than the intervention of the Pope in his government: by "the grace of God" he seeks to enroll himself among hereditary reigning families, and to establish an identity between their cause and his. As Emperor

they had been loaded with favors. During the Italian war (1859) the priests were but partially prevented from putting up public prayers for Austria. This hostile attitude, which he ought to have foreseen, stupified the Emperor, who had fan-by the national will," he frankly decied he might lean on the material strength of the army on the one hand, and, on the other, on the moral power of the clergy, and by combining these forces like the two parts of a vice, compress, and, if necessary, stifle, the refractory bourgeoisie. The vice necessarily lost its hold when one of its arms was broken, and immediately the whole Fusionist party, men of fashion and shopkeepers, profiting by this break-down of the system to show their spirit of opposition to the Empire, followed in the wake of the clergy, and thus gave us the curious spectacle of the old sectaries of Voltaire screaming "Sacrilege," because the temporal dominion of the Pope was curtailed. This question has now become a serious one, so serious and so complicated that the Emperor dares not solve it. He is caught between the horns of an inextricable dilemma; if he abandons the Pope, he destroys, or at any rate enfeebles, the principle of authority, in virtue of which he has hitherto governed; if he does not abandon him, he is false to the principles laid down by the French Revolution-- principles which he so often invokes, and of which he calls himself the representative, or, we might rather say, the dynastic expression. Therefore he remains motionless, like Balaam's ass.

From the earliest days of the Second Empire, any clear-sighted person might easily have foreseen the obstacles against which its founder would have to contend:

the very heading of the Imperial decrees foreshadowed his future difficulties, for Napoleon III. entitles himself Emperor "by the grace of God, and the national will." All the mystery of his political indecision, and perhaps even the determining cause of a fall clearly inevitable, lies hid in that formula. As Emperor "by the grace of God," he links himself on to a dynasty which affirms its rights; he gives a pledge to all sovereigns by right divine; he reassures the old reactionary societies still trembling at the revolution; he acknowledges a heavenly dispensation in human affairs, which, in the Sovereign of France, is equivalent to admitting a Catholic intervention, which is no other

clares himself the offspring of the revolution, the elected chief of the nation, the chosen mandatory of the sovereignty of the people; he repudiates inheritance by divine right, declines all supernatural intervention, since he asserts himself to have been raised by human forces alone; he is the ally of the peoples against their hereditary kings, and identifies their cause with that of the French people, of whom he is, so to say, but the freely elected first executive magistrate. We doubt whether Napoleon III. had maturely considered, or even clearly understood, what he was about when he adopted a formula embodying two incompatible principles. We rather believe him to have yielded to the habits of political dissimulation, which, in similar cases, is said to be admissible. He probably wished to reässure all parties, which is the surest way to alarm all, and to hold out distant hopes both to conservative and to revolutionary Europe. The attempt to weld together these two opposite principles, opposite as fire and water, was in fact to provoke the flagrant contradictions of which the Imperial policy has set an example, every time the Emperor found himself face to face with either of them armed in its own defense. By trying to conciliate them, and thus remain true to the spirit of his formula, he has discontented and turned against himself at the same time both the principles which he sought to obey.

This ambiguous policy is especially remarkable with regard to Italian affairs. Two examples will illustrate our meaning, and at the same time show the inconsistencies that are too apt to result from false premises. When he sent his fleet to Gaëta to protect that uninteresting person Francis II., Napoleon III. acted as an Emperor by the grace of God, and offended those in whose opinion he reigns by the national will; when he recalled his squadrons without having saved the ousted young monarch, he acted as an Emperor by the national will, and offended those in whose opinion he reigns by the grace of God. It is the same at Rome to leave a garrison there in spite of the unanimous wishes of Italy, is act

of view, we might be induced to believe perceiving that all these new arteries are that Napoleon III. cherished a scheme strategical lines, isolating a barrack or a of founding what we must call a colonial fort, permitting the use of artillery, and empire. The expedition to Cochin China, abutting, like so many defensive trenches, certain projects relating to the Isthmus at the Imperial abode, which, by the comof Panama, the ill-repressed covetous pletion of the Louvre, and the inclosure longings after San Domingo, the proba- of a private garden taken off the Tuileries, ble claim to Madagascar, the discussed has itself become a fortress capable of conpurchase of two hundred leagues of the taining a garrison of twenty thousand Abyssinian coast, seem to concur in prov-men, and of holding out for six months. ing that the present chief of the State In this, again, a double aim has been purdreams of maritime possessions which would authorize a considerable increase of his navy. This is but a supposition as yet, but there are grounds for believing that it is not a gratuitous one.

sued and partially attained-to make Paris an unrivaled city dating from the Napoleonic era, and to render revolutions impossible; but whoever has seen one of those strange up-heavings to which Paris is endemically subject will know how absurd this last dream is.

