[89]
was a short document, but contained the most entire pledges of adherence to the Republic.
He would treat as enemies, he said, all who would attempt by illegal means to alter the Constitution.
His aim would be to establish society on its true basis, to consolidate the Democratic Institutions of the country, and to ameliorate the condition of the people.
He thanked the old government for what it had done to maintain the supremacy of the public authority, and passed a brief eulogy on General Cavaignac.
They had a great mission to accomplish-namely, to found a Republic in the interest of all, with a just and firm government, animated by a sincere love of progress, and neither reactionary nor utopian.
If they could not do great things, what they did do should, with the aid of God, be good.
This was a programme which might well have silenced the fears and stimulated the hopes of our correspondent.
After a brief but comprehensive allusion, in his final letter, to the inconclusive results realized in
France,
Germany,
Austria, and
Italy, and to the fact that the arrest of the revolution as a European movement had put an end to the fear of general war, “which seemed at first inevitable, then desirable, and then probable,” but which had “gradually faded away like a cloud from the horizon,” he passed on to a philosophical summary of the good produced by the revolution:
... Briefly it consists in the opening wide of the way of progress.
In the putting of society face to face with the questions on which its fate depends, and in the raising of many minds to solve them.
Of positive results it has little to show-nothing in comparison with the evils by which it has been attended.
But all evil is temporary.
Good is permanent and renews itself forever.
The carnage of the battlefield disappears, but the liberty thereby achieved remains for the latest generations.
The impulse given to the heart and mind of Christendom by the year 1848 will wake after its
