The Orleanist-Fusionists are
Bourbonists only from calculation. They wish for the Comte de Paris for
their king, not from any affection for him or for his family, but because
they think that such an arrangement offers to France the best chance of
a stable Government in some degree under popular control: and they are
ready to tolerate the intermediate reign of Henri V. as an evil, but one
which must be endured as a means of obtaining something else, not very
good in itself but less objectionable to them than a Bonapartist dynasty
or a Republic.
* * * * *
'The Legitimists have been so injured in fortune and in influence, they
have been so long an oppressed caste, excluded from power, and even from
sympathy, that they have acquired the faults of slaves, have become
timid, or frivolous, or bitter. Their long retirement from public life
has made them unfit for it. The older members of the party have forgotten
its habits and its duties, the younger ones have never learnt them. Their
long absence from the Chambers and from the departmental and municipal
councils, from the central and from the local government of France, has
deprived them of all aptitude for business.
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