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false. Perhaps he really fancied that if he | the casuist, "for they may have been done did not strike down the Assembly, that by De Morny and Persigny, without the body would strike down him. At last, M. authority, or even the knowledge, of the de Montalembert, the most religious of man whom they called their master. The men, feared so much that the action of the evidence is too scanty to allow of our accuAssembly would bring anarchy to France rately deciding the guilt. As M. Renan and desolation to the Church, that he sang says we must wait for our facts and our the praises of the author of the coup de état Sainte Beuve." But, again, the Emperor as the man who had put to flight the declared war against Prussia on grounds whole of the Revolutionists, the whole of which the whole civilized world pronounced the Socialists, and the whole of the bandits to be a mere pretext. He declered war to of France and Europe." The same devotee save his dynasty. He deliberately sacriwarned the religious men of France that ficed the lives of hundreds of thousands, "to vote against Louis Napoleon would be and he brought misery to a million homes, to invite the dictatorship of the Reds, in rather than permit the throne of France to place of the dictatorship of a Prince who had slip from the grasp of himself and his son. rendered for three years incomparable ser- But," replies the casuist, that is an asvice to the cause of order and catholicism." sumption which no court of law would reAnd even if we assume that Louis Napoleon ceive as evidence. France wished for war; did tell a lie to the French people, he and even such French statesmen as M. would, alas! not stand alone among the Thiers, who held the causes assigned for political men whom the world has agreed the present war to be insufficient, would to honour. Cavour told a lie to the Italian gladly have welcomed a war with Germany Parliament when he solemnly declared that if it had been waged to prevent her from he had not ceded an inch of Italian terri- becoming the rival of France, and been tory to the Emperor of the French. On declared at a time when France was prethe subject of political lies, a subtle casuist pared to strike. Nay, it was the insane might discourse for a year, and might jealousy with which the French people replausibly argue that no statesman ever tells garded a united Germany, and their immoral the real truth to a popular assembly; but passion for la gloire, that forced the Emglosses over ugly facts, or leaves false im- peror to attack the Prussian troops. He pressions by means of evasive sentences. was not his own master. He was forced to Pitt's whole system of oratory was a system go with the stream. He went with it sorely of rhetorical lying. A Queen's Speech against his will, and saddened by the premight be described as an ungrammatical lie, sentiment that he was going to meet political if anybody expected such a document to death. Thus he has been the victim of tell the truth. The Prince-President how- circumstances." ever, not only told a lie; but shot down Such are the pleas with which a clever the people in the streets of Paris because, casuist might defend Louis Napoleon at the by erecting barricades and firing muskets, bar of morality, and the case would give some few Parisians showed that they did room for the display of wonderful subtlety. not believe his words. But, perhaps, it A casuist of the school assailed by Pascal was the subordinates of the President who would delight to hold a brief for the defence. were responsible for the massacre; or, He would delight to undertake the task, for perhaps, the massacre was unavoidable, and the same reason that a dexterous surgeon the shooting of innocent wives and children might glow with pleasure when about to exewas only a "misfortune," like the burn- cute an operation demanding such consuming alive of the women and children in the mate delicacy and boldness of stroke that the village of Bezeilles the other day, when the life of the patient would be lost if the scalpel Bavarians opened fire on the houses for were to go a hair's breadth too deep into strategical reasons; or, perhaps, there is the mass of flesh and tissue. The casuist no end of the " perhapses " which might would delight to hold a brief in the cause flow from the pen of a clever casuist who of Morality v. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, had been trained inthe school of Loyola. because the evidence against the prisoner The prisoners taken in the street fight, at the bar seems so strong, and the verdict however, were shot down by scores in cold of guilty so sure. And the arguments by blood a full day after the battle had ceased; which he would seek to turn the point of the and surely the President must bear the re- evidence, or to secure a mitigation of sensponsibility of those wholesale and deliber-tence, are precisely such as a skilful Old ate murders, surely they will cover his name with infamy until the end of time. "Not necessarily," might be the reply of

