With those words he legislated for Europe. By that law, so convincing to his generation, he was providing an organic force that enabled him at Vienna to subdue the Congress, to scatter the victorious allies, and to achieve his own chosen scheme of an alliance between England, Austria, and France. The implacable analysis of history has since made known that the doctrine which makes hereditary right paramount in politics is unscientific, and cannot combine with the rights of nations. Talleyrand was no advocate of arbitrary power, either at Paris or at Vienna. He was disgusted with those who sent Ferdinand the Seventh to reign without conditions. Although it was not his hand that drew up the Charte, it was his mind chiefly that inspired it. In 1815 he denounced the reactionary counsels of the Count of Artois before the King and the Count himself, and insisted on the principle of a homogeneous and responsible ministry ; and he retired before the Holy Alliance. The Bourbons, if they had reigned by his advice, would not have fallen. When he wrote his narrative of the events In which he performed the part of king-maker, he did not see that he had made a blunder. The dynasty he had enthroned persisted for fifteen years in excluding him from power. After 1830 he regrets that he had forgotten Fox's saying that the worst sort of Revolution is a Restoration. When Madame de Lieven affected surprise that the man who had crowned Louis the Eighteenth should appear in London as the plenipotentiary of Louis Philippe, he replied that the King he served would have been the choice of Alexander in 1814. They do not seem to have remembered who it was that prevented it.
