her resources, all her aspirations, all her policy, all her thoughts, were to be once more turned to military glory. France must shine-and shing she could not, except by the paraphernalia, the trophies of victorious war. Upon such promises, hinted if not loudly spoken, Napoleon III. relied to win to his dynasty the hearts of the people.

Two things-on the one hand, the traditions of Napoleonism and the promise held out by them, and on the other, the mysterious and grimly-silent character of the man himself, have operated, from the first day of his reign to this, to make Napoleon III. universally suspected and distrusted. Every movement of his, not sufficiently explained at the moment, has been construed as the commencement of some gigantic Napoleonic plot. The most commonplace expressions have been discovered to hold a hidden meaning. Every journey which he undertook, every unusual courtesy which he extended to this or that foreign dignitary, nay, almost every turn of his eye, or movement of his head, have set afloat a thousand suggestions of sinister purposes and darkly contemplated projects. It is singular that these ideas should, after eighteen years' experience of Napeleon III., still cling to people's minds. In America, for example, we are accustomed to regard this quiet and rather indolent man, who is only anxious to hold his own, and who, if he ever did have an ambition to subject Europe to one great Empire, has long since abandoned it-a man by no means as mysterious as is supposed, and whose chief political mint lies in his worldly experience, his knowledge of men, and his shrewd reading of the necessities and the weaknesses of the French character,-we are wont to look upon him as a very ogre, as a royal Balsamo, who, by his dark acts, may, when his concoctions are prepared, charm the nations to sleep, and thus win their helpless homage at his will.

Let us see. Promising that the old Empire should be restored, with a renewed and vigorous youth, he established himself, and created a great army.

What did he do with this army? There have been no Italian campaigns, no Austerlitz and Jena, no heroic plunges into Northern snows, no Waterloo defeats, shedding a last magnificent glory on the vanquished. Why? Because this shrewd, grimly-silent man, having been knocked about the world for thirty years-an exile in Germany, a prisoner in France, a loafer in New York, a special policeman at the English capital --an observer everywhere, hearing men talk, and seeing them act, taught by vicissitude not to trust too much, having recognized the fact that thrones grow more precarious, and the people bolder and stronger and more knowing every year,-this shrewd man knew that he had got into a generation of men entirely different from that with which Napoleon I. had to deal--in a word, saw that the age was not fit for and would never suffer a repetition of the first Empire. The forces which finally made Napoleon I. a failure, which rendered him, as a permanency, impossible, are a hundred fold stronger, happily, to-day. Napoleon III. created this great army, and promised a new Cæsarian military Empire; but the days of Cæsarianism gone by forever. This army, which was to win new glories for France, was quietly used to sustain himself; and that is the underlying fact of this second Empire. Napoleon III. does not trust the French people; he only half trusts, while coquetting with, the priesthood; he does not trust to the popularity of his own policy, nor to the splendor of his name, nor to his Imperial patronage, nor to conquests now become impossible; his only trust, his only rampart, his only safety, is in the army. And to sustain and increase this last, but hitherto efficient defence, he has repeatedly, and especially of late,risked not only his popularity, but insurrection, open resistance to his authority, the raising of ominously seditious cries beneath the windows of his palaces. The writer heard, last spring,-when the new army-law, increasing the available force at the disposition of the Government to 1,400,000 men, was put in

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operation, the boisterous singing of the Marseillaise in French streets, which, as is known, is an offence before the law; he heard crowds of ouvriers shouting "Vive la République!" and "A bas l'Empereur!" in the face of the soldiery and the gendarmerie; and in the scholastic and historic town of Toulouse, barricades, those significant symbols of the revolutionary spirit, were thrown up, in resistance to the new conscription. Yet the conscription went on; the rioters were subdued; the new army was raised; and, in spite of popular emotion, the new Empire was safe. While the promise of military glory and territorial aggrandizement has not been kept, the army has been, and still is, kept up, in order to act as an auxiliary to the most extensive and most perfect police system in the world.

