household." The majority feared the Rev- to shut up the House of Lords, and three other persons to order the strongest military prison to deliver up Rochefort, who was accordingly delivered and made a Minister; should sweep away Napoleonic emblems, though "respecting even on a chemist's shop "the arms of England;" and should finally by a whiff of its anger blow the Legislature into space, is of the well-known babitudes of Paris in revolution; but there are some novelties, too. There is sense in the composition of this Provisional Government. That Government is Parisian, but the defence of Paris is its first task. It is revolutionary, but it is only by revolutionary means that Paris can be defended. Considering that for twenty years no Republican has had more chance of power than a byæna of election by sheep, that every tried man is in exile or dead, that a jealous military force had to be conciliated and a timid bourgeoisie to be re-assured, the composition of the Government is extremely able. It is a compromise, of course, between three parties, - Paris, the inorganic, anarchic, democratic force; the Orleanists, that is, liberty as understoood by the comfortable; and the Republicans, that is, the thinkers of France, and the compromise is well managed. There are just five offices of the highest importance to be filled, the military dictatorship, which will organize defence; the Foreign Office, which will arrange peace; the Ministry of the Interior, which governs France from day to day; the Prefecture of the Seine, which governs Paris; and the Prefecture of Police, which accumulates information, and they were all fairly filled. General Trochu was inevitable, and as against Napoleon trustworthy, and he was named Military Dictator. The ablest and most moderate available Republican, Jules Favre, was named Minister of Foreign Affairs, and may, as we have elsewhere pointed out, in that capacity redeem France both from herself and the Germans; the most energetic Republican, the man nearest to a true Jacobin with faculty of administration, Gambetta, was selected for the Interior; the man nearest Danton, huge, bull-voiced, and competent, Etienne Arago, was made Prefect of the Seine; and the cool, cynical, daring M. de Keratry, persistent Republican, who yet signs himself Count" becanse Count in his case is less of an affecThat Paris in its triumph should be child- |tation than Citizen would be, is named Preishly gleeful goes without talking. That it fect of Police, walks to the Prefecture, disshould be utterly revolutionary, should cusses that little matter with Pietri, or, it claim not only to be France, but above may be, with recalcitrant lieutenant of France; should send four persons of re- Pietri, and in five minutes sits down solved aspect" but ridiculous credentials serenely in the inner bureau master of that 66 66 situation, and of all dangerous persons in France. The success of the Republic, is of course, dubious, depending mainly on King William of Prussia, Providence, and the effect of the magnificent offer its chiefs for the first time in the history of France are able to make to the peasants, their exemption from the blood-tax; but, considering its means, its hurry, and its necessities, Paris, we believe, has chosen well. They say the Government was self-chosen, and in a way that is true; and the men who, with a victorious enemy at their gates, France in Revolution, authority ended, and two millions of people on the verge of despair, decide in the teeth of the laws to take the helm, and do take it, are, in all human probability, the men to whom that helm, by a right higher than legality, ought to belong. From The Spectator. THE EX-EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH. THE sombre figure of Napoleon III., for twenty-one years ruler, and for nineteen years Emperor of the French, will always seem to have been at once one of the most curious caprices of the historical fortune of France, and one of the most striking illustrations of the immutability of the law of strict political retribution. That after two attempts on the throne of France, one of them the Boulogne attempt with the tame eagle theatrical to the most ludicrous degree, he should have actually succeeded in obtaining the suffrages of the people, and gaining for himself a real chance of seizing the power he so long coveted, seems strange enough. But that, after such antecedents, he should have succeeded per fas aut nefas in governing France for twentyone years with some repute in Europe, without any absolute disgrace, and then have thrown away his power, if not in quite so fanciful and conceited a fashion, yet in no less theatrical a fashion than that in which he attempted to gain it, is even stranger, because it furnishes one of those curious little bits of complete historical symmetry between the commencement and the close of a great political career, which is much more common in fiction than in actual life. In 1843, when Louis Napoleon was imprisoned at Ham, he published some striking remarks on the government of Louis Phillippe, which contained the following sentences:-"Some years ago, there was in the United States a man called Sampatek, who went into the following trade: he con structed, with a great deal of art, a scaffolding above the falls of Niagara, and