ber of those who deemed the surrender of them a cheap price to pay for security and peace was so incomparably large; the acclamation with which nineteen-twentieths of the peoplenumerically reckoned, as every thing has long been reckoned there-then or shortly after ratified all the Emperor's acts, and signed away their own individual freedoms and responsibilities, was so prompt and so universal,-that he can hardly be accused of more than of lawlessness in interpreting the national desires, and skilful egotism in turning them to his own purposes. That he has suited the great mass of the nation more thoroughlyunderstood them more intimately-hit their fancies, mastered their interests, done their work, incomparably better than any of their previous rulers, admits, we think, of no doubt whatever. He undertook to do all their political business for them, on his own terms and in his own way;-and they were too sick of their own blunders not to be thankful to him for the offer. This is a very different thing from crushing and keeping down the liberties of a struggling and aspiring people. As a matter of political as apart from personal morals, the question very much resolves itself into this: whether the wishes of the cultivated and educated few, or of those of the numerical majority, are to be deferred to in the establishing of the government and institutions of a country? That nearly the whole élite of the French nation-those to whom politics was a liberal profession, those to whom political philosophy was an earnest and cherished study, those who think and who would fain write and speak on political questions-are opposed to the Emperor, and have been suppressed and reduced to virtual slavery by him, is indisputably true. And those whose creed it is-as it is ours-that the intelligence of a country and not its uneducated masses ought to govern and decide, will condemn him as guilty of the unpardonable sin. But this has never been the creed of Frenchmen since the great transformation of 1789,-and yet only by the adherents and on the principles of this creed can the autocracy of Louis Napoleon, independent of its genesis, be held a usurpation or a tyranny. Equality and universal suffrage-two fatal errors are the worshiped ideas of the Gallic mind; and these have consecrated and enthroned the Emperor. And actions must be judged mainly by the standard of ethics and belief in the nation which commits them-political actions more than any other. Moreover, holding the doctrine that, as a general law, the more educated classes of a nation ought to bear rule, and that the will of an autocrat and the will of a democracy are both injurious foundations for civil polity, we are bound to say, that if any experience could shake our conviction in the habitual soundness of this doctrine, it would be the conduct of the great

body of the educated French politicians during the last fortyfive years, both when in power, when in opposition, and when in temporary subjugation and abeyance. From the year 1815 till the year 1848, the whole of their parliamentary history was a brilliant and sparkling display of incapacity for either constitutional government or lofty statesmanship-an incapacity the more sad and incurable because it was moral rather than intellectual. Petty passions, fierce and yet small factions, insatiable desire for unchecked power, inability to compromise or share, notions of public morality low in home affairs, ungenerous in foreign questions, and almost always narrow, selfish, and unworthy,these nearly sickened and wore out the advocates of middle-class rule. If we look only at three subjects—but three very significant ones-we shall be obliged to confess, with surprise and mortification, that the French proletaire and the Emperor, his nominee, seem capable of wiser instincts and nobler sentiments than either Orleanists, or Legitimists, or Republican statesmen-than either Guizot, Thiers, Chateaubriand, or Cavaignac. The men whom we have named, and nearly all whom they represent, could never either feel fairly towards Great Britain, or abstain from pandering to the hatred, envy, and suspicion of her, which lie so deep in the heart of the French nation; few of them could ever think or speak of Italian liberty without contempt and disgust; and none of them would have ventured even to conceive such a measure as the commercial treaty with England. Louis Napoleon has steadily kept friends with England, and can appreciate her; he has some sympathy with Italy, and has served her splendidly, in spite of the denunciations of "liberal" politicians; and he has inaugurated something like free trade. And the masses have accepted his policy in the first case and the last, and heartily and disinterestedly applauded it in the second.

It seems doubtful whether even now he is not willing to give a larger measure of political freedom to his Chambers than either the people approve, or than the liberal politicians deserve, or are able to use well. The factious virulence of temper, and the absence of any wide or sound views of national policy, displayed in the more recent discussions in the Corps Législatif, were sources of bitter grief and disappointment to all friends of parliamentary institutions. The bestdisposed monarch can scarcely be expected to concede enlarged privileges to deputies who use all that he does concede to attack the very foundations of his power; especially when he may be pardoned for the conviction that they are both less sagacious, less liberal, and less generous than himself. The writer before us draws a most graphic picture of the entire stagnation of all

political life in France; nor does he profess to see any symptoms of its revival.

"The longer the search, and the more earnest the seeker, the deeper will be the disappointment and the sadness. Ten short years, and all is forgotten, or remembered only to be cursed and laughed at. The artisan who once listened with devotion to the public reading of the paper in his atelier, and who might have given lessons in politics to many a member of the Chamber of Deputies, now cares no more about politics than the tool he handles. He has a vague sympathy for Italy, because he admires the man of the people, Garibaldi the pure, and because it is the French army which 'made' Italy. The bourgeois is frightened at the very word politics, and reads piously his semi-official paper, from which he tries to gather what the Emperor is going to do next. Of the upper classes, the great mass care only for telegrams from abroad, and announcements of the Moniteur, as influencing the quotations of the Exchange. Politics imply change and disturbance, hence risks and losses; they have been already the cause of much misery in the world, and above all in France. Let us guard ourselves against all further temptation. Besides, politics are a social bore;' freedom a dangerous illusion, which is easily caught by the mob and turned against their betters. Rather the rule of one man than that of the masses."