At

There is doubtless another reason why the dazzling temptation to seek military glory has not prevailed-apart from the fact that success would be far more difficult, and, indeed, far more empty, in this age than in that of Napoleon I. The present Emperor has discovered that he has not a great military genius. He is an abler politician and a more efficient governor than was his uncle. Perhaps, too, as a scientific soldier, as one comprehending the utility of arms, and the art of strategy, he is his equal. But as a general in the field, he is a failure. And military glory, unless he appeared as its ostensible hero, would lose, for him, its lustre. Solferino, it is said, the Emperor, commanding in person, well-nigh lost the battle; only the great ability of Niel and the other generals saved it; and it was won, as an opposition journal said, referring to the part which the Emperor took in it, "in spite of bad generalship." Three times in the history of the second Empire have we seen an attempt on the part of the French to attract the rays of military glory to their arms; in neither case, however, could it be said that a repetition of the old Napoleonic design was essayed. One of these wars was not undertaken for aggrandizement, but on the balance-of-power idea—in

other words, to preserve the equilibrium of Europe. The second, if it was a war of aggrandizement, had also other and far nobler objects, which threw the lust of gain into obscurity. The third was distinctly a war of aggrandizement, and more; it was a war in which a crime was attempted to be committed, far more heinous and more treacherous to civilization than the crime of lust of conquest. What was the result of each of these wars? Did they remind one of the old Empire? Was there among them an Austerlitz or a Lodi?

The Crimean war, undertaken in alliance with England to check the dreaded growth of Russia southward, was long and painful; there were few of those brilliant actions which can alone charm the martial pride of the Frenchman, and what there were of these, the English had in them the lion's share of the glory. Victory came in the end, but it was divided with the ancient and hated rival of France, the detested victor of Waterloo-it was, more than half of it, England's victory. The French went back to Paris, half dissatisfied, thinking of their own many failures, and of England's repeated triumphs.

Whether the Italian war of 1859 was undertaken to increase the French territory, is not yet known; that was one of its results; but in that it was undertaken by Napoleon III. to free and to create Italy, it was noble, justly popular in France and throughout the world. It was successful "in spite of bad generalship;" but the contest was between a great military power allied with a people of hot enthusiasm and reckless bravery, fighting for its life, and a decaying nationality, burdened with almost hopeless debt, with which defeat was traditional, and which must, from the beginning, have been discouraged by the thought that it was playing a losing game. Such being the circumstances, the victory could not have been one of those victories which astound and dazzle men, which call forth the adoration of a people, and which link a sovereign to the hearts of his subjects with "hooks of steel." Solferino and Magenta did

shed a glory upon the French Empire; but it was a moral, not a martial glory. It was the moral spectacle of a great and generous nation, lifting up and giving life to a historic and long-degraded people, which gave it its lustre.

The military triumph was not a splendid one; there were no wonderful military exploits; the odds were from the first with the victorious allies. But it was the triumph of France over herself, -over the priesthood, over old-world bigotries; it was a whole nation bleeding for its friendship toward a weaker sister. To-day, alas, that moral glory is clouded; there will be an election soon, and the Empire must, at all hazards, win the priests; and hence we have seen French soldiers trying the murderous Chassepôt on the followers of the John Brown of Italy; we see them still there, amid the grand old ruins which tell us of Cato and of Rienzi, holding Italy back from her ancient capital, and, while preventing the completion of her unity, serving as the defenders of the worst and most decrepit of earthly governments. Solferino is disgraced, France is disgraced, and she is conscious of it; and this alliance, treacherous to the French people, between the military despotism and the despotism of the hierarchy, is the gloomiest of all the gloomy facts of the past twenty years.

