There seem, indeed, to have been several mistakes in the political principles on which the war was entered into, as well as in the plans upon which it was conducted,—­some of them very fundamental, and not only visibly, but I may say palpably erroneous; and I think him to have less than the discernment of a very ordinary statesman, who could not foresee, from the very beginning, unpleasant consequences from those plans, though not the unparalleled disgraces and disasters which really did attend them:  for they were, both principles and measures, wholly new and out of the common course, without anything apparently very grand in the conception to justify this total departure from all rule.

For, in the first place, the united sovereigns very much injured their cause by admitting that they had nothing to do with the interior arrangements of France,—­in contradiction to the whole tenor of the public law of Europe, and to the correspondent practice of all its states, from the time we have any history of them.  In this particular, the two German courts seem to have as little consulted the publicists of Germany as their own true interests, and those of all the sovereigns of Germany and Europe.  This admission of a false principle in the law of nations brought them into an apparent contradiction, when they insisted on the reestablishment of the royal authority in France.  But this confused and contradictory proceeding gave rise to a practical error of worse consequence.  It was derived from one and the same root:  namely, that the person of the monarch of France was everything; and the monarchy, and the intermediate orders of the state, by which the monarchy was upheld, were nothing.  So that, if the united potentates had succeeded so far as to reestablish the authority of that king, and that he should be so ill-advised as to confirm all the confiscations, and to recognize as a lawful body and to class himself with that rabble of murderers, (and there wanted not persons who would so have advised him,) there was nothing in the principle or in the proceeding of the united powers to prevent such an arrangement.

An expedition to free a brother sovereign from prison was undoubtedly a generous and chivalrous undertaking.  But the spirit and generosity would not have been less, if the policy had been more profound and more comprehensive,—­that is, if it had taken in those considerations and those persons by whom, and, in some measure, for whom, monarchy exists.  This would become a bottom for a system of solid and permanent policy, and of operations conformable to that system.

The same fruitful error was the cause why nothing was done to impress the people of France (so far as we can at all consider the inhabitants of France as a people) with an idea that the government was ever to be really French, or indeed anything else than the nominal government of a monarch, a monarch absolute as over them, but whose sole support was to arise from foreign potentates, and who was to be kept on his throne by German forces,—­in short, that the king of France was to be a viceroy to the Emperor and the king of Prussia.