XXV. 1831. CHAP. would represent nothing but the will of the monarch, and become an instrument the more for ministerial corruption or tyrannic power. By the first system, you will merely have two chambers elected by the same persons, and devoted to the same interests, and alike hostile to the superiorities, now defenceless, and the Crown. By the second system, the Chamber of Peers is struck at the heart-its respectability, its independence are gone; it can serve only to veil the despotism of the sovereign. Take away its name, you will have a falsehood the less in the structure of society. 98. "It is in vain to oppose to these eternal truths the Continued. common argument that merit is not hereditary, that the talents of the father do not pass to the son, and that a hereditary chamber may become a mere chamber of fools. Be it so. Talents do not always pass; but traditions pass, feelings are communicated by descent, and that suffices for our argument. But is it true that talents are not hereditary? There are many examples to the contrary, especially in descent by the mother's side. The peerage is composed of two or three hundred families: if talent is awanting in some of them, it will not be awanting in others; and allow me to say, if men of talent sometimes are the fathers of fools, fools are as often the fathers of men of talent. 99. "Nothing but hereditary succession can render the Continued. peerage independent of the influence of the Crown on the one hand, and the favour of the people on the other. If experience has proved that an upper chamber is indispensable to form a check upon the precipitance of the lower, is it not expedient that it should be respected? But how can it ever be so, if it is either the instrument of a sovereign's pleasure or a people's caprice? As now constituted, the peerage is not a privilege; it is a political right, like royalty or the elective franchise, accorded to particular persons or families, not for their own, but for the general good. Hereditary right, in forming the basis XXV. 1831. of a new aristocracy, can never now revive the abuses of CHAP. the ancient régime; they have for ever been rendered impossible by civil equality, and the eligibility of all to all offices. Aristocracy, as an exclusive caste, has been destroyed, without return; but it is otherwise with a generic assemblage of great families, modern glories, scientific celebrities, senatorial services. Their preservation and progressive increase is an essential part of the social system as it exists in our day. By a universal and indelible instinct of our nature, so long as the transmission of fortunes is permitted will mankind look in the son for the illustration of the father. 100. "Families already founded exist in society; more are every day added to them. What is to become of their Continued. descendants? If you do not identify them with the Government, they will become hostile to it. By making the aristocracy hereditary, you do for it what you have already done for the throne by declaring its descent fixed; you will neutralise all the tyrannies which might aim at elevating themselves to supreme power. In the hereditary peerage they will be blended together, and actuated by an interest conservative of society; standing separate, they might, from individual ambition, tear it in pieces. The most effective way to render an aristocracy harmless is to declare it hereditary; for then its members, for their families' sake, are restrained from doing evil; and every one, seeking to preserve and transmit what he has acquired, becomes a check upon his neighbour. Should the system of an elective aristocracy triumph, it is easy to foresee what will be the consequence. The sons of the great families will no longer submit to be nullified in the elective peerage. They will aspire to seats in the Chamber of Deputies; and what barrier will be adequate to restrain their ambition, if to the lustre of ancient descent and the influence of present fortune, they add the prestige of popular favour, the sway of ready eloquence in a popularly elected assembly? It was thus XXV. 1831. CHAP. that Cæsar overturned the liberties of ancient Rome. The elective chamber is, and ever will be, in a free country, the chamber of ambition.. Thence it was that Chatham said to his son Pitt, "Never enter the House of Peers." If you deprive the peers of their hereditary right, the great families will throw themselves into the elective chamber, as formerly they did into the antechambers of the Emperor. 101. "It is from want of this element that all governments Concluded. hitherto constructed have been incomplete. Republicanism is but a sketch; it leaves the principal figure unfilled up, which is that of royalty. Democracy is but a sketch ; it also leaves a question unresolved, that of an aristocracy. A representative monarchy leaves none; it is complete in all its parts. As a government, it has the unity of monarchy; as a republic, it has the perseverance of aristocracy, the energy of democracy. That is the government which the country requires. The most liberal writers on government-M. Manuel, the President of the Commission on Government during the Hundred Days; M. Benjamin Constant, in his published work on Political Constitutions-admit this. It is now permitted to us, probably for the last time, to arrest the course of our innovations, I dare not say of our destruction. We have 1 Ann. Hist, had enough of ruin, of changes introduced against the xiv. 299, lessons of experience. We are now invited to repose. v. 356, 361; Maintain then, consecrate anew, the hereditary peerage, Blanc, iii. and you will not only have preserved an institution, the niteur, Oct. protector alike of liberty and order, but you will have 311; Cap. Louis 30, 32; Mo 20-29, 1831. 