English Parliament that was called after the restoration of the House of Stuart.  The comparison is unfair to the Parliament.  There had been a long and a bitter war between parties in England, and the Cavaliers remembered, because they were events of yesterday, the terrible series of defeats they had experienced, from Edgehill to Worcester.  Between the date of the Battle of Worcester and the date of the Restoration there were less than nine years.  The same generation that saw Charles I. beheaded saw Charles II. enter Whitehall.  England had changed but little in the twenty years that elapsed between the meeting of the Long Parliament and the dissolution of the Convention Parliament.  Very different was it in France.  There parties had had no fighting in the field, save in Brittany and the Vendee.  There the change had been as complete as if it had been half a century in the making.  Twenty-three years had passed away since the fall of the monarchy, when the Impracticable Chamber met, to legislate for a new France in the spirit of the worst period of the reigns of the worst Bourbons.  These ultra-royalists would have had their way, and the massacres of the Protestants would have been accompanied or followed by the destruction of all parties save the victors, but for the existence of circumstances which it is even now painful for Frenchmen to think of.  The Allies occupied the country, and their influence was thrown in behalf of moderate counsels.  The good-nature of Louis XVIII. was supported by the sound common-sense of Wellington, and by the humanity of Alexander; and so but few persons were punished for political offences.  The conduct of the Chamber showed that the Deputies had no just conception of the nature either of a ministry or of an opposition.  So it was, though with less violence, throughout the period known as the Restoration; and the Polignac movement of 1830, which led to the fall of the elder Bourbons, was a coup d’etat, the object being the destruction of the Charter.  In Louis Philippe’s reign, there were facts upon facts that establish the proposition that no French party then clearly comprehended the character of a political opposition; and it was the attempt of M. Guizot to prevent even the discussion of the reform question that was the occasion, though not the cause, of the Revolution of 1848.  No sooner had the Republic been established than the Royalists began to conspire against its existence, while the Republicans themselves were far from being united, the Reds hating the Blues quite as intensely as they hated the Whites, or old Royalists; and beyond even the Reds were large numbers of men who, for the lack of a more definite name, have been called Socialists, who wanted something as vehemently as Brutus desired his purposes, but who would probably have been much puzzled to say what that something was, had the question been put to them by the agent of a power willing and able to gratify their wish.