Bailey practitioner would employ to defend a man who had not only committed a murder, but had been so unfortunate as to

be caught in the act. Such answers as we | But the Philistine is so delightfully stupid have suggested to the impeachment of Louis as to be one of those good members of Napoleon are precisely similar to the pleas society who make a fortune, and live re that might be suggested in favour of Bill spectably, or, at the worst die in the odour Sykes. Caligula could be defended on of sanctity and pecuniary debt. Napoleon similar grounds; so could Fouquier Tin- the Great, on the other hand, added the ville; so, whatever may have been the selfishness of a Philistine to the intellect of opinion of Macaulay, could Barrère; and a Titan. He was a monster, not because so could that paragon of activity and filial he lacked a conscience, but, as Prevostpiety, Troppmann, who killed a whole Paradol justly indicates, because the strength French family in order to provide for his of his conscience bore no relation to the poor relations. strength of his brain. His aim was to make himself the first man in all the world, and then, let us not doubt, to give the world such justice of law, such success of commerce, such breadth of culture, and such grandeur of aim as it had never known before. All things were to be done for mankind, if only mankind would permit the work to be executed by Napoleon, and only allow the glory to be his. All things must be done by him. whatever might be the cost in tears and blood. And, indeed, how trivial must the tears and blood of a few million people, during one paltry generation, have seemed to a Napoleon, with his eyes forecasting the results of a thousand years, and a time when history should speak of Napoleon in the same breath with Cæsar and Charlemagne! It was as natural for such a man to waste a million lives as it is for a British Philistine to effect a huge transaction on the Stock Exchange, and thus to beggar his neighbour, if he receive early intelligence of the fact that France has declared war against Prussia, or that the army of Marshal MacMahon has capitulated at Sedan. The Philistine cannot understand how a Napoleon can be so wicked, for precisely the same reason as he cannot understand Kant's "Philosophy of the Unconditioned." He fails to follow the windings, and the impulses, and the flights of a Satanic intellect, not because he himself is too pure to have a sympathetic comprehension of the promptings of evil, but because he is too unimaginative to conceive crimes of Napoleonic grandeur, and too stupid to follow the reflective process of a Napoleonic brain. And yet there have been Philistines whose own career in the world of commerce had somewhat of a Napoleonic sweep. There have been speculators for whom the world has seemed too small. And as railway, or as cotton, or as stock-jobbing kings, those men have been mighty conquerors, with grand aims and without scruples, the artificers of colossal work, and the authors of the ruin which has fallen on a million homes. Such men, if they were able to analyze the motives by which they have been driven from the slum of the huckster

However, it is a weary task to shriek out accusations against the Ex-Emperor; the task of interest is to understand the man, by looking into what he is pleased to call his conscience, as we should look into a curious watch, that always revealed its presence by loud ticking, and always told a lie about the time of day. The real explanation of his acts is, we believe, to be found in the theory by which Prevost-Paradol accounts for the moral aberrations of the First Napoleon. In perhaps the most remarkable passage ever penned by the unhappy journalist, it is contended that the great Napoleon wrote on the page of history an everliving record of selfish ambition and gigantic crime, not because he was morally worse than the mass of men, but because in point of intellect he was immeasurably greater. Morally, Napoleon I. was an average man, that is to say, he was selfish enough to prefer himself and his family to the nation, which had cast itself at his feet, and given its destiny into his keeping. He did, on a vast scale, what is done on a small by the average British Philistine, who fancies that to make one's family comfortable, and to pay one's rates, and to undersell one's neighbour is the whole duty of man. But the average British Philistine is so wretchedly endowed with brain, and so incapable of following any train of thought to its logical result, that he cannot conceive any aims grander than those of the counting-house, or any code of right and wrong other than that furnished by the parson. Thus his selfishness has little room to act. He is like a cow tethered in a field of clover, and with a bandage over its eyes, so that it cannot stray beyond a small circle, or see that the sweet clover stetches far beyond its little orbit in a billowy expanse of green. If the ordinary British Philistine were as richly endowed with intellect as with selfishness, these islands would be made uninhabitable in a week, and the children of light would be forced to beg that Von Moltke would smite the Philistines" from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same."