after having raised a heavy contribution from the immense crowd assembled from the whole neighbourhood to see him, he mounted majestically to his platform, and then threw himself headlong into the boiling waves at the foot of the cataract. He repeated this perilous experiment several times, till at last he was swallowed up by a whirlpool. Alas! there are some Governments whose appearances on the scene of the world are in every respect analogous to that of the American juggler: their history is summed up in these words, fearful scaffolding, terrible fall!' On a few stakes planted in the ground, they raise a shapeless building, composed of fragments and bits borrowed from the ruins of the past; and when their task is finished, their bastard building, as without utility as it is without foundations, has only served to throw them headlong from a greater height into the abyss. What this amounts to is that raising a scaffolding is not building. To appeal to the vulgar passions of the mob is not to govern. One cannot build solidly except upon the rock." Surely these words must now come back to the ex-Emperor as a curiously accurate prediction of his own great feat. He did, at great pains and with much ostentation, erect a scaffolding out of fragments of the ruins of the past - his uncle's past,- which has served but for the same purpose as that described by him,- to furnish him with an artificial elevation from which to cast himself headlong into the gulf beneath. Indeed, to none of the recent unstable governments of France has Louis Napoleon's parable applied with greater force than to his own. There has always been something of the juggler about his atherwise sombre and sedate impersonation of the Imperial character. From the descent on Strasburg to the telegram about poor little Louis's "baptism of fire," there has been visible at regular intervals in the exEmperor's writings and actions a certain amount not merely of theatricality, but of ill-judged and ridiculous theatricality,that sort of theatricality which arises not from social vanity, which is often very telling, but from the indulgence of moody and solitary reverie. The laboured rhodomontade which he addressed, from his prison at Ham, "to the Manes of the Emperor," on occasion of the removal of Buonaparte's remains from St. Helena to Paris, is a very fair illustration of the purely intellectual side of this deep flaw in Louis Napoleon's mind. That any able man should have written such high-flown nonsense in the be lief that it would identify him in the popular peror's policy has been the constant balancmind with his uncle, we do not in the least ing between long-headed caution and a believe. The rhapsody was written, we are craving for brilliant effects. At first he was persuaded, not out of contempt for vulgar very prudent. The war with Russia, which minds which it was intended to please, but brought him into such close alliance with out of the unsound superstition in Louis England, was a by no means dangerous Napoleon's own understanding. He cried stroke of tentative foreign policy: indeed, out to the Manes of the Emperor,-"The that such a Power as England joined him in people have renounced your gospel, your ideas, your glory, your blood; when I have spoken to them of your cause, they have said to me, 'We do not understand it.' Let them say, let them do, what they will. What matter to the mounting chariot the grains of sand which fall under the wheels? They have vainly said that you were a meteor which left no trace behind; they have vainly denied you political glory; they will not disinherit us of its fruits. Sire! the 15th December is a great day for France and for me. From the midst of your sumptuous cortége, disdaining the homage of some, you have cast a single glance on my sombre dwelling-place, and remembering the caresses which you heaped upon my infancy, you have said: Friend, thou sufferest for me! I am satisfied with thee."" That is not the sort of thing written to dazzle the fancy of a mob. It is the sort of thing which occurs to a man apt to indulge moody reveries of the subtle affinities which connect him with a great creative mind, whose career he hopes, or at least eagerly wishes, to imitate. Like the Imperial getup at Strasburg, so ill-sustained by Louis Napoleon's actual demeanour when introduced to the troops there, like the tame eagle at Boulogne,-like many profoundly superstitious references to destiny' throughout his writings, this rhapsody shows a trace of spurious metal in the ex-Emperor's mind, which is not assumed for popular purposes, but is ingrained and inherent. The prisoner at Ham was, like all solitary persons, deprived of the aid of that implicit social criticism on his own most marked thoughts which living in the world of itself insures, and therefore his writings then had much more of this extatic Bonapartism about them than his speeches or actions have since shown. But you can see the same kind of fixed and dreamy enthusiasm about his idea of raising up in Mexico an empire of the "Latin race to balance the Teutonism of the United States, no less than in those dreams of destiny which have from time to time driven his slow and hesitating judgment into mad projects, like the Boulogne descent, and, let us add, the ill-prepared or unprepared invasion of