sincere lover of liberty sees in the Emperor of the French the most deadly enemy that genuine freedom has on the continent.

His whole career having

been one of treacherous despotism, every honorable mind wishes it to terminate in humiliation and disgrace. For twenty years, nearly, he has played a desperate game of monstrous egotism and base personal ambition; he has introduced into politics the practices of the brigand and the burglar, has sat like an incubus upon the development of the free energies of a noble nation, has even bullied the whole of Europe in the furtherance of his detestable schemes; and now that he has cast himself headlong into a conflict with a nation whose leaders are his masters, no less in diplomacy than in arms, we desire to see him hurled from his bad eminence. Not a soul in the United States, we are certain, desires to see the French people humiliated; they are a brave, gallant, and generous people; they have long stood in the foremost ranks of civilization; but they have allowed themselves to be trapanned and bamboozled by a wretched impostor, have tamely submitted to the ignominy of his tyrannical rule, and they must bear the consequence of their folly. They have abdicated their manhood in favor of what is termed personal government, and they cannot justly complain if they get enough of it before

the end.

WILLIAM AND LOUIS NAPOLEON.

What a striking contrast there has been in the various proclamations issued by the two leaders respectively of the nations now at war on the continent. An honest republican can have little regard for the personal aims of either of them; they are both dynasts, the one drawing his inspiration from the imperialism of Rome, and the other from the later Middle Ages-are both eager to maintain their mere family ascendency, and caring little for the real emancipation and advancement of the people. But William has shown himself an honorable, high-minded, dignified leader, "every inch a king;" while the other

has proved himself, what he really is, a trickster and a gambler, intent on his own personal glory, and hoping to gain by deception and bombast what he cannot win by native worth. How paltry, imbecile, and repulsive his first despatch to the Empress, in which, describing "Louis and I" as receiving "a baptism of fire," he extolled a poor little boy of thirteen years of age, who would be better engaged with his tops and marbles, for a tranquillity that moved the veteran soldiers to tears! What estimate could a man, capable of such heartless claptrap, have formed of the good sense of his countrymen and the world? Take again his address to the inhabitants of Metz, whom he abandons in the midst of a siege, while he exhorts them to courage and perseverance, and goes himself" to meet the invaders" in a direction where they were not! On the other hand, how moderate, measured, cautious, self-respecting, and truthful the despatches of King William, who tells what has occurred, without boasting and without concealments. "We have the victory," he says once, "but of our losses I dare not think!" How manly, too, direct, and honest, his reply to the Pope, frankly recognizing the good-will and Christian charity of the Head of Catholic Christendom, reciprocating his wishes for peace, but referring him, with an admirable directness, to him who had declared the war, and who was alone responsible for its continuance. All his utterances, indeed, thus far, have been those of a conscientious ruler, who felt that he was acting not in his own interests, or for his own personal glory, but as the representative of a great nation.

THE SOURCE OF NATIONAL STRENGTH.

One of the lessons of the war has been drawn so ably by a journal of this city, the Evening Post, that we think we cannot better express our own sentiments than transfer a part of its remarks to these columns. The argument is, that a government, to obtain great strength, even by the standard of war, should direct its efforts to the building up, not of a great army, but of a great nation.

"France is somewhat superior to the German states now at war in population, and greatly so in the numbers and cost of her standing army; she is and has long been thoroughly centralized in government, while they have been divided into many states, which, within four years, have been at war among themselves. There must, therefore, be some sources of national strength, not contained in statistical tables, in which Germany is vastly superior to France.

