I believe that Louis Philippe is no ignoble man, who certainly will not do what is wrong, and who has only the weakness (to yield to the inborn tendencies of his fellows in birth), and to ignore his own most peculiar principle of life.[1] And through this he may yet be ruined. For, as Sallust has shrewdly remarked, governments can only uphold themselves by that to which their existence is due—thus, for example, one which is founded by force must by force maintain itself and not by craft, and vice versâ. Louis Philippe has forgotten that his Government was born of the principle of popular sovereignty, and now, in afflicting blindness, he would uphold it by a quasi-legitimacy, by alliances with absolute princes, and by a continuation of the period of the Restoration. Hence it comes that the spirits of the Revolution bear him ill-will (despise him) even more than they hate[2] and make war on him in every way. This strife is at all events more just than was the feud against the previous Government, which owed nothing to the people, and which from the first was in open opposition to it. Louis Philippe, who
