Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 06

								

life-interest in the State; but to true liberty and permanent order
centralization is a deadly poison.  The more the provinces govern their
own affairs, the more we find everything, even to roads and post-horses,
are left to the people; the more the Municipal Spirit pervades every vein
of the vast body, the more certain may we be that reform and change must
come from universal opinion, which is slow, and constructs ere it
destroys,--not from public clamour, which is sudden, and not only pulls
down the edifice but sells the bricks!
Another peculiarity in the French Constitution struck and perplexed
Maltravers.  This people so pervaded by the republican sentiment; this
people, who had sacrificed so much for Freedom; this people, who, in the
name of Freedom, had perpetrated so much crime with Robespierre, and
achieved so much glory with Napoleon,--this people were, as a people,
contented to be utterly excluded from all power and voice in the State!
Out of thirty-three millions of subjects, less than two hundred thousand
electors!  Where was there ever an oligarchy equal to this?  What a
strange infatuation, to demolish an aristocracy and yet to exclude a
people!  What an anomaly in political architecture, to build an inverted
pyramid!  Where was the safety-valve of governments, where the natural
vents of excitement in a population so inflammable?  The people itself
were left a mob,--no stake in the State, no action in its affairs, no
legislative interest in its security.*


* Has not all this proved prophetic?
On the other hand, it was singular to see how--the aristocracy of birth
broken down--the aristocracy of letters had arisen.  A Peerage, half
composed of journalists, philosophers, and authors!  This was the
beau-ideal of Algernon Sidney's Aristocratic Republic, of the Helvetian
vision of what ought to be the dispensation of public distinctions; yet
was it, after all, a desirable aristocracy?  Did society gain; did
literature lose?  Was the priesthood of Genius made more sacred and more
pure by these worldly decorations and hollow titles; or was aristocracy
itself thus rendered a more disinterested, a more powerful, or a more
sagacious element in the administration of law, or the elevation of
opinion?  These questions, not lightly to be answered, could not fail to
arouse the speculation and curiosity of a man who had been familiar with
the closet and the forum; and in proportion as he found his interest
excited in these problems to be solved by a foreign nation, did the
thoughtful Englishman feel the old instinct--which binds the citizen to
the fatherland--begin to stir once more earnestly and vividly within him.
"You, yourself individually, are passing like us," said De Montaigne one
day to Maltravers, "through a state of transition.  You have forever left
the Ideal, and you are carrying your cargo of experience over to the
Practical.  When you reach that haven, you will have completed the