This great Republic of the West, thought Napoleon III., when he witnessed the outbreak of the American rebellion, is and has been the huge particular thorn in the side of despotism everywhere. To me, who rule over a nation which has been republican, and is easily struck by a shining example, its prosperity is a continual, and may be a vital, injury. Let us crush it. Turning to Mexico, southward of us, he saw a people, weak, divided against itself, struggling amid a pandemonium of rival factions, lying at the mercy of the first strong-armed comer. We will kill two great birds with one stone, was the Imperial idea. By the same stroke, we will kill the Republic, and we will found a Latin Empire in the West. We will at the same time rid ourselves of a fear

ful enemy-successful republicanism— and we will add to the Napoleonic crown a glory which will give to it the old martial and Cæsarian halo. Who among my readers now doubts that this was the double end of the Mexican enterprise? Who hesitates to believe that it was a covert blow directed at the existence of our Union? Let it be remembered that Napoleon tried his utmost to seduce England into joining with him to recognize the Confederacy, at our direst hour; that he made more than one attempt to engage the South to unite with the new Empire; that the French expedition was undertaken exactly at the time when the opportunity for effecting his end was apparently ripe; and let us thank God for baffling the miserable intrigues of our enemies! If these proofs are not enough, let the revelations made by Keratry and a hundred others be pondered; and you will laugh to scorn the pleas that were put forth in defence of that meditated wrong. The Mexican expedition was a farce darkly tinged with tragedy, which broke down in the middle of the act. Puebla was the moral Waterloo of Napoleon III., with this difference-that while Waterloo was a glorious defeat, Puebla was 3 most inglorious victory. Of military glory there was not a whit; of outrage to the liberal feelings of France, of oppressive taxation, of utter folly, there was enough to make France groan to this day. It was not only the greatest blot on the record of the Empire, it was a severe blow self-directed and selfwounding; it will never be recovered from; it has permanently alienated from the Empire many of its former partisans, and has given a weapon to that eloquent and ever-active Opposition in the national legislature, of which Jules Favre and Adolphe Thiers are the spokesmen, and who have not yet ceased to use it with effect. There was a time when the prince who now reigns in France, proposed the Republic of the United States as a model to France; it was, he declared in 1831, the most perfect government which had ever been devised. But that was in the generous heat of his

youth, when exile and misfortune had made him honest. Now it is quite different; nous avons changé tout cela. You can hardly expect a man in power to praise or to be friendly to his greatest bugbear.

Out of neither of these wars, then, came military glory of the genuine Napoleonic sort. All that France got for them was Savoy and Nice; to the eighty-seven departments, two morean Alpine and a Mediterranean department-were added. We may conclude that the idea of aggrandizement and glory has been definitely abandoned. The foreign policy of the Empire has never been what could be called an aggressive one, except in the instance of Mexico; and that failure was enough to check all other essays of a similar kind. It has drawn further and further from such an one every year, until at last, it may almost be characterized as a timid policy. France yielded to arbitration in the Luxembourg matter; she threw no obstacle in the way of the unity of Germany,—a forbearance which Thiers calls the most grievous of blunders; she now witnesses the growing power and insolence of Russia in the East, with hardly a protest; we no longer hear of a crusade in behalf of Poland, or the Turk, or the Hungarian. She has interfered at Rome, but there the Emperor ran no danger-being the bigger and stronger of the combatantsexcept from his own people; and they are under the heels of the army. Taking a general view of all these years of Imperial rule, it is clear that the Emperor has generally been content to sustain the dignity and integrity of France, to engage in no more military enterprises than were either necessary to that dignity, or else necessary to serve as a distraction to his fickle and easily discontented subjects. Sometimes, true, the appearance has been otherwise; but it has begun and ended in an appearance. It has been said that by increasing his armament early in 1867, Napoleon first shook the foundation of his throne. But the wiser opinion would seem to be, that that foundation was

shaken at least as far back as the Mexican expedition. The increase of the army has undoubtedly increased also that first effect. If any French party has ever had, within these twenty years, the ambition of military glory, they seem now to have ceased to hope for it. It is recognized that Napoleon is not the man, and this is not the age, to supply it. There is, therefore, no distrust of Napoleon on the score of military ambition; and that suspicion which many intelligent Frenchmen felt at the outset of his career, lest he should drag France into another splendid misery like that of 1814, has given place to another, that he has devoted himself to arbitrary power, to the security of his dynasty within the nation, and to rendering it permanent by a despotic rule, periodically tempered by petty concessions, intended to conciliate the masses. It seems certain that France has ceased to be, what she was before the Mexican fiasco, the arbiter of nations; Germany has become her rival; she can no longer impose her diplomatic will upon the cabinets, and she now shrinks from a collision with the new power, with as much eagerness as she was at first fierce to provoke it.

