tion,
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 c