HKB
Eastern question--a war into which we were being led by the imprudence of M. Thiers and the bragging of our press and which could have ended in nothing but disaster.
The governmental machine worked meanwhile, as a whole, with tolerable smoothness. The House of Peers, the members of which were permanent, and therefore strangers to electoral compromise, discussed with weight and authority laws which were really progressive, respecting as they did the interests and liberties of all concerned; while the Chamber of Deputies, consisting of unpaid members, voted with much more care for the public weal than is possible in an assembly of men enslaved by their election committees, and perpetually haunted by the nightmare of re-election. An independent magistracy, according to President Seguier's fine expression, gave sentences, not services, "rendait des arrets, et non pas des services" while the administration, which was almost as permanent as the magistracy, had time to do good work and did it. In short, except for the criminal classes, and those incorrigible revolutionists who ask perpetually for the impossible, everybody felt that his security, his liberty, and his faith, were well protected, and, as I heard said on all sides when I came back from my voyages, people felt they were well governed. It is true that if I opened the newspapers I generally read to the contrary in them--but if there were some few serious organs of public opinion among these journals, edited by courageous and talented men, who did their best to serve their country by their writings, whatever their opinions might be, how many more had editors who were mere slander-mongers, and columns all the more eagerly read, the more calumnious they were, and the more they pandered to every envious and subversive passion. Such men were the spokesmen of that increasingly numerous class of speculators, who relinquish any useful career to seek fortune in the chances of politics. According to them, oppression and corruption had grown intolerable, and would never cease until power passed into their own immaculate hands. They alone possessed the secret for turning France into a terrestrial Paradise, by applying in all SINCERITY the great and high-sounding principles, liberty, equality and fraternity. This SINCERITY of application, which has been so frequently announced, dallies somewhat in its coming, especially as regards equality, which to so many people merely means, "That which I have not nobody else shall have." The word equality is seductive truly, and in every self-respecting community equality before the law must be utterly absolute for all men. But so long as science discovers no means for making all men equally intelligent and all women equally beautiful, I shall continue to look upon universal and blind equality as the most absurd and the most dangerous of chimeras. These reflections did not occur to me at the period I speak of. I was far too careless in the year 1840 to bother my head about the conundrums set by our office-seekers, "place-hunters" as the Americans call them. While they were amusing themselves with the fancies, envious, irreligious, unhealthy, and above all self-interested, which they posed as deducing from the principles of 1789, a far more terrible revolution than the French one--for it was to strike the poor as well as the rich--was shortly to burst upon us; the revolution brought about by the use of steam and electricity and rapidity of communication. Few people in those days foresaw the complete subversion of all the conditions of labour and food supply and life itself, which was to overtake all the peoples gathered together in old-established communities on worn-out soil, a subversion which is only in its beginning as yet, and the remedy for which we cannot discover.