text:  And was it not now to assume even a more powerful influence on the fates of mankind? Was not the falling of the monarchical forest of so many centuries about to lay the land open to a new and perhaps a more powerful produce; where the free blasts of nature were to rear new forms and demand new arts of cultivation? The monarchy was falling--but was not the space cleared of its ruins to be filled with some new structure statelier still? Or if the government of the Bourbons were to sink for ever from the eyes of men were there to be no discoveries made in the gulf itself in which it went down; were there to be no treasures found in the recesses thus thrown open to the eye for the first time; no mines in the dissevered strata--no founts of inexhaustible freshness and flow opened by thus piercing into the bowels of the land? There are moments on which the destiny of a nation perhaps of an age turns