s and their flows. This
has been eminently the fate of the monarchy of France. There have been
times in which no power has ever been brought so low. Few have ever
flourished in greater glory. By turns elevated and depressed, that power
had been, on the whole, rather on the increase; and it continued not
only powerful, but formidable, to the hour of the total ruin of the
monarchy. This fall of the monarchy was far from being preceded by any
exterior symptoms of decline. The interior were not visible to every
eye; and a thousand accidents might have prevented the operation of what
the most clear-sighted were not able to discern nor the most provident
to divine. A very little time before its dreadful catastrophe, there was
a kind of exterior splendor in the situation of the crown, which usually
adds to government strength and authority at home. The crown seemed then
to have obtained some of the most splendid objects of state ambition.
None of the Continental powers of Europe were the enemies of France.
They were all either tacitly disposed to her or publicly connected with
her; and in those who kept the most aloof there was little appearance of
jealousy,--of animosity there was no appearance at all. The British
nation, her great preponderating rival, she had humbled, to all
appearance she had weakened, certainly had endangered, by cutting off a
very large and by far the most growing part of her empire. In that its
acme of human prosperity and greatness, in the high and palmy state of
the monarchy of France, it fell to the ground without a struggle. It
fell without any of those vices in the monarch which have sometimes been
the causes of the fall of kingdoms, but which existed, without any
visible effect on the state, in the highest degree in many other
princes, and, far from destroying their power, had only left some slight
stains on their character. The financial difficulties were only pretexts
and instruments of those who accomplished the ruin of that monarchy;
they were not the causes of it.

Deprived of the old government, deprived in a manner of all government,
France, fallen as a monarchy, to common speculators might have appeared
more likely to be an object of pity or insult, according to the
disposition of the circumjacent powers, than to be the scourge and
terror of them all: but out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in
France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more
terrific guise than an