single-handed with the efforts
of the public authority. But at the present day, when all ranks are more
and more confounded, when the individual disappears in the throng, and
is easily lost in the midst of a common obscurity, when the honor of
monarchy has almost lost its empire without being succeeded by public
virtue, and when nothing can enable man to rise above himself, who shall
say at what point the exigencies of power and the servility of weakness
will stop?

As long as family feeling was kept alive, the antagonist of oppression
was never alone; he looked about him, and found his clients, his
hereditary friends, and his kinsfolk. If this support was wanting, he
was sustained by his ancestors and animated by his posterity. But
when patrimonial estates are divided, and when a few years suffice to
confound the distinctions of a race, where can family feeling be found?
What force can there be in the customs of a country which has changed
and is still perpetually changing, its aspect; in which every act of
tyranny has a precedent, and every crime an example; in which there
is nothing so old that its antiquity can save it from destruction, and
nothing so unparalleled that its novelty can prevent it from being done?
What resistance can be offered by manners of so pliant a make that they
have already often yielded? What strength can even public opinion have
retained, when no twenty persons are connected by a common tie; when
not a man, nor a family, nor chartered corporation, nor class, nor free
institution, has the power of representing or exerting that opinion;
and when every citizen--being equally weak, equally poor, and equally
dependent--has only his personal impotence to oppose to the organized
force of the government?

The annals of France furnish nothing analogous to the condition in which
that country might then be thrown. But it may more aptly be assimilated
to the times of old, and to those hideous eras of Roman oppression, when
the manners of the people were corrupted, their traditions obliterated,
their habits destroyed, their opinions shaken, and freedom, expelled
from the laws, could find no refuge in the land; when nothing protected
the citizens, and the citizens no longer protected themselves; when
human nature was the sport of man, and princes wearied out the clemency
of Heaven before they exhausted the patience of their subjects. Those
who hope to revive the monarchy of Henry IV or of Louis XIV, appe