"Doubtless these are chiefly the superior honesty of the civil and military service, and the superior education of the people. When the Emperor Napoleon seized the throne, he was surrounded by a body of adventurers, whom he was compelled to use and to reward, but whose corrupt practices gave character to every branch of his government. From that day to this complaints have been loud and bitter of the stock-jobbing plots of his ministers, and the selfish and plundering schemes of their subordinates. A military government is always wasteful in the extreme; but add to this wastefulness general corruption, and it is easy to see how the immense sums which have been added to the French national debt have been squandered, without securing efficiency even in the army. A throne founded in dishonor and perjury and cemented by murder could not expect to be served in any other than its own pirate spirit; and the unquestionable disorder, bad discipline, and constant failures in supplies which marked the first movements of the Emperor's army to the frontier, are the necessary results of the general corruption of his service.

"On the other hand, Prussia is not a military despotism, but a constitutional monarchy, with a nation organized on a military basis. Her citizens are all soldiers, but they are citizens still. They identify themselves at all points with the interests of the nation, in peace as in war; and while their resources are not wasted in maintaining a million of men under arms through a long peace, they learn the military discipline, and always hold themselves ready to prac

tise it when needed. The German army is thus as truly a citizen army as our own. The government is stable; it is not afraid of individual freedom; its civil service and military staff are filled for competency, and not as the rewards of treason or of cruelty; and thus its administration is pure, patriotic, and vigorous.

"Again, in education the French people are behind those of many nations; the Germans are in advance of the world. In several large districts in France a majority of the adults are entirely illiterate; in Prussia a man who cannot write is rarer than in Massachusetts. Where Napoleon has wasted millions on his favorites and his army, the Prussian government has spent a fraction of the amount in securing the intelligence of its people. Man against man, a body of thinking, reading soldiers will always be more than a match for ignorant ones; and the unquestioned personal superiority of the German armies in this war must be ascribed more to their superior intelligence than to any other cause."

CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR.

Being without sufficient cause, will any good yet come of the war? Much suffering, much sorrow, much ruin will come of it; but can we hope for any real advantages to be derived from it, for the nations engaged or for the world? Can the overruling Providence permit so enormous a waste of life and treasure, without directing it to some adequate and beneficent end? For our part, we cannot believe it; not only our hopes but our convictions are, that it must terminate in some result greater than the mere political or territorial aggrandizement of either of the immediate parties to it. One thing is certain: in France there is an end to personal government. The imperial system, which is despotism with the forms of liberty, has forever gone down in contempt and disgrace, along with its principal exponent, Louis Napoleon. Never again can the French nation become so besotted as to trust its destinies to a single mind,

and that one of the basest and meanest that ever achieved high station. But having vomited the Bonapartes, will it go back to the Bourbons, older or younger? That too, we should say, is impossible. But for the miserable example of imbecility and self-stultification which Spain exhibits in sending round her government to various families, crying, Come and govern us, oh! superior mortal, we should say that this notion of blue-blooded families was exploded in Europe. France, assuredly, after the education of a hundred years of political change, is not so stupid and silly as to believe that any family has a right to govern it, or that any family has superior capacities for rulership. She, indeed, by the immortal utterances of '89, would appear more than all other nations essentially republican. Will she have the manliness, the good sense, the self-respect, to proclaim the republic? How can we doubt of it? Bonapartist and Bourbon will protest against it; the whole priestly party and the party of sycophants and swindlers, who believe in ranks, with many of the timid, money-making shopkeepers, to whom Republicanism is always presented as a red spectre, will intrigue against it; but the literary men, the artists, the workingmen, the men of insight and honesty, will demand it as the only rational solution of the problem.

But France a republic, as she must be inevitably, what is to hinder Spain from recovering her sanity, and instead of beseeching for a crowned head, trust to the sagacity and probity of her own people? Or, can Italy, when the once priest-ridden Spain is free, endure any longer the ascendency of her crapulous monarch, or Rome the senility of a Pope ruled by a conclave of cardinals? France, Spain, and Italy emancipated, will intellectual Germany remain in the background? No doubt the moderation of the present royal family, with the brilliant fame of the Crown-Prince as a soldier, will prolong its hold of power. To have conducted and terminated with success a great war against the first military nation of the conti

