This is the essential aim of every community of men; and the
institutions and guarantees of free government are the means of
attaining it. It is clear that, in the eighth century, on the ruins of
the Roman and beneath the blows of the barbaric world, the
Gallo-Frankish nation, vast and without cohesion, brutish and ignorant,
was incapable of bringing forth, so to speak, from its own womb, with
the aid of its own wisdom and virtue, a government of the kind. A host
of different forces, without enlightenment and without restraint, were
everywhere and incessantly struggling for dominion, or, in other words,
were ever troubling and endangering the social condition. Let there but
arise, in the midst of this chaos of unruly forces and selfish passions,
a great man, one of those elevated minds and strong characters that can
understand the essential aim of society, and then urge it forward, and
at the same time keep it well in hand on the roads that lead thereto,
and such a man will soon seize and exercise the personal power almost of
a despot, and people will not only make him welcome, but even celebrate
his praises, for they do not quit the substance for the shadow, or
sacrifice the end to the means.
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