Page:Coubertin - France since 1814, 1900.djvu/92

 leaders, and consequently no discipline. A mischievous and violent Press, that mistook intransigeance for strength and carping for cleverness, picked holes in every clause of the proposed measure, and did its work so thoroughly that failure seemed certain, and the Bill had to be withdrawn. Again, as in the time of Louis XVIII., it was the Government that did its duty and the parties that failed in theirs. History, at least, has avenged Martignac. All the great Liberals — Guizot, Duvergier de Hauranne, even Dupin and Odilon-Barrot — have acknowledged in their Mémoires that they were collaborators in a tremendous blunder.

The failure was not so much the failure of a Bill as the failure of a policy ; the King, if he had stood resolutely by his Ministers, could have given them the time and the means to recover their position ; but he never dreamt of such a thing. If, in the most unexpected manner, he had grown a little wiser in the exercise of supreme powder, he could not rise to the idea of equilibrium which had inspired his brother; he could not acquire a sense of policy which was not in him. He only understood one thing — that Martignac and