It is often impossible, in these political inquiries, to find any proportion between the apparent force of any moral causes we may assign and their known operation.  We are therefore obliged to deliver up that operation to mere chance, or, more piously, (perhaps more rationally,) to the occasional interposition and irresistible hand of the Great Disposer.  We have seen states of considerable duration, which for ages have remained nearly as they have begun, and could hardly be said to ebb or flow.  Some appear to have spent their vigor at their commencement.  Some have blazed out in their glory a little before their extinction.  The meridian of some has been the most splendid.  Others, and they the greatest number, have fluctuated, and experienced at different periods of their existence a great variety of fortune.  At the very moment when some of them seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster, they have suddenly emerged.  They have begun a new course and opened a new reckoning, and even in the depths of their calamity and on the very ruins of their country have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness.  All this has happened without any apparent previous change in the general circumstances which had brought on their distress.  The death of a man at a critical juncture, his disgust, his retreat, his disgrace, have brought innumerable calamities on a whole nation.  A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.

Such, and often influenced by such causes, has commonly been the fate of monarchies of long duration.  They have their ebbs and their flows.  This has been eminently the fate of the monarchy of France.  There have been times in which no power has ever been brought so low.  Few have ever flourished in greater glory.  By turns elevated and depressed, that power had been, on the whole, rather on the increase; and it continued not only powerful, but formidable, to the hour of the total ruin of the monarchy.  This fall of the monarchy was far from being preceded by any exterior symptoms of decline.  The interior were not visible to every eye; and a thousand accidents might have prevented the operation of what the most clear-sighted were not able to discern nor the most provident to divine.  A very little time before its dreadful catastrophe, there was a kind of exterior splendor in the situation of the crown, which usually adds to government strength and authority at home.  The crown seemed then to have obtained some of the most splendid objects of state ambition.  None of the Continental powers of Europe were the enemies of France.  They were all either tacitly disposed to her or publicly connected with her; and in those who kept the most aloof there was little appearance of jealousy,—­of animosity there was no appearance at all.  The British nation, her great preponderating rival, she had humbled, to all appearance she had weakened, certainly had endangered, by cutting