102. House pass repelled the invasion of anarchy, and restored the social edifice tottering to its fall."1 Such is a summary of the arguments on both sides on The Lower this great question, the stirring of which was the first the bill by lasting result of the Revolution of July. But it was a great ma- known throughout what the result would be; the Chamber was bound, by imperious mandates from the electors, to destroy the hereditary peerage. Casimir Périer and jority. XXV. 1831. the orator of the Commission confessed with a sigh that CHAP. the hereditary peerage was on principle the most advisable, but that circumstances, which were irresistible, compelled its abandonment. The vote was taken, amidst great anxiety, on the 18th of October, and the result was Oct. 18. a majority of 346 against the hereditary Chamber-the numbers being 386 to 40. The nomination of peers, who were to hold their seats for life only, was committed to the Crown; but it was restricted in the choice to certain categories," as they were called-that is, certain classes of persons eminent in civil or military affairs-from whom alone the selection could be made. These categories, however, were so numerous and capacious as to admit nearly every person who could by possibility be dignified by the peerage, and thus gave the sovereign, practically Ann. Hist. speaking, the choice of the whole nation to form a sénate 320. for the purpose of putting the last seal upon the laws.1 66 1 xiv. 319, peers to through the Upper where it Nov. 20. There remained, however, the existing Chamber of 103. Peers for the bill to pass before it could become law; Creation of and servile as the Senate on many occasions had shown itself to be, it was doubtful whether it would put the final seal to its degradation by voting its own abolition. A House, month elapsed before the question was brought before passes, the Upper House, during which the point was anxiously deliberated in the Cabinet what means should be adopted to overcome the opposition of the peers. During this period of anxious suspense, it was ascertained that the majority against the proposed measure would be at least thirty. In these circumstances, the Cabinet, deeming a crisis as having arrived, which must terminate either in a creation of peers, a popular insurrection, or a coup d'etat, preferred the former alternative. On the 20th November there appeared in the Moniteur a royal ordinance creating thirty-six persons-all, of course, of the liberal partypeers for life. This step was decisive of the fate of Towards the end of the next month it was introduced into the now swamped and degraded the measure. XXV. CHAP. Chamber of Peers; but so strongly rooted was the opposition to the measure, that, even after the creation of 1831. 36 peers to carry it through, the majority was only 33, 1 Moniteur, the numbers being 103 to 70. But for the creation, the measure would have been lost by a majority of 3. Ann. Hist. Next day thirteen of the peers, embracing the representatives of some of the oldest families in France, resigned their seats in the Upper Chamber. 1 Nov. 20, and Dec. 28, 1831; xiv. 319, 333. 104. on this event. Thus was finally effected, after its restoration by NapoReflections leon and Louis XVIII., the destruction of the hereditary peerage in France. The unanimous concentration of the efforts of the liberal party in France upon this object, to the entire neglect of others of far greater moment in the interest of freedom, is one of the most curious circumstances in the history of the Revolution, and most characteristic of the disposition of men, even the most enlightened, to look all day to the east, expecting still to see the sun rise there. In 1789, when the first Revolution broke out, the aristocracy was with reason the object of dread, because it was more powerful than either the king or the people; and it was against it, accordingly, that the fervour of popular indignation was in the first instance chiefly directed. But in 1831, circumstances were entirely changed: the aristocracy had been, by the effects of the first convulsion, as much weakened as the executive had been strengthened, and the danger to the cause of freedom was no longer from the privileges of the nobility, but from the power of the sovereign. The confiscations of the Convention had deprived most of them of their estates; the revolutionary law of succession had parcelled out their fortunes; and the pitiable state of dependence of the majority of their number was revealed by the fact that they each received a pension of £300 a-year from the Crown. On the other hand, the centralising system, and the immense increase of government patronage, had augmented the power of the chief magistrate, whether emperor or king, as much as it had thrown |