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tunity of doing so is sure to present itself in the end, as was the case in France. In the French Revolution there were two impulses in opposite directions, which must never be confounded; the one was favourable to liberty, the other to despotism. Under the ancient monarchy the King was the sole author of the laws; and below the power of the Sovereign, certain vestiges of provincial institutions, half-destroyed, were still distinguishable. These provincial institutions were incoherent, ill compacted, and frequently absurd; in the hands of the aristocracy they had sometimes been converted into instruments of oppression. The Revolution declared itself the enemy of royalty and of provincial institutions at the same time; it confounded all that had preceded it—despotic power and the checks to its abuses—in indiscriminate hatred; and its tendency was at once to overthrow and to centralize. This double character of the French Revolution is a fact which has been adroitly handled by the friends of absolute power. Can they be accused of labouring in the cause of despotism, when they are defending that central administration which was one of the great innovations of the Revolution[1]? In this manner popularity may be conciliated with hostility to the rights of the people, and the secret slave of tyranny may be the professed admirer of freedom.
I have visited the two nations in which the system of provincial liberty has been most perfectly
- ↑ See Appendix, K.
