The Press.
London, England, 1855-04-07 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

Sometimes from passion or want of foresight, precipi•
tated themselves into novelties the most contrary to their
true interests ; and, sometimes alarmed by the crises they
themselves created, abandoned politics in disgust, withdrew
from civil life, and ocoupied themselves only with their
private affairs.

_
Lastly, the middle classes showed a mis-
chievous jealousy of the aristocracy, and the
aristocracy of the middle classes, and each tried
to triumph over the other, though they were
mutually dependent on one another:—

They both committed the same fatal error—in turns
they believed that because they had each one day van-
quished, each could separately suffice for all the great
social interests, for resistance and progress, for order and
liberty; and, stricken by disunion with impuissance, they
in turn saw order and liberty, resistance and progress,
perish equally in their hands !
A lesson that for those wicked men in our
own country who are labouring to separate
class from class !

So much as to the " disappointments " of
the great party of constitutional monarchy, of
moderate, well-regulated liberty in France.
But, great and bitter as they are, M. Guizot
declares that they do not cause him to
despair :

Our times are not a deviation from our past—an unfore-
seen accident, a strange inconsistency, a malady which has
troubled sound health. For fifteen centuries we have been
marching in the same path. A principle, an idea, a senti-
ment, whatever it may be called, has dominated for fifteen
centuries all European society, and especially that of
France, and has presided over all their development—the
sentiment of the dignity and of the rights of man simply
because he is man, and of the duty to extend more and
more to all men the benefits of justice, of sympathy, and of
liberty.

Given by God, and proclaimed by Jesus
Christ, these benefits must in the end
prevail :
- - -

God does not deceive human kind ; nations du not con-
stantly deceive themselves in the course of a long destiny;
an abyss is not at the end of fifteen centuries of ascen-
sional movement; what for fifteen hundred years has been
a principle of life and progress cannot now be a cause of
decadence and death.
But-

We must know how to act—how to wait; we must wait
and act with intelligence, with perseverence, with virtue,
with submission to the laws of God under the empire of
which our life passes away, and our activity is exercised.

He protests against the idea entertained
by many persons that the constitutional
regime has fallen in France never to rise
again :

Where is the regime which during the last sixty years has
not fallen? Absolute power has failel as well as liberty—
the conquests of war have disappeared as well as those of
peace. The different regimes would have bad grace in
treating each other with hauteur ; they have all undergone
the same reverses. But the constitutional one is that
which has lasted the longest. Even in falling it has not
lost all its empire, and some of its greatest benefits have
survived its faults and reverses.

He declares that the hopes and sentiments
of all young men of intelligence, whatever
their class, profession, belief, and tendencies,
point to
- -

Political life—the desire to advance in the same paths
of liberal civilisation in which the French people have for
many centuries made so many conquests and so much
progress I
And he finds that the same is more or less
the case in every country in Europe, even to
some extent in Russia. Ho concludes as
follows :
Let us, then, abandon discouragement, and at the same
time our blindness, our interested reticences, our com-
plaisance to ourselves; let us be serious and sincere, and
see things as they are. We have believed ourselves better
than we are; we have disregarded the evil inherent in our
nature, and consequently the necessity of struggling de-
cidedly and incessantly against the enemy which we carry
in us. We have believed ourselves more powerful than we
are; we have disregarded not only the limits of our power,
but the rights of the sovereign power which governs the
world and ourselves; we have not taken into the account
the eternal laws of the God who made us, and we have
madly attempted to put in their place and everywhere our
own laws. We have believed ourselves more advanced
than we are in the paths of civilisation and liberty ; en-
gaged in the great and rude task of founding a free
Government, we have not well measured the difficulties
and conditions of it; we have flattered ourselves too much
that we alone could suffice to do it; we have presumed too
much on our enlightenment and our strength; we have
too much forgotten the general ignorance and the anarchy
which knocked at our gates, and the time necessary for
enlightening the ignorance and the allies necessary for
combating the anarchy. Such are the true causes of our
disappointments and reverses. In this there is enough to
diminish our pride, but not to annihilate our hopes : our
evil is of that kind which cures itself when it is well
known and strongly felt. Let us pursue our object—it is
founded in right, and for fifteen centuries has been
laboriously sought for by Christian Europe. Let us be