It is the government of prudence, because it is also that of great responsibility.
An empire is the stake of a monarch--the throne is everywhere a guarantee of immobility.

When we are placed on high we fear every shake, for we have but to lose or to fall.
When then a nation is placed in a sufficing territory, with settled laws, fixed interests, sacred creeds, its worship in full force, its social classes graduated, its administration organised, it is monarchical in spite of seas, rivers, or mountains.

It abdicates and empowers the monarchy to foresee, to will, to act for it.

It is the most perfect of governments for such functions.

It calls itself by the two names of society itself, _unity_ and _hereditary right_.
IX.
If a people, on the contrary, is at one of those epochs when it is necessary to act with all the intensity of its strength in order to operate within and without one of those organic transformations which are as necessary to people as is a current to waves or explosion to compressed powers--a republic is the obligatory and fated form of a nation at such a moment.
For a sudden, irresistible, convulsive action of the social body, the arm and will of all is needed; the people become a mob, and rush headlong to danger.