to the throne of the commercial dictator, ligion, and in his uncle a Messiah. He could reveal with terrible vividness the worshipped at the shrine of Napoleon, and temptations that lure on a Bonaparte from the one aim of his life was to ride into suthe position of a humble citizen of the Re- preme power over France on the wings of public to that of an autocrat. Such men his uncle's fame, his uncle's system of gov are seized with the idea that it would be a ernment, his uncle's schemes for universal magnificent feat to bridge the Channel, peace. He found Louis Philippe in the since the link would make France and Eng-way, but why should he permit his way to land friends for ever, and since, before all be blocked by a man who was the type of things, the iron highway from island to continent would give undying fame and boundless power to him by whom it should be executed. So, in season and out of season, the plans are thrust on the notice of the world. The world is careless; it must be stimulated by eloquent prophecies. It is sceptical; it must be convinced by facts. It is dull of comprehension; the facts must be arrayed in the garb of that rhetoric which uses adjectives only of the superlative degree. The world fails to see the meaning of facts; it must be taught truth by means of lies. It does not know its own interest: so it must be treated like a baby by the Napoleon of the Stock Exchange. And yet one day the Napoleon finds that, in spite of all his good intentions, the mighty scheme for binding nations together by means of iron rods has signally failed; that the sea has washed the fabric away; that his schemes have driven a thousand families to eat the bread of charity or toil; and that, strange as the fact may seem, he, the Napoleon of his age, is pursued into exile by the curses of those to whom he meant to be a second Providence.

bourgeois vulgarity, and whose aims were desperately common-place; whose crowning ambition was to enrich his family, and whose parade of love for the plebeians was so hollow that, as Heine sarcastically said, he always used the same old dirty glove to cover the hand with which he shook the hands of his unwashed subjects? Louis Philippe must be put out of the way. So must the Republic, with its blustering, its quarrelling, and its inability to comprehend the grandeur of the scheme which had been unfolded by Prince Louis Bonaparte in the comments on the ideas of his uncle. A coup d'état must be effected, and the Republic must bear the blame of the unfortunate necessity. The subsequent massacre was an unhappy incident; but the Republic must bear the blame of that too; Persigny had sworn to that fact with abundant gusto. If untruths must be told and lives sacrificed, in order to found the Empire, the plan, after all, had the warrant of all time. For, whatever might be said by the theologians, evil had uniformly been done in order to bring forth good. That was Nature's plan; that was the only plan open to a great statesman; and that should be the plan of Louis Napoleon. When men talked of morality, he asked what they meant, and showed, by a small expenditure of subtlety, that they were building houses upon the sand. It was easy for so able a man to demolish the foundations of the Philistine morality, and easy to laugh at the bugbears which the priests had instilled into his wife, -a passion for masses as well as for crinoline. And, moreover, the system of Imperialism would shower such abundant blessings on France and Europe as could

Thus we get a clue to the nature of the man who, after destroying the French Republic, and ruling France for twenty years with sagacity and success, plunged into the most foolish as well as the most unprovoked war recorded in modern history, and ended his career in the mightiest capitulation known to military annals. The personal ability of Napoleon III. has been exaggerated by his admirers. He does not stand on the same plane as his uncle, to whom nature had given one of those originating and organizing brains which she fashions once in a thousand years. Nor, in diplomatic sub-never rain down from the arid sky of a Retlety, fertility of resource, or sagacious au- public or a Monarchy. Italy should be free dacity of plan, is he the equal of such men and united; Mexico should be a great Emas Cavour and Bismarck. But he acquired pire, the representative in America of the immense power from the profound study of Latin races, and the rival of the United one political system, and the fanatical belief States; while France should be made as in one political idea. He was a Bonapartist rich as England by the influences of freeby conviction as well as by blood. The trade. The scheme did not lack grandeur; worship of his uncle's name, and the study it lacked nothing but justice and truth. It of his uncle's plans, had taught him to regard forgot but one thing. the existence of a the system of Imperialism with some such moral law. It has failed, as all such schemes faith as the devotee regards the mission of will fail in a world of freedom. A high the Church. In Imperialism he found a re- priest of the religion of Selfishness, Louis

