In some respects they may be described as making for progress.

Their establishment gave to the Revolution that solidity which it had previously lacked.

Among so "inflammable" a people as the French--the epithet is Ste.

Beuve's--it was quite possible that some of the chief civil conquests of the last decade might have been lost, had not the First Consul, to use his own expressive phrase, "thrown in some blocks of granite." We may intensify his metaphor and assert that out of the shifting shingle of French life he constructed a concrete breakwater, in which his own will acted as the binding cement, defying the storms of revolutionary or royalist passion which had swept the incoherent atoms to and fro, and had carried desolation far inland.

Thenceforth France was able to work out her future under the shelter of institutions which unquestionably possess one supreme merit, that of durability.