It is possible that this political lethargy, as a temporary and transition phase of French national life, may not be without its serviceable influence. It may give popular passions time to subside, factious enmities time to die away, wearied public feeling time to restore its elasticity, and arise refreshed by its slumber. It may give sounder notions of economy and government an opportunity to take root in the nation's mind by the close observation of an entirely new régime. The various parties who see what they have all lost by their insatiable and intolerant thirst for an undivided monopoly of power may possibly learn from their common catastrophe those lessons of moderation and of compromise without which all constitutional government is absolutely and for ever hopeless. An era of stagnation, succeeding to an era of such aimless and ceaseless agitation, may afford the people the interval of rest necessary to recover its tone. The enormous development of material wealth and comfort may render peace more welcome, by rendering war more disturbing and more ruinous. The national character may undergo a permanent modification, which, without rendering it more estimable or more lofty, may render it less externally mischievous. But it is impossible for the most resolute optimist to conceal that this refreshing slumber and

this contingent gain are being purchased at a price which, viewed from any moral stand-point, must be held to be enormous. This price is threefold. In the first place, the whole soul of the nation is concentrated upon money-making, and upon money-making rather by speculation than by sober and plodding industry. The spirit of stock-jobbing-than which there is scarcely any devil more demoralising-has seized upon all classes, and has been unscrupulously fostered by the Imperial entourage. "The almighty dollar" has grown to be almost as omnipotent, and quite as much worshiped, in France as in America. In the second place, the Imperial system has made it necessary to govern with inferior tools, and to raise only third-rate men to high place. The ablest, the proudest, and the purest minds of France naturally refused to serve under a rule so inaugurated and so directed. The cleverest statesmen and the most experienced administrators declined to obey a master whose selfish aims they clearly detected, but whose superior ability they did not recognise. Independent thinkers, with marked individualities, and strong convictions, and precise purposes, would not submit to become the mere clerks and instruments of an Emperor who consulted no one, deferred to no one, and thought out every thing for himself. Honourable politicians, with characters to lose, and names which they valued far above any Bonaparte, felt that it was impossible to join either the Court or the Government of a man who had no moral principles and no nobility of soul; who might drag them through any mire, and cover them with any shame; and who, if glory was to be gathered, would want it all for himself. The Emperor was, therefore, by the necessity of his position and his desires, driven to employ and surround himself with prefects and proconsuls who could help him little, and were certain to degrade him much, and with whom no great or noble men would choose to be mixed up. Hence the sad and injurious spectacle presented to the world of a régime establishing and maintaining its supremacy in one of the greatest nations of our day, from which yet every thing that is eminent in that nation for virtue, ability, or fame, stands resolutely and reprovingly aloof.

In the third place, whatever profit the strength and lucrative sagacity of the Imperial rule may bring to France, has been purchased by a torpor of the national intellect almost amounting to paralysis. Freedom is the very soul and essential condition of all mental activity and literary achievement. If thought and speech are fettered in any direction, they grow dead in all. If one field is prohibited, they retire from the rest. If debarred from the loftiest and most spirit-stirring subjects—and such are

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unquestionably those which deal with questions of government and social order-feebleness and stagnation spread over their efforts in all other lines. It is so now in France: there is little productiveness, and no greatness, in the literary life of the nation; and its degeneracy is not more shown in its general sterility than in the character of the scanty progeny to which it does give birth. Moreover, great literary efforts, worthy intellectual achievements, can only spring from aspirations after some noble purpose or faith in some good cause; and both faith and aspiration seem alike dead in France. There are doubtless some who keep their light trimmed and their lamp burning, but they do so in the secrecy and silence of their own soul.

To those who desire to understand the character and policy of the remarkable man who has transformed the aspect and now guides the destinies of France, we especially recommend the last chapter of the work before us, entitled "Gossip." It is by far the best thing that has been written on the subject; and its wisdom and penetration seem to us most admirable. The author traces all that is persistent and all that appears vacillating in the proceedings of the Emperor to the contradictory influences of his early exile and of the coup d'état, which are perpetually embarrassing and traversing each other. In the vicissitudes of his youthful career Louis Napoleon learned to appreciate, in a degree that no other ruler has done or could do, the strength and prevalence of the revolutionary element in Europe: he came into personal intimacy with its votaries; he penetrated their purposes; he was taught to admire their devotion, and to dread their indomitable courage and their fierce resentments; and it is not unreasonable to believe that he was, to a certain extent, affected with sympathy for their ideas. In the solitude of his long imprisonment at Ham he had ample leisure to digest all that he had seen and heard; he had time to read the history of his uncle, and to meditate on his own failures; and he had sagacity to draw from the whole conclusions which have become to him ingrained and ineffaceable convictions. He saw that the stirring ideas of nationality and popular sovereignty-the ideas of 1789-are those of the age, those which every where inspire and excite THE PEOPLE, those which sooner or later must prevail over all opposition,-those therefore which would bear up to supremacy and fame the leader who was sagacious enough to master them, and bold enough to undertake their championship. He recognised also that he had been unable to raise himself without them, and that his uncle fell from having broken faith with them after rising to empire as their embodiment. Having reached these convictions, his