The mistake or the misfortune of the doctrinarian party was to create aged youth.
They assumed the poses of wise men.
They dreamed of engrafting a temperate power on the absolute and excessive principle.
They opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative liberalism to the liberalism which demolishes.
They were heard to say: "Thanks for Royalism!
It has rendered more than one service.
It has brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect.
It is faithful, brave, chivalric, loving, devoted.
It has mingled, though with regret, the secular grandeurs of the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the nation.
Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution, the Empire, glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age.
But this mistake which it makes with regard to us,-- have we not sometimes been guilty of it towards them?
The Revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to be intelligent on all points. To attack Royalism is a misconstruction of liberalism.
What an error! And what blindness!