It is certainly much to make gardens for the people, to secure employment for the workmen, to found hospitals for the

Had Napoleon III. been inspired by a really strong dynastic idea, he would have worked inwards by giving France the institutions she requires, and has demanded for now nearly eighty years. But no serious internal reforms have been attempt-aged, and asylums for infants; but it is ed, and half-measures only have been adopted. It is true that the Emperor leans on the bulk of the inhabitants, of France, on the most numerous and poorest classes, but, though they are his support, he fears them. He loves the common people, to whom alone he owes his elevation. He is eager for their material advantage, and, on occasion, he adopts the sentimental line of policy, which sovereigns find so easy and so successful; thus, during the floods, he was seen to set off for the inundated towns, and himself distribute assistance to the needy. Popularity and humanity went hand-inhand, and, in this case, nothing could be better. He is anxious to keep the laboring classes constantly employed, and, in this point of view, the ruinous embellishments of Paris are in reality well-organized "national work-shops," with an aim of utility; but by these very improvements the workmen are driven out of Paris, the palaces they build afford no homes for them, and a double aim is thus pursued and attained-employment of the laborers and their removal beyond the walls, where they would be less dangerous in case of an insurrection. A new Paris has been created by the magic power of millions; the citizen is enchanted with the spacious boulevards and the long, wide streets; he may think they have cost rather dear, but he consoles himself while chatting of an evening under the trees of a freshly planted square, as he admires his renovated town, without

not enough. In this exclusive anxiety for material objects, a culpable neglect has cast the wants of mind and soul into the shade. Not an effort has been made to improve the intellectual condition of the people. The most patriotic Frenchmen deplore that while Prussia and Switzerland, and even the smallest Protestant States of Germany, have wise and thoroughly intelligent laws, which render instruction compulsory for all their citizens,* without distinction of rank or sex, France, with her noisy rather than wellfounded pretensions of leading the vanguard of civilization, makes no attempt to diffuse education in her own territory. The axiom that to be governable the people should remain ignorant, is French and peculiarly Catholic. This idea is both false and stupid, since it forcibly leads to a confusion between rights and duties, and thereby necessarily brings on revolutions. The Empire has done nothing to rescue France from the profound ignorance in which she stagnates; on the contrary, by its regulations respecting hawkers, it carefully examines every volume published, reads, comments, takes fright at a word, is alarmed at an allusion, and forbids the sale in the country districts, while superstitious almanacs or collections of indecent anecdotes are allowed to circulate freely. All the persons who, for the last ten years, have demanded the suppression of this iniquitous censorship, called the commis

*See note at page 33.

ter of the Interior permission to make trial of his aërostatic machine. The Home Department was at that time administered by M. Léon Faucher, who, though imbued with Orleanism, subsequently died of grief at not having rallied to the coup d'état of December in the success of which he had not believed. He was deaf to the entreaties of Pétin, and obstinately refused to grant the requisite authorization. Pétin, hoping to overcome the objections of the minister, returned to him, accompanied by two well-known authors, MM. Maxime Du Camp and Théophile Gautier. In vain did these two gentlemen employ their best rhetoric. The poor inventor, driven to despair by the refusals of the minister, vehemently insisted on the incalculable advantages that civilization would derive from aërial navigation, more frequent communication between different nations, freedom of trade, progressive abolition of war. M. Léon Faucher suddenly interrupted him, in a rage, by exclaiming: แ We will have none of your balloons, your railroads already give us too much trouble." This phrase, summing up, in its stupid brutishness, the whole administrative system of France, which in reality has long been no better than government by the police, put an end to the discussion, and destroyed all the hopes of Pétin; he left France, and went to America, where we know not what became of him.

sion du colportage, which is an important | cleaned without reference to the authorisection of the Ministry of the Interior, ties, obliged him to solicit from the Minishave been treated as revolutionists; and as to those who desire to see the Government intervene on behalf of the mental elevation of the people by making education compulsory, and, if possible, gratuitous, they are merely styled Utopians, and classed as belonging to the category of madmen. This is comprehensible if we take the pains to reflect and realize to ourselves the fact that silence and repression have always been the ideal of every successive government of France. The recollections of the eighteenth century have given Frenchmen the reputation of being light-minded, fond of novelty, and in love with progress. This is a manifest error, and has been abjured by all those who have studied with some perspicacity a people peculiarly plodding, and attached to traditions the bonds of which are only broken through violently to be resumed with the greater fervor. England, Belgium, and the United States were netted over with railways before France had constructed even one. Literature, art, science herself, so perpetually in motion, are all carefully confined to their traditional paths by academies founded ad hoc. Politicians take for their models the statesmen extolled by history, and the proudest day of the life of M. Guizot was that on which some absurd and violent orator, whose name we forget, compared him to Mazarin, to whom, by the by, he never had the slightest resemblance. Two anecdotes, the authenticity of which we can guarantee, will best illustrate the inconceivable routine peculiar to a nation that has such vast pretensions never to act like any other.

The other anecdote was cotemporaneous with the one we have just related, and we beg our readers to remark that this also occurred under the Republic. The anniversary of the birth of Pierre Corneille (the sixth of June) was to be celebrated at the French Theater, and M. Théophile Gautier, one of the most eminent poets now living in France, was requested to compose a piece of verses for the occasion. He chose for his subject, Corneille, obliged to leave off writing to repair his own shoe, and blamed Louis XIV. for having left

In October, 1851, under the Republic, and two months before the coup d'état, a mechanician of the name of Pétin asserted that he had discovered the secret of aërial navigation. The scientific world shrugged its shoulders at the idea, and the inventor addressed himself to the artists and literary men, who are at least more accessible to novelty. The poor man had spent his whole fortune and that of his wife in the "Corneille sans souliers, Molière sans tombeau;" construction of enormous balloons, sustaining a car of fantastic form. He had ruined himself, and counted on the success of his experiments to compensate for all his losses. When his preparations were complete, French usages, which do not

and wound up by saying,

"Dans la postérité, perspective inconnue, La poëte grandit, et le roi diminue."

allow even the front of a house to be The Minister of the Interior, represented