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CHAPTER X. 



POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



THE second cause of progress forms really only a part of 

 the first, although its action is different. This is the good 

 public feeling of the English, which, for more than a cen- 

 tury and a half, has preserved them at once from the 

 power of despotism and from revolutionary disorders 

 both so fatal to every kind of labour. Nothing like the 

 latter half of Louis XIV/s reign, the entire reign of Louis 

 XV., and the miseries of the Eevolution, has afflicted this 

 favoured nation. The eighteenth century, so disastrous 

 to us from beginning to end, was for her a period of con- 

 tinuous advancement ; and when we began our not unin- 

 terrupted course, she was three quarters of a century in 

 advance. 



Two hundred years ago, France, in agriculture as in 

 everything else, was the farthest advanced of the two. 

 The twelve years which elapsed from the peace of Vervins 

 to the death of Henry IV., formed perhaps the brightest 

 of those short periods of prosperity which appear at dis- 

 tant intervals, brief and rare, in the dark and bloody 

 course of our history. The annalist has few events to 

 chronicle during those years, apparently so blank ; they 

 are not remarkable for either wars or passages of histori- 

 cal note. Bat the popularity of Henry IV., the only king 

 the nation ever loved, sufficiently shows what they were. 



