have not, like the privileged orders of former times, the dazzling of rank, the support of a caste, or the monopoly of fortune, would not exercise over the mass of a nation the power attributed to them, if that nation did not recognise their interests to be one. Why do these two interests agree? It is because authority has created factious interests in opposition to those of the people. Authority wants deputies who will consent to all its demands. Is it astonishing that the citizens do not return the candidates proposed by authority? It requires of its functionaries a complete abnegation of principles, opinions, and conscience. Is it not natural that electors should listen to

those who recommend them not to choose any functionary? With what face will the Prefects henceforth recommend the choosing this species, after the dismissal of Messrs. Camille-Jordan and RoyerCollard, of MM. Girardin and St. Aignan? What need is there of directing committees, of secret associations, to inculcate such simple ideas? The acts of the Ministry are sufficient. This Ministry pleads eloquently agamst itself, but since committees and associations are on this topic, I shall put a question to Ministers. One: of them has spoken to us of the brethren at Manchester. It is true that all the hearers smiled, the others fill the papers they patronise with denunciations against a liberal centre, allied to the Radicals, to the Carbonari, the Teutonians, which unites all the. branches of the same system, and which is ready to invade Europe. Would there not, on the contrary, be a permanent and active directing committee in another sense? The associations, about which the Ministers make so great a noise, suppose a labor, a connexion, a secresy, which surround their creation and their existence with numberless obstacles; and it is at least a preliminary difficulty to conquer, for the unprivileged multitude. But have not

the feudal institutions bequeathed to us an asssociation which unites all these characters? an association which has an interest separate from the rest of the human race; whose colors, rallying words, and meetings, are authorised; which spreads itself from one end of Europe to the other; whose members in each country are much more the countrymen of their caste, than those of their fellow citizens; whose directing committee has its seat around thrones, in eminent functions, in ministerial cabinets? There is found precisely every thing that is invented to accuse of chimerical conspiracies individuals or classes isolated in their positions changeable in their nature, not forming a body because admission is given to all, having consequently no exclusive interest, no natural union, no centre or means of action always existing, without being obliged to create them, or to agree upon them. If I wished to seek for conspiracies I should much sooner look for them, I confess, in the directing committees of aristocracy; and I should find numerous symptoms of an uninterrupted conspiracy against the constitutional regime, in that habitual intercourse with foreign powers, in those denunciations which are addressed to them, in those declamations made in concert with them against the French institutions, in those secret notes, tending to analyse our divisions to them and to submit our affairs to them; the repeated clamors against all our election laws, successively, would appear to me to be one of the branches of this conspiracy; the assassination of the deputies, defenders of the Charter, one of its means; and the project pompously announced, of an European congress, which is to impose upon all nations the preservation of

the oligarchy, would be in my eyes the fulfilment and the termination.

To return to the elections and to the committees which it is said direct them, it is, I repeat, the Ministry which gives to the committee all its power. On this point, as well as on so many others, they follow the route exactly opposite to the end they are desirous of attaining. When chance furnishes them with the means of influence they reject it at pleasure. I could cite for example many departments, whose Prefects, men of intelligence, moderate, clever, and tolerably ministerial, had gained the confi dence of their district. These Prefects would probably have acted in the elections. What did the Ministry do? Hastened to displace them, in order to replace them by unknown persons, who might be perfectly worthy, but who will be found evidently without standing, without connexions, without means at the ensuing elections, by which they will be surprised almost imme diately on their arrival. It is because the Ministry does not guide itself according to its interest, it is domineered over by a faction whose ambition and hatred must be satiated by turns. Thus, all the dangers at which it is alarmed, are the result of its own errors. Will it still persist in a route which has already been so fatal to it? Will it persist in seeking its safety and ours in a useless complaisance towards an insatiable faction, in vexations always increasing and still inefficacious, in those laws of exception which now-a-days wound the nation without alarming it? But our Ministers have enjoyed the laws of exception six months; and by their confession and complaints, it does not appear that these laws have restored tranquillity to France. It depends upon them indeed to arrest every body-but they have had this power for six months; and for six months, if they are to be credited on the subject, every body is conspiring. They impose silence on the Journals, but the most alarming and the least founded reports are in circulation. France fears every thing, because it is told nothing; and as the price of having allowed nothing to be said, they are obliged to refute what has not been said.' Would the

See the articles in the Moniteur and the Journal de Paris, against the reports which are circulating. Articles which have the inconvenience of giving information of these reports to those who have not heard them. The Journal de Paris innocently admits," that all its columns would be inadequate if it were every day necessary to refute the ridiculous and absurd reports which malevolence is incessantly inventing and hawking about." (No. of 5th Sept., 1820.) Another paper also, which speaks more directly to the fact, demands that silence may be imposed upon the impostures, and that the reports spread by the Buonapartist or Jacobin faction may be stopped. (4th Sept.) Is it not entertaining to see the party which so vigorously defended

Ministers at length have recourse to these great measures, to these extreme means, to which during a celebrated discussion, an orator less skilful than the generality of them made an imprudent allusion, and of which the Journals which the Ministry does not think it right to repress or contradict, repeat the absurd threat?

