neither her interests nor our own duties."

With a more gentle effusion of mind and heart, M. Camille Jordan held
the same language; the bills passed; the right-hand party felt as blows
directed against itself the advice suggested to the Cabinet, and the
Cabinet saw that in that quarter, as necessary supporters, they had also
haughty and exacting allies.

Their demands were not fruitless. The Cabinet, uninfluenced either by
despotic views or immoderate passions, had no desire to retain
unnecessarily the absolute power with which it had been entrusted. No
effort was requisite to deprive it of the provisional laws; they fell
successively of themselves,--the suspension of the securities for
personal liberty in 1817, the prevotal courts in 1818, the censorship of
the daily press in 1819; and four years after the tempest of the Hundred
Days, the country was in the full enjoyment of all its constitutional
privileges.

During this interval, other questions, more and less important, were
brought forward and decided. When the first overflowing of the reaction
of 1815 had a little calmed down, when France, less disturbed with the
present, began once more to think of the future, she was called upon to
enter on the greatest work that can fall to the lot of a nation. There
was more than a new government to establish; it was necessary that a
free government should be imbued with vigour. It was written, and it
must live,--a promise often made, but never accomplished. How often,
from 1789 to 1814, had liberties and political rights been inscribed on
our institutes and laws, to be buried under them, and held of no
account. The first amongst the Governments of our day, the Restoration,
took these words at their true meaning; whatever may have been its
traditions and propensities, what it said, it did; the liberties and
rights it acknowledged, were taken into real co-operation and action.
From 1814 to 1830, as from 1830 to 1848, the Charter was a truth. For
once forgetting it, Charles X. fell.

When this work of organization, or, to speak more correctly, when this
effectual call to political life commenced in 1816, the question of the
electoral system, already touched upon, but without result, in the
preceding session, was the first that came under notice. It was included
in the scope of the fortieth article of the Charter, which ran
thus:--"The electors who nominate the Deputies can have no right of
voting, unless they pay a direct