nent, will be a ground of gratitude and attachment to it far better than any of its hereditary and dynastic claims. Enthusiastic royalists indeed already begin to talk of reviving the Empire in the person of King William. But will the German mind, already so far advanced speculatively in political science, consent to such a recurrence to mediaval folly? Now, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when science has demonstrated the equal rights of men, the title of every human being to absolute justice, which is the recognition of his manhood; when the people have come to know that they, and not families or dynasties, are the only sources of power, and alone have the right to rule, will so enlightened a 1ace as the Germans tolerate any government but selfgovernment, any method of political organization but the republican? The outlook, we confess, on all sides is favorable to the republic; but so it was in 1848, so it was in 1830, so it was in 1813, and so in 1789; and yet the republic is a bugbear to large classes of the populations; while statesmen still see in it anarchy, and the priesthood the downfall of their order.

BURSTING OF THE BUBBLE.

Since the above notes were put in type, the imperial bubble has burst. Napoleon is no more; Cæsarism has played its last card; and the Prussian bayonets have let the wind and bravo out of the inflated posthume. A campaign of a single month has sufficed to expose the hollowness, the rottenness, the utterly base and corrupt condition of an adventurer, who for so many years has deluded France and bullied Europe. His armies, it appears, have been armies of pasteboard; his invinci ble military power scarcely more than empty brag; and his empire, which held the world in awe, a mere league of brigands and chevaliers d'industrie, who having seized by fraud and perjury upon the resources of a mighty, confident, generous, and gallant nation, having squandered them in ways best

known to themselves, are at length arrested and proclaimed to the world. Within the short time that it takes to get up a single number of a magazine, the whole stupendous fabric of false

hood and imposture has been exploded; the conspirators are driven to the four winds; and the great people they had throttled is once more free. Te deum laudamus!

THE truth of the axiom that there is nothing so successful as success, is more conclusively proved by the Coup d'Etat of Louis Napoleon than by any other event of the period. Execrated at the time by every right-thinking man in the world, the Empire which followed it not only became stable enough to command respect, and powerful enough to cause fear, but so apparently necessary as to bewilder the judgment into forgetfulness of the means by which it was brought about. It seemed as if the world had absolved Louis Napoleonto use his own phrase-of his violated oaths, and the blood of his slaughtered countrymen. That his countrymen themselves had absolved him was taken for granted; so much so, that the few who continued to attack him by their tongues and pens found it unsafe to do so except on foreign soil, where most of them came in time to be regarded as little less than madmen. The curses of Victor Hugo, for example; may have been admired as poetry, but they were certainly laughed at as politics. Louis Napoleon himself came to care so little for them that it was not his fault that Hugo remained a vociferous exile in England. Histories of the Coup d'Etat were published. Most of them, it is true, were written from the Bonapartist point of view, but not all; for so secure did Louis Napoleon consider himself at last, that he allowed what may be called a Republican History to appear. It is the work of Eugene Ténot, an editor of the Siècle, and is entitled Paris in December, 1851; or, the Coup d'Etat of Napoleon III. Such, at least, is the title of a translation of M. Ténot's volume, made by S. W. Adams and A. H. Brandon, and published by Messrs. Hurd & Houghton,

That the original should have been permitted to be published in Paris two years ago strikes us as a singular circumstance, or rather would so strike us if events had not taught us that no circumstance connected with Louis Napoleon can be considered at all singular. In any other country than France, such a history of such an event as the Coup d'Etat would be the greatest of blunders, as the crime was the greatest of crimes; but in France, it seems, they do these things differently; as, indeed, what things do they not do differently from the rest of the world? We have read M. Ténot's book with great interest, and with much more confidence than we usually give to writers confessedly adverse to Louis Napoleon. That it is impartial, we shall not undertake to say, but it certainly reads as if it were. At any rate, M. Ténot substantiates his facts from imperialist authorities, who were bound to make out as good a case as possible for themselves; and he wisely refrains from commenting upon them. We say wisely, not merely because his book might not have seen the light at this time had a contrary course been pursued, but because the facts that he narrates are sufficient for his purpose, which is not to denounce Louis Napoleon for the Coup d'Etat, but to show what Louis Napoleon is, by showing what the Coup d'Etat was. The indictment against him is terrible-terrible enough to justify the retribution which has now overtaken him, and which no one would regret were it he alone who has suffered. It is the fashion to abuse him now, even among those who were his warmest admirers and apologists; but we decline to follow it here, for, guilty as he is, the people over whom he ruled

