for whom their own representatives are violently cashiered;--can you
conceive such a combination of wet blankets supplied by the irony of Fate
for the extinction of every spark of ardour in the population from which
armies are to be gathered in haste, at the beck of usupers they distrust
and despise? Paris has excelled itself in folly. Hungering for peace,
it proclaims a Government which has no legal power to treat for it.
Shrieking out for allies among the monarchies, it annihilates the hope of
obtaining them; its sole chance of escape from siege, famine, and
bombardment, is in the immediate and impassioned sympathy of the
provinces; and it revives all the grudges which the provinces have long
sullenly felt against the domineering pretensions of the capital, and
invokes the rural populations, which comprise the pith and sinew of
armies, in the name of men whom I verily believe they detest still more
than they do the Prussians. Victor, it is enough to make one despair of
his country! All beyond the hour seems anarchy and ruin."

"Not so!" exclaimed De Mauleon. "Everything comes to him who knows how
to wait. The Empire is destroyed; the usurpation that follows it has no
roots. It will but serve to expedite the establishment of such a
condition as we have meditated and planned--a constitution adapted to our
age and our people, not based wholly on untried experiments, taking the
best from nations that do not allow Freedom and Order to be the sport of
any popular breeze. From the American Republic we must borrow the only
safeguards against the fickleness of the universal suffrage which, though
it was madness to concede in any ancient community, once conceded cannot
be safely abolished,--viz., the salutary law that no article of the
Constitution, once settled, can be altered without the consent of two-
thirds of the legislative body. By this law we insure permanence, and
that concomitant love for institutions which is engendered by time and
custom. Secondly, the formation of a senate on such principles as may