her it is dreaming, whether it knows whither it
is going, whether it has ever exercised its reason, a thing impossible
on the part of the masses, of nations and of women. M. de Metternich and
M. de Pilat are terrified to see this age carried away by a passion for
constitutions, as the preceding age was by the passion for philosophy,
as that of Luther was for a reform of abuses in the Roman religion;
for it truly seems as if different generations of men were like those
conspirators whose actions are directed to the same end, as soon as the
watchword has been given them. But their alarm is a mistake, and it is
on this point alone that I condemn them, for they are right in their
wish to enjoy power without permitting the middle class to come on a
fixed day from the depth of each of their six kingdoms, to torment
them. How could men of such remarkable talent fail to divine that the
constitutional comedy has in it a moral of profound meaning, and to see
that it is the very best policy to give the age a bone to exercise its
teeth upon! I think exactly as they do on the subject of sovereignty.
A power is a moral being as much interested as a man is in
self-preservation. This sentiment of self-preservation is under the
control of an essential principle which may be expressed in three
words--_to lose nothing_. But in order to lose nothing, a power must
grow or remain indefinite, for a power which remains stationary is
nullified. If it retrogrades, it is under the control of something else,
and loses its independent existence. I am quite as well aware, as are
those gentlemen, in what a false position an unlimited power puts itself
by making concessions; it allows to another power whose essence is
to expand a place within its own sphere of activity. One of them will
necessarily nullify the other, for every existing thing aims at the
greatest possible development of its own forces. A power, therefore,
never makes concessions which it does not afterwards seek to retract.
This struggle between two powers is the basis on which stands the
balance of government, whose elasticity so mistakenly alarmed the
patriarch of Austrian diplomacy, for comparing comedy with comedy the
least perilous and the most advantageous administration is found in
the seesaw system of the English and of the French politics. These two
countries have said to the people, 'You are free;' and the people have
been satisfied; they enter the government like the zeros whi