'
'Of course I do,' he replied. 'And I cannot blame the Comte de Chambord
for doing what I do myself--for refusing to bind himself in
contingencies, and to disgust his friends in the hope of conciliating his
enemies.'
'Do you believe,' I asked, 'that the mere promise of a Constitution would
offend the Legitimists?'
'I do not think,' he answered, 'that they would object to a Constitution
giving them what they would consider their fair share of power and
influence.
'Under Louis Philippe they had neither, but it was in a great measure
their own fault.
'They have neither under this Government, for its principle is to rest on
the army and on the people, and to ignore the existence of the educated
classes.
'You see _that_ in its management of the press. 'Montalembert, or Guizot,
or Falloux, or I may publish what we like. We are not read by the soldier
or by the _proletaire_.[1] But the newspaper press is subject to a
slavery to which it was never reduced before. The system was first
elaborated in Austria, and I daresay will be copied by all the
Continental autocrats, for no inventions travel so quickly as despotic
ones.
'The public _avertissements_ are comparatively unimportant.
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