s of liberty, they
serve liberty much more than they injure it, for they warn and place it
on its guard. To secure victory to the system of order and government to
which they aspire, there is but one road;--the Inquisition and Philip
II. were alone acquainted with their trade.

As might naturally be expected, the resistance provoked by the attempts
of the fanatical party soon transformed itself into an attack. One
royalist gentleman raised the flag of opposition against the policy of
M. de Villele; another assailed the religious controllers of his
Cabinet, and not only dragged them before public opinion, but before the
justice of the country, which disarmed and condemned them, without
inflicting any other sentence than that of its disapprobation in the
name of the law.

No one was less a philosopher of the eighteenth century, or a liberal of
the nineteenth, than the Count de Montlosier. In the Constituent
Assembly he had vehemently defended the Church and resisted the
Revolution; he was sincerely a royalist, an aristocrat, and a Catholic.
People called him, not without reason, the feudal publicist. But,
neither the ancient nobility nor the modern citizens were disposed to
submit to ecclesiastical dominion. M. de Montlosier repulsed it, equally
in the name of old and new France, as he would formerly have denied its
supremacy from the battlements of his castle, or in the court of Philip
the Handsome. The early French spirit re-appeared in him, free, while
respectful towards the Church, and as jealous of the laical independence
of the State and crown, as it was possible for a member of the Imperial
State Council to show himself.

At the same moment, a man of the people, born a poet and rendered still
more poetical by art, celebrated, excited, and expanded, through his
songs, popular instincts and passions in opposition to everything that
recalled the old system, and above all against the pretensions and
supremacy of the Church. M. Beranger, in his heart, was neither a
revolutionist nor an unbeliever; he was morally more honest, and
politically more rational, than his songs; but, a democrat by conviction
as well as inclination, and carried away into license and want of
forethought by the spirit of democracy, he attacked indiscriminately
everything that was ungracious to the people, troubling himself little
as to the range of his blows, looking upon the success of his songs as a
victory achieved by liberty, and forgetting