Prussia. The special characteristic of the ex-Em it showed how comparatively safe, for a war For, naturally enough, while he has dreamt these brilliant dreams of external glory, he has given himself a comparative holiday in the much harder task of driving deep the foundations of his power in the hearts of the people of France. "On a few stakes planted in the ground, he raised a formless building composed of bits and fragments of the ruin of the past," and never -- realm. Certainly none of the unstable French Governments, which he described as raising ostentatiously a temporary scaffolding only for the sake of leaping from it into the abyss, ever took the leap with so strange an unconsciousness of the fatal whirlpools beneath, as he who is now, for the third time in his life, a political prisoner, and for the fourth time an exile from his native land. It is melancholy that a man who has spent two-thirds of his life in dreaming of power, and one-third in the exercise of it, should have to spend the remainder in regretting that he carefully made all the mistakes which he had before his accession so bitterly ridiculed others for perpetrating. From The Pall Mall Gazette. ENGLISH IMPATIENCE. till within the last eight months did he even appear to attempt seriously the laying of deeper foundations; and then he found the task so difficult and disgusting that he quickly abandoned it for a dazzling stroke of foreign policy. In regard to the external comfort of the people, indeed, in relation to roads, commerce, and free production, the Emperor really did a good deal to make his people more prosperous. But beyond this he never got. Trusting as he did in universal suffrage, he never liked to educate the voters, lest they should cease to be dazzled by the Empire. The free Press shook his power, and he never permitted it till it seemed even more dangerous to curb it. The only creative principle of his mind as a ruler was its dreamy imaginativeness, and this he was far too cautious to apply except in foreign policy. For all experiments in developing the confidence of the educated classes at home he was too prudent. Hence the eighteen years of his rule were utterly sterile in home policy, except WE wish there were any reason to expect in relation to the development of the physi- that the war between France and Prussia cal resources of France. All his tentative will soon be over, and that then the affairs audacity was reserved for his foreign policy, of Europe will return to their old comfortand as that was not, on the whole, success-able state. Evidently a great many ful, certainly not flattering to the vanity Englishmen are very unwilling to admit of France in its general results, he never that such a hope has no solid ground on succeeded in gaining for the Empire the which to rest. They quote the precedents affection of the people, except so far as it was of 1859 and 1866, and seem to take it algained at once by the superstitious rever- most as a personal injury that 1870 has not ence felt for his name. In one of his curi- turned out a war exactly on the same patous political reveries he once wrote:-"No tern. It is on this account, perhaps, that one can escape his destiny. Every govern- they dislike for the most part the notion of ment condemned to perish, perishes by the France being deprived of territory. They very means which it employs to save itself. have a sort of instinct that France might Espartero believed that he should strengthen take some time to settle down after having his power by the bombardment of Barce- to submit to such a blow as this, and that lona, and he only sapped its foundations. the Continent might be a good deal disThe Conservatives believed that by erecting quieted by her efforts to regain her lost the fortifications of Paris they should estab-possessions. The payment of an indemnilish for ever their doctrine of peace at any ty, they think, need have no such annoying price; but they only imitated those kings accompaniments. It would simply mean of Egypt who raised immense tombs in their an addition to the yearly expenditure and a life-time, monuments so colossal for men corresponding addition to the taxation of so little, that they buried in their immense the country. consequences which would wombs, as well as the body, the very name, naturally be disliked by Frenchmen, but of the founder." What can better describe would entail no inconvenience upon the rest the ex-Emperor's own fate? His Govern- of the world. The sooner Englishmen disment, condemned to perish," has perished miss any anticipations of this kind the better "by the very means it employed to save it will be for their own peace of mind. We itself." He took credit to the Empire for shall make no predictions as to the duration its army, and by the weakness of the Army of the war, but we will venture to prophesy the Empire has perished. He sought to that, whether it be short or long, it will save his foreign policy from the reproach leave behind it elements of disturbance that it had raised up great rivals to France, which may not be laid to rest for years to by crushing Germany to fragments, and the come. The conditions of the contest have attempt has ground his own twenty-one no parallel either in the Italian war of 1859 years' work to powder, and fearfully en- or