Page:The Royal Family of France (Henry).djvu/66

 VI.

LEGITIMACY, OR RIGHT.

"," wrote the eminent French statesman Royer Collard, "is the grandest and most fruitful idea ever conceived by modern nations. It is a living representative of individual right, the noble inheritance of humanity, of which, if we are once deprived, nothing more remains to us on earth. Legitimacy belongs to us more than to any other nation, because no other Royal Family possesses it as wholly and as fully as the Royal Family of France does."

M. Guizot said: "Hereditary right and legitimacy must exist everywhere, that society may be permanent and authority duly exercised. The heredity of thrones has no other aim than to place right on the throne, that so it may exist everywhere. A legitimate King cannot be made, any more than can a free people. The idea and the feeling of right, which is the true principle of the institution in both cases, and is its motive power, cannot permeate it throughout in a day. All things in their origin are the product of violence, and violence distorts them even whilst creating them. The essence of right is sullied and defaced by the action of the unruly passions of violence. Time must take it in hand, free it, and foster it, cleanse it from the coarse alloy which error and violence have mingled with it, till at last it stands forth brilliant and pure. When, therefore, a true legitimate rule is available,, one whose claims are the result of centuries, and which, though suspended, have yet never been destroyed; when this legitimate rule has been and is ready again to become the institution I have spoken of, it would surely be a singular folly not to welcome it, not to strive earnestly to realize all the advantages it offers, instead of setting oneself the task of remaking what already exists, of en- 60