patriotism, to ward off the dangers, present and future, with which the ambition of the permanent and persevering governments around us threaten us, but of which our short-sighted democracy takes so little account.  The King was indeed shortly to justify this confidence by saving France from a war with a European coalition, about the Eastern question—­a war into which we were being led by the imprudence of M. Thiers and the bragging of our press and which could have ended in nothing but disaster.

The governmental machine worked meanwhile, as a whole, with tolerable smoothness.  The House of Peers, the members of which were permanent, and therefore strangers to electoral compromise, discussed with weight and authority laws which were really progressive, respecting as they did the interests and liberties of all concerned; while the Chamber of Deputies, consisting of unpaid members, voted with much more care for the public weal than is possible in an assembly of men enslaved by their election committees, and perpetually haunted by the nightmare of re-election.  An independent magistracy, according to President Seguier’s fine expression, gave sentences, not services, “rendait des arrets, et non pas des services” while the administration, which was almost as permanent as the magistracy, had time to do good work and did it.  In short, except for the criminal classes, and those incorrigible revolutionists who ask perpetually for the impossible, everybody felt that his security, his liberty, and his faith, were well protected, and, as I heard said on all sides when I came back from my voyages, people felt they were well governed.  It is true that if I opened the newspapers I generally read to the contrary in them—­but if there were some few serious organs of public opinion among these journals, edited by courageous and talented men, who did their best to serve their country by their writings, whatever their opinions might be, how many more had editors who were mere slander-mongers, and columns all the more eagerly read, the more calumnious they were, and the more they pandered to every envious and subversive passion.  Such men were the spokesmen of that increasingly numerous class of speculators, who relinquish any useful career to seek fortune in the chances of politics.  According to them, oppression and corruption had grown intolerable, and would never cease until power passed into their own immaculate hands.  They alone possessed the secret for turning France into a terrestrial Paradise, by applying in all sincerity the great and high-sounding principles, liberty, equality and fraternity.  This sincerity of application, which has been so frequently announced, dallies somewhat in its coming, especially as regards equality, which to so many people merely means, “That which I have not nobody else shall have.”  The word equality is seductive truly, and in every self-respecting community equality before the law must be utterly absolute for all men.  But so long