INTRODUCTION.

SECTION I.

Plan-Elements of European Institutions.-Their Diversity and their Conflict.-The Barbarians.-The RomansThe Church.-Legitimacy.-The Barbarous Age-Feadalism. The Commons. The Church.-Epochs of European Civilization.-The Crusades.-Royalty.-The Italian Republics.-Other Municipalities.-Parliaments, Cortes, and States.-Centralization of Social Elements.Attempts at Church Reform.-Literature.-Discoveries and Inventions.-The Reformation.-Its Theory.-Character of the Age.—English Revolution-France.

In deliberately reviewing the French Revolution of the Three Days of July, and the consequent events in Europe, it is natural to seek for the remote as well as the immediate causes of the political changes, which signalize the present epoch of European history. The immediate causes belong to, and are mixed up with, the events themselves: — the remote or predisposing causes exact a wider range of observation. For those changes are not to be regarded as insulated facts, detached from past or passing events, and independent of the great system of the European Republic. On the contrary, they form the parts of a visible whole, they are the catastrophe, the dénouement of the great social drama,

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of which all Christendom is the scene. They are connected together by a pervading common principle, and they succeed the incidents of other ages, not merely in sequence of time, but as determinate effects following upon efficient causes. Retracing our steps backward, we come, in the first place, it is plain, to the incidents, policy, and opinions of the Restoration, which substituted the constitutional sceptre of the recalled Bourbons for the revolutionary truncheon of Napoleon. But we cannot scrutinize and ponder this period, so as to arrive at satisfactory results, without understanding the philosophy of the first Revolution, its origin and its progress. And having advanced thus far, we shall perceive that the entire series of events, from the Assembly of Notables in 1787 down to the Barricades of 1830, appertains to the comprehensive subject of modern civilization and social improvement, — although it be on the surface of things a question of French politics, attaching simply to the history of France.

These remarks open to us the course of inquiry, which alone is competent to give a clear and full idea of the inner workings of political change in Europe, and especially the Revolution of the Three Days. To understand this, we must consider, — 1. The elements, the composition, the successive changes, the general action, of the political system of Christendom; 2. The French Revolution, including, of course, the Restoration, out of whose misfortunes and crimes the Revolution of July was destined to spring.

It is an obvious peculiarity of the social institutions of modern Europe, that they have been founded on the ruins of a preexisting state of civilization. Like so many edifices of Italy or Greece at the present day, their materials have not been quarried out of the living rock, but collected from the scattered remains of the temples and dwellings of ancient times. In the face of society, as in our languages, we do not see an original idea, principle, or form, receiving its developement from the impulse of circumstances, and grow

ing up from the simple beginnings of primitive life into the large and comprehensive system of advanced civilization; but the ideas, principles, and forms of a past age and an extinct people, recombined and modified according to the tastes and exigences of the succeeding age and of a new people. Hence, in the investigation of the theory of the social institutions under which we live, we possess a fixed point of departure, a definite starting-place: we know that in the crumbling frame of the Roman Empire, and in the fusion of the invading Barbarians with the conquered inhabitants of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, we are to seek for the elements of modern European civilization.

Carry back the mind, then, to that disastrous epoch of our history, when rapine and violence ruled the world; when all the component parts of society seemed to be resolved into chaotic confusion; when cities wasted by fire and sword, nations swept into oblivion, the accumulated fruits of ages of refinement and wealth annihilated in a day, bore witness to the fury of human passions, when loosed from the control of reason and religion, and given up to the dominion of selfishness and rapacity. Out of that scene of tremendous disorder, that shock of classes, races, and opinions, arose the combinations of modern society; and it was that very collision itself, which impressed upon European society its characteristic features.

If we look at the subsisting institutions of Asia,→→→institutions which have endured from beyond the period of authentic records, we find that a comprehensive unity of principle is the secret at once of their stability and of their total absence of progression: They do not recede : ~ they do not advance. The theocratic principle swallowed up all others, and stamped a fixed and monotonous character upon their manners, their literature, their monuments, their opinions. Thus it was, also, in ancient Egypt. Again, if we examine the civilization of the Greeks, we do not find their institutions congealed as it were into one unchanging form;

with them, there was progression, developement, melioration; their principle of civilization was an advancing one, namely, the democratic principle, and the rapidity of its advancement was as extraordinary as the magnificent results it produced; but the other great elements of civilization were overpowered or borne away in its progress, and it was left standing alone and unsupported, to sink into premature exhaustion. In a word, the civilization of the Chinese, the Hindus, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, has wanted either the capacity of progression or the capacity of sustaining and reproducing itself by new combinations.

In modern Europe, on the contrary, no one principle has acquired such fixed ascendancy over all others, as either to arrest the march of civilization, or to suffer it to decay from the deficiency of renovated forces; the various elements of social organization have held on their progress side by side; the spiritual and temporal powers, the different principles of government, the various degrees of social condition, have all existed together, contending with, limiting, running into, and balancing one another, and each acquiring vigor and developement from perpetual action. This incessant movement of European society, always in activity, and amid occasional checks and vicissitudes, yet on the whole continually advancing, is the distinctive property, which it derives from the combination of the opinions and social forms of the northern Barbarians with those which previously existed among the Romans.

The Barbarians brought with them two principles, which gave to them victory and power for the time being, and which impelled European society into a new channel of exertion. The first was the passion of individual independence. The kindred sentiment, which appears in the face of Greek and Roman society, is political liberty, the freedom of a citizen, of a member of a political association; but this was widely different from the sentiment of personal independence, which distinguished the Norman and Ger,