bitterness with which he was assailed by the Liberal party
may be inferred from the following extract from the "Revolution of
1848," by Louis Blanc:

"Whatever may have been the baseness of Rome under the
Caesars, it was equalled by the corruption in France in the
reign of Louis Philippe. Nothing like it had ever been
witnessed in history. The thirst for gold having obtained
possession of minds agitated by impure desires, society
terminated by sinking into a brutal materialism. The formula
of selfishness, every one by himself and for himself, had
been adopted by the sovereign as the maxim of state; and that
maxim, alike hideous and fatal, had become the ruling
principle of government. It was the device of Louis
Philippe--a prince gifted with moderation, knowledge,
tolerance, humanity, but skeptical, destitute of either
nobility of heart or elevation of mind--the most experienced
corrupter of the human race that ever appeared on earth!"

There were thirty-four millions of people in France. Of these, but
one hundred and fifty thousand of the richest proprietors enjoyed the
right of suffrage. Consequently, the laws were framed to favor the
rich. All the efforts of the people to secure a reform of the
electoral law proved unavailing. The agitation of the subject
increased every year, and the cry for parliamentary reform was ever
growing louder and more menacing. Many of the illustrious men in
France joined this reform party. Among others, there were M. Lafitte,
the wealthy banker, M. Odillon Barrot, the renowned advocate, and M.
Arago, the distinguished philosopher.

We may search history in vain for the record of any monarch so
unrelentingly harassed as was Louis Philippe from the time he
ascended the throne until he was driven from it. He was
irreproachable in morals, a man who had seen much of the world in all
its phases, sagacious and well meaning. But he was placed in a
position in which no earthly wisdom could rescue him from the direst
trouble. There were two antagonistic and very powerful parties
watching him.

The one was the Liberal party in France, of varied shades of opinion,
demanding equal rights for all men, hating the old dynastic
despotisms of Europe, who had forced the Bourbons upon them, and
hating those treaties of Vienna, of 1815, which had shorn France of a
large portion of her territory, and had bound Europe hand and foot,
so as to prevent