are far from guiltless. The situation which rendered the Coup d'Etat a possibility was not made by Louis Napoleon, though he seized upon it; it was made by the incredible blindness and violence of French politicians. And it was French generals that made it successful; such men as Fleury and Canrobert and Saint-Arnaud, who was sent to his long account in the Crimea, it has since been suspected, by poison. The head of Louis Napoleon could have accomplished nothing without the help of these willing hands. "It seems,"

says Kinglake, "that the man who was most able to make the President act, to drive him deep into his own plot, and fiercely carry him through it, was Major Fleury." "The one was skilful in preparing the mine and laying the train; the other was the man standing by with a lighted match, and determined to touch the fuse. It would seem, from the moment when Fleury became a partaker of momentous secrets, the President ceased to be free." Let us give the devil his due, by all means; but let us not forget to give his imps their due likewise. M. Ténot does not, nor do we think that France will, should they be so unfortunate as to survive the Empire which they helped to raise, and which is now rocking to its ruin. If they have lived conspirators, they can at least die soldiers. Will they? It is somewhat doubtful.

It is refreshing to turn from the highly-wrought fictions of the day, which deal for the most part with the class of passions and circumstances heretofore confined to the Newgate Calendar, to a natural and simple story like Hans Christian Andersen's Only a Fiddler, which has lately been added by Messrs. Hurd & Houghton to their uniform series of "Andersen's Writings." It is not much of a novel, as novels go now, for neither its plot nor its characters are in any sense remarkable; it is devoid of startling incidents, and it lacks profundity of analysis; it has, in short, so little in common with the novels of Miss Braddon, or Mr. Charles Reade, or Mr. Wilkie Collins,

that the merest novice among the storytellers of the time would hardly put his name to it. It is charming for all that, however, as is every thing written by Andersen, who more than makes up for his deficiencies as a story-teller by his inimitable sweetness and freshness, and his perpetual tenderness of spirit. There is something child-like in most of the writers of Northern Europe, and Andersen is the most child-like of all of them, the epithet the epithet "Immortal Boy," applying to him with quite as much fitness as to Leigh Hunt. We have no such writers in England and America, for our writers are what they are by culture, and not by nature; or, more exactly, are writers because they have taught themselves to be such, not because there is that within them which must and will find utter

ance.

There may be Art in writers of the stamp of Andersen and Björnson, but it is so little like any Art with which we are familiar, that it has the effect of Nature alone. Writing appears as natural with them as conversation with us, and, like good conversation, it has a spontaneity and a variety not often found in writing, least of all in any English writing of the period. Of" Only a Fiddler," which, we believe, is one of Andersen's early stories, we will merely say that it is characterized by the most loveable qualities of his genius-a genius which knows how to make the simplest incidents interesting, and the simplest people dearer to us than all the kings and queens that ever lived.

-There are, we conceive, but two motives which impel towards authorship-a desire to make reputation, and a desire to make money. Each is laudable, and each has led to the production of great works. Shakespeare, we suppose, wrote for money rather than reputation. Milton, we know, wrote for reputation rather than money. Of the two incentives, we honor the last most, and nowhere so much as among ourselves, upon whom it has never exercised a very powerful influence. We have authors and authors, but for one who does his best without thinking how much he will make by it, there are