Is it a question of preservation, of reproduction, of development in that kind of slow and insensible growth which people have like vast vegetables?  Is it a question of keeping in harmony with the European balance of preserving its laws and manners; of maintaining its traditions, perpetuating opinions and worship, of guaranteeing properties and right conduct, of preventing troubles, agitation, factions?  The monarchy is evidently more proper for this than any other state of society.  It protects in lower classes that security which it desires for its own elevated condition.  It is order in essence and selfishness:  order is its life—­tradition its dogma, the nation is its heritage, religion its ally, aristocracies are its barrier against the invasions of the people.  It must preserve all this or perish.  It is the government of prudence, because it is also that of great responsibility.  An empire is the stake of a monarch—­the throne is everywhere a guarantee of immobility.  When we are placed on high we fear every shake, for we have but to lose or to fall.

When then a nation is placed in a sufficing territory, with settled laws, fixed interests, sacred creeds, its worship in full force, its social classes graduated, its administration organised, it is monarchical in spite of seas, rivers, or mountains.  It abdicates and empowers the monarchy to foresee, to will, to act for it.  It is the most perfect of governments for such functions.  It calls itself by the two names of society itself, unity and hereditary right.

IX.

If a people, on the contrary, is at one of those epochs when it is necessary to act with all the intensity of its strength in order to operate within and without one of those organic transformations which are as necessary to people as is a current to waves or explosion to compressed powers—­a republic is the obligatory and fated form of a nation at such a moment.

For a sudden, irresistible, convulsive action of the social body, the arm and will of all is needed; the people become a mob, and rush headlong to danger.  It can alone suffice to its own danger.  What other arm but that of the whole people could stir what it has to stir?—­displace what it has to displace?—­install what it desires to found?  The monarch would break his sceptre into fragments on it.  There must be a lever capable of raising thirty millions of wills—­this lever the nation alone possesses.  It is in itself the moving power, the fulcrum and the lever.

X.

We cannot ask of the law to act against the law, of tradition to act against tradition, of established order to act against established order.  It would be to require strength from weakness, life from suicide; and, besides, we should ask in vain of the monarchical power to accomplish these changes, in which very often all perish, and the king foremost.  Such a course would be the contradiction to the monarchy:  how could it attempt it?