nd for substituting, in thought as in fact, equity for
hostility, and the principles of liberty for the arms of the Revolution.
An edifice is not built with machines of war; neither can a free system
be founded on ignorant prejudices and inveterate antipathies. I
encountered, at every step throughout my course, the great problems of
social organization, under the name of which parties and classes
exchanged such heavy blows,--the sovereignty of the people and the
right divine of kings, monarchy and republicanism, aristocracy and
democracy, the unity or division of power, the various systems of
election, constitution, and action of the assemblies called to
co-operate in government. I entered upon all these questions with a firm
determination to sift thoroughly the ideas of our own time, and to
separate revolutionary excitement and fantasies from the advances of
justice and liberty, reconcilable with the eternal laws of social order.
By the side of this philosophic undertaking, I pursued another,
exclusively historical; I endeavoured to demonstrate the intermitting
but always recurring efforts of French society to emerge from the
violent chaos in which it had been originally formed, sometimes produced
by the conflict, and at others by the accordance of its different
elements--royalty, nobility, clergy, citizens, and people,--throughout
the different phases of that harsh destiny, and the glorious although
incomplete development of French civilization, such as the Revolution
had compiled it after so many combats and vicissitudes. I particularly
wished to associate old France with the remembrance and intelligence of
new generations; for there was as little sense as justice in decrying or
despising our fathers, at the very moment when, equally misled in our
time, we were taking an immense step in the same path which they had
followed for so many ages.

I expounded these ideas before an audience little disposed to adopt or
even to take any interest in them. The public who at that time attended
my lectures were much less numerous and varied than they became some
years later. They consisted chiefly of young men, pupils of the
different scientific schools, and of a few curious amateurs of great
historical disquisitions. The one class were not prepared for the
questions I proposed, and wanted the preparatory knowledge which would
have rendered them acceptable. With many of the rest, preconceived ideas
of the eighteenth century and