Napoleon now expiates in exile the sins which he committed in the day when the magic of his uncle's name, and the worship of his uncle's system, gave him such power as comes, perhaps, only once in a generation to any of the children of men.

From The Economist.
AUSTRALIAN FEDERATION.

different form enlarges the view of their electors, tempts them to overlook petty drawbacks in their representatives, and gradually fosters that first of political virtues, a readiness to make sacrifices. For instance, a central Government in Australia would very soon require the control and the produce of the Customs, now the sheet-anchor of Australian taxation. Hence a new and a higher view of the pressure inflicted by tariffs, a readiness to endure direct taxation, and a new and much- wanted appreciation of the uses of economy. The pride of THE movement reported from Australia nationality moreover, sure to spring up in a in favour of federation has, we imagine, the federation with a special name and a sepafull consent of the Colonial Office, even if rate place in the world, is an element in it was not suggested from this side, and we political culture, and so is the sense of trust that as it advances it will receive the community with other and allied States warm support of the English public. From situated in the same region, united by any possible point of view except one the similar interests, and having for a common federation of these colonies will be an ad- object equal burdens. The Australians vantage to themselves, to Great Britain, have hitherto had none of these things, their and the world. It might be a disadvantage relation to England having been too much if Great Britain ever contemplated the idea that of the grown-up child to its parentof holding them by force, but as that is that is, no disciplinary relation at all, exgiven up even by the strongest Imperialists cept in extreme cases recurring but once in the objection may be dismissed without dis- a generation. Then federation is better for cussion. Federation will be an advantage England, because the colonies must either to the Australians themselves, because it be allies or dependents, and in either case will introduce into their politics just that an increase in their power must be an addiamount of complication which is necessary tion to ours. This is peculiarly the case in to produce statesmen. The defect of colo- Australia, which is clearly adapted by its nial politics as a training school for Govern- position to become a great maritime State; ment is a certain simplicity, or to take a to maintain fleets rather than armies; to phrase from a different region of thought perform, in fact, functions which can be a certain lowness of type, as of an organism performed effectively only by considerable not yet fully developed. The colonists Powers. Any country can have an army if have no frontiers, no foreign affairs, no ex- it will put its whole people into the field, ternal yet ever present restraining influence; but only a country of a certain width of rethey have no one to consult but themselves, source can keep an armed fleet at sea. nothing to fear except a change in local Ireland could maintain a great army, but public opinion. The consequence is that, not great squadrons. And finally the exlike Anglo-Indians, they become very clever periment must, in the long run, be beneficial but very narrow reasoners, think much too to the world. It is impossible to glance at little of obstacles, and are apt to grow into the map and not see that the work of "exvehement doctrinaries of the parochial kind. ploiting," civilizing, and, may be, of conFederation does much to correct all this. quering the Southern half of the shattered The relations between the provinces and Continent, which we call the Indian Archithe Central Government soon require deli- pelago, with its magnificent islands, savage cate adjustment, self-restraint, a habit of races, and tropical products, must fall ultiregarding circumstances other than those mately to the rulers of the Australian Conof the immediate locality, which all tend to tinent, that we are too far off, Holland too widen men's minds, and take them out of an weak, and all other nations too occupied or otherwise narrow groove. The sense of im- too indifferent. That great task will be mense and general responsibilities solem- much facilitated by the creation of a central nizes politicians, while the same sense in a Government.

From The Economist.