in the German war of 1866. In both dangered the very independence of his these cases the object of the struggle was to fix the place of one of the combatants, rule by being an exception to it, we have no not in Europe, but in a certain limited area right to suppose that the extraordinary sucof territory. The battle of Solferino de-cess of Prussia will not give rise to great termined that Sardinia was to be supreme uneasiness on the part of other nations. in Italy. The battle of Sadowa determined Neither Austria nor Russia can regard her that Prussia, not Austria, was to be su- aggrandizement with much complacency. preme in Germany. Each left the combat- Austria has German subjects who will alant mainly affected by the decision with most certainly be attracted by the new Gerabundance of employment on his hands. man empire, and if she pursues her natural Sardinia had to fit herself for her new duties, policy, and tries to increase her power in Austria had to revise her aims and readjust the east of Europe by way of compensation her estimate of the comparative importance for its diminution in the west, she may arouse of the various races which make up her em- opposition which will have an echo far bepire. But neither of these processes con-yond the limits of her own dominions. cerned the rest of Europe. The unification Russia, as we have already pointed out, will of Italy and the regeneration of Austria have her internal policy directly menaced affected only the subjects of Victor Emman- by Germany as soon as Germany has a uel and Francis Joseph. The war of 1870, thought to spare for anything but her conon the contrary, threatens to change the test with France; and whether she rejects whole face of European politics. For two all intervention on behalf of the Germans centuries France has been the leading in the Baltic provinces, or comes to terms Power on the Continent. If she has been beaten, it has been only by coalitions, and the fact that a coalition has always been needed to do it is in itself a testimony to the paramount character of her position. The present war, therefore, is in the nature of a fight for the championship of Europe. If France had won, she would have taken care to disqualify Prussia from challenging her supremacy for the future. If Prussia wins, she will be equally anxious to prevent France from offering a return match. In neither case is it at all likely that so soon as the wager has been decided the two combatants will shake hands and forget all that has passed. And even if the war itself should come to an end after another battle or two, its consequences will be none the less lasting. The Powers of Europe had learned to know France: they could in some measure calculate her orbit, and guard against her eccentricities. If Prussia takes her place in the continental system, all these observations will go for nothing. Europe will have to begin the study of political as-mediately display its natural powers of selftronomy over again. with Germany on that question in order to secure her support on the Eastern question, bodes equally ill for the continued tranquillity of the Continent. If Russia resists Germany she will have to fight her; if she compounds with Germany the two together may have to fight the rest of Europe. Nor are these by any means the only reasons for believing that we are still but at the beginning of sorrows. Those who take the most hopeful view of the situation in France admit that another great defeat will almost to a certainty put a final end to the Empire. We do not profess to grieve over this prospect. On the contrary, we hold that even defeat may be a blessing to the French people if it teaches them that freedom at home is better than greatness abroad. But we see little probability that France will learn this lesson without a long course of previous suffering. The adversaries of the Empire often speak as though it had been a mere incubus upon the country, and that when once it is lifted off the nation will im government and show itself none the worse It is not reasonable to expect changes of for the long disuse of them. If this is so, this magnitude to be effected in the space it will be in flat contradiction to all previous of a few weeks, and to leave no disturbance experience. The French nation has not behind them when effected. It is no matter been the mere innocent victim of the Emfor surprise that France has not yet ac- pire. The majority of Frenchmen have knowledged herself defeated, and asked to been its willing accomplices, and even those make terms with the conqueror. A great who have offered an unavailing but consisnation is not convinced in a moment that it tent resistance show traces in every movehas no choice but submission, and if the ment of the injuries they have suffered in fortune of war means anything, it means the contest. Men who have lost the habit that the end of the struggle often contradicts of self-government cannot resume their part the beginning, that the second campaign is in public affairs without blunders and shortnot necessarily cast on the same model as comings of all kinds. The Empire has done the first. Even if we allow that in the pres-nothing for the political education of France, ent war France will prove the force of this and whenever it passes from the stage the |