g that period, from the extreme mistakes which, after his
secession, led rapidly to their ruin. As minister of a constitutional
monarchy, M. de Villele has furnished France with one of the first
examples of that fixity of political ties which, in spite of many
inconveniences and objections, is essential to the great and salutary
effects of representative government.

When M. de Villele was called on to form a Cabinet, he found the country
and the Government under the influence of a violent excitement. There
were not alone storms in the Chamber and tumults in the streets; secret
societies, plots, insurrections, and a strong effort to overthrow
established order, fermented and burst forth in every quarter,--in the
departments of the east, west, and south, at Befort, Colmar, Toulon,
Saumur, Nantes, La Rochelle, and even at Paris itself, under the very
eyes of the Ministers, in the army as well as in the civil professions,
in the royal guards as in the regiments of the line. In less than three
years, eight serious conspiracies attacked and endangered the
Restoration.

Today, after the lapse of more than thirty years, after so many events
of greater importance, when an honest and rational man asks himself what
motives could have excited such fierce anger and rash enterprises, he
can find none either sufficient or legitimate. Neither the acts of power
nor the probabilities of the future had so wounded or threatened the
rights and interests of the country as to justify these attempts at
utter subversion. The electoral system had been artfully changed; power
had passed into the hands of an irritating and suspected party; but the
great institutions were still intact; public liberty, though disputed,
still displayed itself vigorously; legal order had received no serious
blow; the country prospered and regularly advanced in strength. The new
society was disturbed, but not disarmed; it was in a condition to wait
and defend itself. There were just grounds for an animated and public
opposition, but none for conspiracy or revolution.

Nations that aspire to be free incur a prominent danger,--the danger of
deceiving themselves on the question of tyranny. They readily apply that
name to any system of government that displeases or alarms them, or
refuses to grant all that they desire. Frivolous caprices, which entail
their own punishment! Power must have inflicted on a country many
violations of right, with repeated acts of injustice a