I do not enquire what these great measures will be; the incarceration or the death of some individuals, their transportation or their interdiction, the destruction or suspension of the fundamental compact, an attack against men or things, it is of little consequence to us; but what is of consequence to us is, that all this is possible, that all this would be inefficacious, that all this would be, disastrous, even for the authors of these criminal attempts.

I have described the moral disposition of the nation you govern. I have described that disposition agreeably to what you yourselves say of it. Do you think that an act of vigor, as those you persecute call it, would suddenly change this disposition, You deceive yourselves, revolutionary recollections lead you astray. When the question was the leading a people who had not yet received the severe education of misfortune, a people intoxicated with a recent victory over despotism, and restless at the duration of that victory, a people who, led to liberty by the revolution, did not, in their ignorance, sufficiently distinguish revolution from liberty; fiery demagogues might avail themselves of their little information, and draw from them a blind sentiment in favor of the violation of the laws; but now every Frenchman knows the consequences of these criminal resources which, constituting the legal authorities into revolt against the law itself, prevent all return to justice and lawful authority. The Citizens know that they form a part of each other, they see the security of each in the security of the whole, they know that order established, consecrated and sanctioned by oaths, cannot be broken for a day nor an hour; when once broken it is never re-established. The Legislative Assembly never returned to it after the 10th August, nor the Convention after the 31st May, nor the councils of the Republic after "Fructidor." It was in vain they proclaimed that they and the country were saved; they perished, and the country had perished with them, if nations were as perishable as power.

In fact, what is there left to a people after their constitution has been violated? Where is security? Where is confidence? Where the anchor of safety? Nothing but a spirit of usurpation is found in those who govern; a spirit which, pursuing them like remorse, fright ens and drives them out of their course. Tyranny hovers over the heads of the governed. Does power wish to pronounce consoling the press in 1817, seeking to destroy even the very liberty of speech in 1820?

words, to protest its future respect for a constitution which it has torn to pieces, to promise it will no more attempt it? Where is the guarantee that this fresh homage is not a fresh derision? Do the people dare, even in a partial interest, without reference/ to great political questions, invoke that constitution which has been trampled under foot? The very name of constitution seems a hostility. On all sides a habit of illegal means is contracted. It forms the afterthought of the Government, it nourishes the spirit of the factious. With perfidious joy they contemplate power taken in its own trammels, marching from convulsion to convulsion, from violence to violence, revolting justice, preparing excuses in despair, and destined to suffer the fate of those whom iniquity directs and hatred surrounds.

Such certainly will not be the destiny to which an enlightened Monarch will condemn France. Ministers will not dare to advise him to it; and if they did, they would neither find in the Prince an approver, nor in the great body of the State, instruments.

And who then will take these great measures, and on what force will they rely for their execution? On the ordinances? Do we 'not remember the ordinances of 1815? Has opinion ceased a single moment, for these three years, to call for their revocation? The ordinances of 1815 have done much harm. They would have done still more had not their instigators been the old tools of demagogism and slavery, so that the constitutional monarchy was enabled to disown them. At the present moment the mischief that such ordinances would occasion, would be without remedy.

Will they invoke the support of the Chamber of Peers? I conceive in a faction what nothing makes recede, nothing enlightens; that disposition to parodise the acts of a tyranny whose chief it detested, and whose system it approved; but if this faction has its 'forgetfulness, the nation has its recollections. It knows that the first Senatus-Consulte was an order for the transportation of a hundred and thirty Citizens, and it has not forgotten what the Senatus-Consultes cost her afterwards.

All authority which exceeds its bounds ceases to be legitimate; and this fundamental principle of natural, political, and civil law is corroborated by the Charter. The Charter points out the case in which the assembling of the Chamber of Peers would be illicit : the simple want of royal convocation renders it so; and what the Chamber of Peers would do, trampling under foot the laws and the Charter-the Chamber of Peers proscribing individuals who have the same guarantees, and are protected by the same safeguards as the first Peer in France-the Chamber of Peers, suppressing or suspending political bodies, which emanate from the same source as themselves, which exist by the same title-what