We have in all this evidently matter to encourage the good genius of France. The life of nations is neither easier nor less mixed with good and evil, with successes and reverses, than the life of individuals; but assuredly, in spite of what is wanting to it, and in spite of its sorrows, the actual state of our country, as well as its long history, open a wide field to the efforts and the hopes of the men of elevated, resolute, and honest minds, who are occupying themselves in earnest with its destiny.
What, in order to attain their object, can be, ought to be, the conduct of the men engaged in this patriotic design, men who have it at heart to second the good current and to stem the evil current, which have both set in amongst us? Upon what conditions and by what means can we hope to pass through the sieve of good sense and of moral sense the confused ideas which plague us, and to find an issue for the public out of the doubts and hesitation which are a source of languor and enervation to the soul?
Political Liberty and Belief in Religion, the movement of society in advance and the impulse of the soul towards eternity, Free Government and Christianity, these are the two forces to which we should recur, and the only ones capable of remedying this disease of trouble and doubt which afflict both our thoughts and our conduct, and which at one time impairs, at another paralyses, our understanding.
I have no intention here to speak of political liberties in the abstract, and of their necessity either to a country in order to guarantee to it a good administration at home and abroad, or to individuals in order to secure their interests, moral and material. The right of France to these liberties, and their opportuneness to her at this moment, have recently been set in their clearest light, and established in all their force on their highest stage, in the bosom of the legislative body. [Footnote 2] It is solely because of its influence upon that ill of our epoch, the complication of questions and the hesitations of opinion, that I speak here of political liberty; I regard it as one of the two great remedies against this ill.
[Footnote 2: Discourse of M. Thiers, Sur les libertés nécessaires et sur la liberté de la presse, in the séances of the 11th January, 1864, 13th February, 1866, 30th January, 7th, 8th, 15th, 21st, and 22nd February, 1868.]
When all questions are agitated pell mell, and all minds are perplexed, the first salutary result consequent upon liberty is that it sets all opinions and all intentions in contact and in conflict. At first, and for a time, this simultaneous invasion of so many complex facts, and of so many diverse and contrary ideas, does but add to the perplexity of the questions and to the confusion of minds; but little by little, and quickly too, provided liberty endures, the winnowing process produces its effect upon the questions, and light penetrates into the understandings: the different facts, and problems which these facts suggest, are set in turn in their place, and valued only for as much as they are worth; actors and spectators grow accustomed to them all, and begin to form more precise conceptions of them.