s myself struck by the excesses in which the
press had already begun to indulge; by the deluge of recriminations,
accusations, surmises, predictions, animated invectives, or frivolous
sarcasms, which threatened to rouse into hostility all parties, with all
their respective errors, falsehoods, fears, and antipathies. With these
feelings and facts before me, I should have considered myself a madman
to have treated them lightly, and therefore I decided at once that a
temporary limitation of liberty, in respect to journals and pamphlets
alone, was not too great a sacrifice for the removal of such perils and
fears, or at least to give the country time to overcome by becoming
accustomed to them.

But to ensure the success of a sound measure, open honesty is
indispensable. Whether in the proposition or the debate, Government
itself was called upon to proclaim the general right, as well as the
limits and reasons for the partial restriction which it was about to
introduce. It ought not to have evaded the principle of the liberty or
the character of the restraining law. This course was not adopted.
Neither the King nor his advisers had formed any fixed design against
the freedom of the press; but they were more disposed to control it in
fact than to acknowledge it in right, and wished rather that the new
law, instead of giving additional sanction to the principle recorded in
the Charter, should leave it in rather a vague state of doubt and
hesitation. When the bill was introduced, its true intent and bearing
were not clearly indicated. Weak himself, and yielding still more to the
weaknesses of others, the Abbe de Montesquiou endeavoured to give the
debate a moral and literary, rather than a political turn. According to
his view, the question before them was the protection of literature and
science, of good taste and manners, and not the exercise and guarantee
of an acknowledged public right. An amendment in the Chamber of Peers
was necessary to invest the measure with the political and temporary
character which it ought to have borne from the beginning, and which
alone confined it to its real objects and within its legitimate limits.
The Government accepted the amendment without hesitation, but its
position had become embarrassed. Mistrust, the most credulous of all
passions, spread rapidly amongst the Liberals. Those who were not
enemies to the Restoration had, like it, their foibles. The love of
popularity had seized them, but