DO THE CONDITIONS REQUISITE FOR A

STABLE GOVERNMENT EXIST IN FRANCE?

ity, especially in France (and we shall be glad to be wrong); but still every appearance shows that Europe has not now to deal with the permanent Government in France, but only with one of many ephemeral Governments that the Republic is not to be counted on for duration any more than its predecessors that, perhaps, the pre-requisites of a stable Government do not exist in France, and that if they do they are very difficult to find and satisfy.

THE new Government in France was made according to custom. By long and painful experience, France has attained what may be called a routine in revolutions. First, the old Government breaks down, and everyone sees it must fall; then the sitting Assembly the Corps Législatif, the Chambre des Deputés, or whatever be the name at the time. votes that the Government The commonest aid to stability—an anshall go and begins to occupy itself with the cient Government resting on recognized various substitutes; it entertains such and dignity and ineradicable veneration — it is such motions, and hears this or that speech plain the French have not and cannot have. upon the subject; when all at once the mob After eighty years of change their scene of of Paris rushes in-expels both speakers politics is still a tabula rasa. They have and hearers, and names a Provisional Gov- had eleven Governments in that time, with ernment such as suits it, or rather such as their average duration of seven years each, suits the views and wishes of the leaders and such an experience is fatal to hereditary who have, for the time being, the command veneration. The mass of the English peoof it. This process has been repeated so ple obey Queen Victoria without knowing often that Paris expects it, and France why or wishing to know why, and England yields to it; but, unhappily, this is not the is coherent because they do so. The only end of the series. After a short interval, approach to such a feeling in France was the Government, thus nominated by the loyalty to the Empire. Much, very much, mob of Paris, quarrels with that mob. The may he said against the first Napoleon, but Government, as a Government, wishes to after all this remains - that scarcely any keep law and order, and then it becomes character and scarcely any career were more opposed to the mob which wants something fitted to awaken and to live in the popular else than law and order. The mob was imagination. The French peasantry knew of urged to name the new Government by nothing before and thought of nothing after strong passions and vague hopes; in a few him. The second Napoleon had no similar days it finds those hopes still distant, and glorious qualities; but he had more homely those passions still ungratified; it soon be- attractions. For eighteen years he gave all gins to hate its own creature, in a little Frenchmen all peasants and all working while after it is in arms against it. Every men- a greater amount of happiness than Government thus nominated by an insurrec- any one before him. Though not fit to attion is soon presented with the inevitable tract a race, it seemed as if he was exactly problem shall we yield to a second insur- fit to rivet a race before attracted. But rection which wants to put new rulers in our now that is over; the happiness of the Emplace, or shall we resist it by force? The pire is turned into pain, and its glory into mob-named Government has to ask itself ignominy. The surrender of Sedan will shall we yield to the mob or shall we resign? be remembered as long as "the sun of As long as Governments yield to the mob Austerlitz;" and the memory of conscript the Revolution continues; whenever the sons, wrung from home only to die or be Government begins to coerce the mob the defeated, is sad and bitter in every French reaction commences. And that reaction, village. Only this spring there was a kind according to its strength, continues perhaps of vague hope that some kind of free or months, perhaps years, till a new opportu- half-free Empire might cement the active nity comes, a new mob succeeds, and a new mind of France with its inert mass of prerevolution begins. The Empire which has judice. But now such a hope is so irrecovnow fallen was but the end of a strong re- erable that it is difficult, even to those who action caused by the terror of a long revo-wrote and said so, to understand that they lution. Is there reason to hope that the new Republic will be more lasting than its predecessors that the French nation has reached the end of its many changes, or is materially nearer to it?

To this question we fear the answer that is much the most likely to be right is the negative. Events often confound probabil

ever believed it. There is no government now possible in France that is helped by an hereditary attachment or the prestige of glory. The Empire was the only government which had a pretence of being such, and that has fallen so as to dispel its glory and to destroy all affection for it.

France is then left to a Government of