the political world was tranquil, he passed his leisure hours in running down the government; and though no one had more experienced the mischief of agitation, he generally voted for its most dangerous adversaries: not because he approved of their principles, or that the ministerial candidates were not honourable men, but because he was determined to let no opportunity pass of making the king and his government feel that he, M. St Godibert, was not pleased with them, and would "give, them a lesson." These lessons occasionally cost the teacher very dear; and when agitation, warmed by himself into incipient insurrection, grew dangerous, he was sure to be the first to accuse the government of having excited it for its own special purposes. When insurrection was defeated, he again blamed the government for excessive lenity in the punishment of those who disturbed the public peace; and when all peril was over, and a complete lull ensued, then he accused the same government of excessive cruelty to those who a day or two before were the infame canaille, but who now were his frères egarés—his deluded brethren and fellow-citizens.
These were the men who served as the instruments to bring about the Revolution of July, and these were they who were feasted and flattered until they were led to believe themselves the only beings on earth worthy of consideration. Such specimens were of course to be met with as employés in the various ministerial departments. Nothing could be more insolent, or more griping, than the general run of those underlings. The recommendation "enrichissez-vous," coming, as it did, from the first minister of the crown, was not forgotten; he was one of the few who did not carry out for himself his own theory; but we fear that the love of power, which was in him a passion, induced him to tolerate, or at least not to prevent, the scandalous jobbing which it was known was going on—for it is not credible that such things could be done in secret. A government where such men enjoy, in consequence of their position, a great though underhand influence, is humiliating for an honour-able man to live under. There is something more respectable in the audacity with which the insurgent flings out his crimson flag, and eyes, as he passes through the richest quarters of Paris, the trembling bourgeois, whose fine mansion he has already marked out, than in the system which admits as its principal instruments the rapacious and insolent underlings, who too often had the ministerial ear under the Orleans régime.
As for the representative system in France during the period of which we speak, it was a farce. Two hundred thousand electors, for a population of thirty-three or thirty-four millions, was not much better than an oligarchy, and the worst of all oligarchies, for its corruption was its bond of union, as was proved by the disclosures made to the world towards the conclusion of Louis Philippe's reign, when some of the highest functionaries were dragged before the tribunals for mal-practices; and we believe that there were other persons who did not regret that the Revolution of February came to save them from public disgrace. A minister who wishes to be regarded as a philosopher and a statesman, should try to purify his age rather than corrupt it; and it is as immoral as impolitic to encourage the baser passions of men in order to keep yourself in power, however clean your own conscience, and virtuous your purposes. Such things might be palliated in so loose a politician as Walpole; but they would shock and disgust were they, by the remotest chance, to be found in so austere a moralist as Guizot.
Some time previous to the coup-d'êtat of 1851, a new scheme was formed by the Orleanists, who were tired of the forced leisure to which the successful imitation, in February 1848, of the example set by themselves in 1830, condemned them. The object of this new project was the complete reconciliation of the elder and younger branches of the Bourbon family, and of the two important sections of the Royalist party, with a view to a restoration, on the expiry of the presidential power in May 1852, by a coup-d'êtat on the part of the majority of the National Assembly, a successful rising of the people or the army, or, in fact, any
