It is not because a part of the government is elective that makes it less a despotism, if the persons so elected possess afterwards, as a parliament, unlimited powers. Election, in this case, becomes separated from representation, and the candidates are candidates for despotism.[323]
Napoleon once consulted the cleverest among the politicians who served him, respecting the durability of some of his institutions. "Ask yourself," was the answer, "what it would cost you to destroy them. If the destruction would cost no effort, you have created nothing; for politically, as well as physically, only that which resists endures." In the year 1802 the same great writer said: "Nothing is more pernicious in a monarchy than the principles and the forms of democracy, for they allow no alternative, but despotism and revolutions." With the additional experience of half a century, a writer not inferior to the last repeats exactly the same idea:--
Of all societies in the world, those which will always have most difficulty in permanently escaping absolute government will be precisely those societies in which aristocracy is no more, and can no more be.[324]
French constitutionalism was but a form by which the absence of self-government was concealed. The State was as despotic under Villèle or Guizot as under either of the Bonapartes. The Restoration fenced itself round with artificial creations, having no root in the condition or in the sympathies of the people; these creations simply weakened it by making it unpopular. The hereditary peerage was an anomaly in a country unused to primogeniture, and so was the revival, in a nation of sceptics, of the Gallican union between Church and State. The monarchy of July, which was more suited to the nature of French society, and was thus enabled to crush a series of insurrections, was at last forced, by its position and by the necessity of self-preservation, to assume a very despotic character. After the fortifications of Paris were begun, a tendency set in which, under a younger sovereign, would have led to a system hardly distinguishable from that which now prevails; and there are princes in the House of Orleans whose government would develop the principle of democracy in a manner not very remote from the institutions of the second Empire. It is liberalism more than despotism that is opposed to liberty in France; and it is a most dangerous error to imagine that the Governments of the French Charter really resemble ours. There are States without any parliament at all, whose principles and fundamental institutions are in much closer harmony with our system of autonomy. Mr. Goldwin Smith sees half the truth, that there is something in the French nation which incapacitates it for liberty; but he does not see that what they have always sought, and sometimes enjoyed, is not freedom; that their liberty must diminish in proportion as their ideal is attained; and that they are not yet familiar with the theory of political rights. With this false notion of what constitutes liberty, it is not surprising that he should repeatedly dwell on its connection with Protestantism, and talk of "the political liberty which Protestantism brought in its train" (p. 120). Such phrases may console a Protestant reader of a book fatal to the Protestant ascendency in Ireland; but as there are no arguments in support of them, and as they are strangely contradicted by the facts in the context, Mr. Goldwin Smith resorts to the ingenious artifice of calling to mind as many ugly stories about Catholics as he can. The notion constantly recurs that, though the Protestants were very wicked in Ireland, it was against their principles and general practice, and is due to the Catholics, whose system naturally led them to be tyrannical and cruel, and thus provoked retaliation. Mr. Smith might have been reminded by Peter Plymley that when Protestantism has had its own way it has uniformly been averse to freedom: "What has Protestantism done for liberty in Denmark, in Sweden, throughout the north of Germany, and in Prussia?"--not much less than democracy has done in France. An admirer of the constitutions of 1791, 1814, or 1830 may be excused if he is not very severe on the absolutism of Protestant countries.