vain, cold, heartless, rigid, and proud. He
had no amiable weakness. His smile was a dagger, and his friendship was
a snare. He was a hypocrite and a tyrant. He had no pity on a fallen
foe; and even when bending under the infirmities of age, and in the near
prospect of death, his inexorable temper was never for a moment subdued.
The execution of Cinq-Mars and De Thou took place when he had one foot
in his grave. He deceived everybody, sent his spies into the bosom of
families, and made expediency the law of his public life.

But it is nothing to the philosophic student of history that he built
the Palais Royal, or squandered riches with Roman prodigality, or
rewarded players, or enriched Marion Delorme, or clad himself in mail
before La Rochelle, or persecuted his early friends, or robbed the
monasteries, or made a spy of Father Joseph, or exiled the Queen-mother,
or kept the King in bondage, or sent his enemies to the scaffold: these
things are all against him, and make him appear in a repulsive light.
But if he brought order out of confusion, and gave a blow to feudalism,
and destroyed anarchies, and promoted law, and developed the resources
of his country, making that country formidable and honorable, and
constructed a vast machinery of government by which France was kept
together for a century, and would have fallen to pieces without
it,--then there is another way to survey this bad man; and we view him
not only as a great statesman and ruler, but as an instrument of
Providence, raised up as a terror to evil-doers. We may hate absolutism,
but must at the same time remember that there are no settled principles
of government, any more than of political economy. That is the best
government which is best adapted to the exigency of that human society
which at the time it serves. Republicanism would not do in China, any
more than despotism in New England. Bad men, somehow or other, must be
coerced and punished. The more prevalent is depravity, so much the more
necessary is despotic vigor: it will be so to the end of time. It is all
nonsense to dream of liberty with a substratum of folly and vice. Unless
evils can be remedied by the public itself, giving power to the laws
which the people create, then physical force, hard and cold tyranny,
must inevitably take the place. No country will long endure anarchy; and
then the hardest characters may prove the greatest benefactors.

It is on this principle that I am reconciled to