tentates.

A more signal defeat than that undergone by the continental
revolutionary party--or rather parties--upon all points of the line of
battle, cannot be imagined. But what of that? Has not the struggle of
the British middle classes for their social and political supremacy
embraced forty-eight, that of the French middle classes forty years of
unexampled struggles? And was their triumph ever nearer than at the
very moment when restored monarchy thought itself more firmly settled
than ever? The times of that superstition which attributed revolutions
to the ill-will of a few agitators have long passed away. Everyone
knows nowadays that wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion,
there must be some social want in the background, which is prevented,
by outworn institutions, from satisfying itself. The want may not yet
be felt as strongly, as generally, as might ensure immediate success;
but every attempt at forcible repression will only bring it forth
stronger and stronger, until it bursts its fetters. If, then, we have
been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the
beginning. And, fortunately, the probably very short interval of rest
which is allowed us between the close of the first and the beginning
of the second act of the movement, gives us time for a very necessary
piece of work: the study of the causes that necessitated both the late
outbreak and its defeat; causes that are not to be sought for in the
accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors, or treacheries of some of
the leaders, but in the general social state and conditions of
existence of each of the convulsed nations. That the sudden movements
of February and March, 1848, were not the work of single individuals,
but spontaneous, irresistible manifestations of national wants and
necessities, more or less clearly understood, but very distinctly felt
by numerous classes in every country, is a fact recognized everywhere;
but when you inquire into the causes of the counter-revolutionary
successes, there you are met on every hand with the ready reply that
it was Mr. This or Citizen That who "betrayed" the people. Which reply
may be very true or not, according to circumstances, but under no
circumstances does it explain anything--not even show how it came to
pass that the "people" allowed themselves to be thus betrayed. And
what a poor chance stands a political party whose entire
stock-in-trade consists in a knowledge of the solitary fact