So his rigid rule tended to the elevation of France; absolutism proved necessary in his day, and under his circumstances.  When arraigned at the bar of posterity, he claims, like Napoleon, to be judged for his services, and not for his defects of character.  These defects will forever make him odious in spite of his services.  I hardly know a more repulsive benefactor.  He was vain, cold, heartless, rigid, and proud.  He had no amiable weakness.  His smile was a dagger, and his friendship was a snare.  He was a hypocrite and a tyrant.  He had no pity on a fallen foe; and even when bending under the infirmities of age, and in the near prospect of death, his inexorable temper was never for a moment subdued.  The execution of Cinq-Mars and De Thou took place when he had one foot in his grave.  He deceived everybody, sent his spies into the bosom of families, and made expediency the law of his public life.

But it is nothing to the philosophic student of history that he built the Palais Royal, or squandered riches with Roman prodigality, or rewarded players, or enriched Marion Delorme, or clad himself in mail before La Rochelle, or persecuted his early friends, or robbed the monasteries, or made a spy of Father Joseph, or exiled the Queen-mother, or kept the King in bondage, or sent his enemies to the scaffold:  these things are all against him, and make him appear in a repulsive light.  But if he brought order out of confusion, and gave a blow to feudalism, and destroyed anarchies, and promoted law, and developed the resources of his country, making that country formidable and honorable, and constructed a vast machinery of government by which France was kept together for a century, and would have fallen to pieces without it,—­then there is another way to survey this bad man; and we view him not only as a great statesman and ruler, but as an instrument of Providence, raised up as a terror to evil-doers.  We may hate absolutism, but must at the same time remember that there are no settled principles of government, any more than of political economy.  That is the best government which is best adapted to the exigency of that human society which at the time it serves.  Republicanism would not do in China, any more than despotism in New England.  Bad men, somehow or other, must be coerced and punished.  The more prevalent is depravity, so much the more necessary is despotic vigor:  it will be so to the end of time.  It is all nonsense to dream of liberty with a substratum of folly and vice.  Unless evils can be remedied by the public itself, giving power to the laws which the people create, then physical force, hard and cold tyranny, must inevitably take the place.  No country will long endure anarchy; and then the hardest characters may prove the greatest benefactors.

It is on this principle that I am reconciled to the occasional rule of despots.  And when I see a bad man, like Richelieu, grasping power to be used for the good of a nation, I have faith to believe it to be ordered wisely.  When men are good and honest and brave, we shall have Washingtons; when they are selfish and lawless, God will send Richelieus and Napoleons, if He has good things in store for the future, even as He sends Neros and Diocletians when a nation is doomed to destruction by incurable rottenness.