Wise enough to perceive that the genuine Cæsarism of Napoleon I. was not to be attempted-cognizant, in a word, of the age, its demands and its impossibili ties,-Napoleon III. has departed widely from the model of his uncle. He has tacitly declared himself independent of the traditions of the Empire. At Bordeaux there stands, in one of the public squares, a statue of the present Emperor, upon the pedestal of which is graven the memorable words, "L'Empire, c'est la Paix "-" The Empire is Peace; " words which he himself uttered there not long after he attained to the Imperial purple. By those words he broke loose from the promise implied by his elevation; and, if they keenly disappointed the restless and vainglorious spirits who blindly hoped for war, they fell gratefully upon the ears of those who only asked tranquillity, political security, and the internal development of France. And the Empire has been, for the most part, Peace.

Only twice has Napoleon III. openly defied the ideas of the progressive agein Mexico, and at Rome; and, as we have shown, these acts were rather defensive than aggressive. The world naturally looked forward to European troubles, to great devastating wars, to gigantic schemes of conquest; but the temptation, if temptation it was, has been shunned, and France has been able to pursue the peaceful arts of internal growth almost without interruption.

Let us do justice to the Empire. Faults, blunders, crimes there have been; but the picture is not without lights as well as shadows. The Empire has certainly kept apace with the popular current. Unlike the Bourbons, it can forget, and it can learn; and the secret of its success lies in its capacity for receiving and satisfying the tone of popular opinion. Popular opinion sent the Empire on the glorious errand of freeing Italy, and creating a new and extensive constitutional kingdom. More recently, we have seen another, and equally famous, acknowledgment of the march of events. When the German war was in progress, it would have been easy for France to extend her frontier to the Rhine, thus accomplishing an ambition of four hundred years. But the temptation passed, then the opportunity. Not only did the Empire gracefully yield to the ascendency of Prussia. For the first time in the history of the world, we heard the Emperor of the French, in the presence of the representatives of the nation, casting to the winds the old idea of balance of power, and in one grand sentence announcing the new doctrine of NATIONALITIES. Peoples of the same race, he declared, had a right to unite together. The Germans could resolve themselves into a single nation, if they would: it was not for France to say them nay. No longer was Europe to be convulsed from the seas to the centre, because this or that power was found to be a growing power. In place of that petty jealousy which begrudged a neighbor his progress and prosperity, that sensitive alarm which hastened to enfeeble, by

sudden alliances, a thriving people, that unworthy suspicion which saw in every forward step, in every territorial accession, in every wholesome improvement, a menace and a defiance,-in place of these, Napoleon frankly announced the rise of great nationalities, and welcomed them; he spoke, not without a tone of complacency, of the final downfall of feudalism, and of the resolving of many small states into a few large ones. Instead of distrust in view of this prospect, he would generously welcome the event; France wished no more territory, France wished peace; France would congratulate and make friends with the new powers, and would insure her safety in their midst by friendly confidence, while her competition with them would rather be in the fields of peace, industry, and education, than on those of battle.

And this course was consistent in the heir of Napoleon. It was by the feudal elements of Europe, with which the balance-of-power principle was indissolubly linked, that the first Empire was opposed, and finally crushed. It was against feudalism and that principle, that Napoleon fought all his life. Waterloo was at once his ruin, and their triumph; and the Treaty of Paris, which restricted France to its present limits, was concluded in the name of the balance of power, and was the compact of feudal Europe, pledging itself against the freedom of nationalities. By announcing, therefore, the doctrine of nationalities, by conceding the right of Germany to unification, by sustaining the independence of Italy, Napoleon III. asserted the cause of the first Empire, and protested against that feudal principle by the successful maintenance of which the first Empire fell.

There is one more act of the present dynasty, which it would be unjust to overlook, and which reflects upon it the fulness of that honor which is due to true political wisdom. I refer to the frank adoption of an enlightened commercial policy. And it is remarkable to note, that this was accomplished by a diplomacy which was completely wanting in those intricate arts of which di