strain it, intellectual freedom maintained
itself and commanded respect. This freedom does not supply all the rest;
but it prepares them, and, while their accomplishment is suspended,
preserves the honour of nations who have not yet learned to conquer or
preserve their rights.

While this movement of the mind developed itself and gained strength
from day to day, the Government of M. de Villele pursued its course,
more and more perplexed by the pretensions and quarrels of the party
which its leader vainly endeavoured to restrain. One of my friends,
endowed with penetrating and impartial judgment, thus wrote to me in
December, 1826, from the interior of his department:--"Men who are at
the head of a faction are really destined to tremble before their own
shadow. I cannot recollect any time when this nullity of the ruling
party was more complete. They do not propound a single doctrine or
conviction, or a hope for the future. Even declamation itself seems to
be exhausted and futile. Surely M. de Villele must be allowed the merit
of being well acquainted with their helplessness; his success springs
from that cause; but this I look upon as an instinctive knowledge: he
represents without correctly estimating these people. Otherwise he would
discover that he might refuse them everything except places and
appointments; provided also that he lends himself to no connection with
opposite opinions." When the party, proceeding from exigence to
exigence, and the Cabinet from weakness to weakness, found themselves
unable to act longer together,--when M. de Villele, in November 1827,
appealed to an election for defence against his rivals in the Chamber
and at Court,--we resolutely encountered our share in the contest. Every
opposition combined. Under the motto, _Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera_,
"Help thyself, and Heaven will help thee," a public association was
formed, in which was comprised men of very different general ideas and
definitive intentions, who acted in concert with the sole design of
bringing about, by legal measures, a change of the majority in the
Chamber of Deputies, and the fall of the Cabinet. I as readily joined
them, with my friends, as in 1815 I had repaired alone to Ghent to
convey to the King, Louis XVIII., the wishes of the constitutional
Royalists. Long revolutions engender two opposite vices, rashness and
pusillanimity; men learn from them either to plunge blindly into mad
enterprises, or to abstain timidly from t