ifficult to answer the question. It has been
said and believed by many, and probably a great portion of the Royalists
imagined, in 1815, that their object was to abolish the Charter, and
restore the old system: a commonplace supposition of puerile credulity;
the battle-cry of the enemies, whether able or blind, of the
Restoration. In the height of its most sanguine hopes, the Chamber of
1815 had formed no idea so extreme or audacious. Replaced as conquerors
upon the field, not by themselves, but by the errors of their
adversaries and the course of European events, the old Royalist party
expected that the reverses of the Revolution and the Empire would bring
them enormous advantages, and restitution; but they were yet undecided
as to the use they should make of victory in the government of France,
when they found themselves in the undisturbed possession of power. Their
views were as unsettled and confused as their passions were violent;
above all things, they coveted victory, for the haughty pleasure of
triumph itself, for the definitive establishment of the Restoration, and
for their own predominance, by holding power at the centre of
government, and throughout the departments by administration.

But in those social shocks there are deeper questions involved than the
actors are aware of. The Hundred Days inflicted on France a much heavier
evil than the waste of blood and treasure it had cost her; they lit up
again the old quarrel which the Empire had stifled and the Charter was
intended to extinguish,--the quarrel between old and new France, between
the emigrants and the revolutionists. It was not alone between two
political parties, but between two rival classes, that the struggle
recommenced in 1815, as it originally exploded in 1789.

An unfavourable position for founding a Government, and, above all, a
free Government. A certain degree of excitement and emulation invariably
exists between the people and the political parties, which constitutes
the very life of the social body, and encourages its energetic and
wholesome development. But if this agitation is not confined to
questions of legislature and the conduct of public affairs,--if it
attacks society in its very basis,--if, instead of emulation between
parties, there arises hostility amongst classes, the movement ceases to
be healthy, and changes to a destroying malady, which leads on to the
most lamentable disorders, and may end in the dissolution of the State.