In truth, its failure and confusion resulted less from the arbitrariness of its procedure, than from the hopeless absence of tenacity, conviction, and consistency in the substance and direction of its objects.

And this, again, was the result partly of the complex and intractable nature of the opposition with which successive ministers had to deal, and partly of the overpowering strength of those Asiatic maxims of government which Richelieu and Lewis XIV.

had invested with such ruinous prestige.

The impatience and charlatanry of emotional or pseudo-scientific admirers of a personal system blind them to the permanent truth, of which the succession of the decrepitude of Lewis XV.
to the strength of his great-grandfather, and of the decrepitude of Napoleon III.

to the strength of his uncle, are only illustrations.
The true interest of all these details about a mere book lies in the immense significance of the movement of political ideas and forces to which they belong.