or suppressed; especially when the people saw great public improvements going on, had both bread and occupation, read false accounts of military successes, and were bewildered by fetes and outward grandeur.  But when the army was a sham, and corruption had pervaded every office under government; when the expenses of living had nearly doubled from taxation, extravagance, bad example, and wrong ideas of life; when trusted servants were turned into secret enemies, incapable and false; when such absurd mistakes were made as the expedition to Mexico, and the crowning folly of the war with Prussia, proving the incapacity and folly of the master-hand,—­the machinery which directed the armies and the bureaus and all affairs of State itself, broke down, and the catastrophe was inevitable.

Louis Napoleon certainly was not the same man in 1870 that he was in 1850.  His burdens had proved too great for his intellect.  He fell, and disappeared from history in a storm of wrath and shame, which also hid from the eyes of the people the undoubted services he had rendered to the cause of order and law, and to that of a material prosperity which was at one time the pride of his country and the admiration of the whole world.

But a nation is greater than any individual, even if he be a miracle of genius.  When the imperial cause was lost, and the armies of France were dispersed or shut up in citadels, and the hosts of Germany were converging upon the capital, Paris resolved on sustaining a siege—­apparently hopeless—­rather than yield to a conqueror before the last necessity should open its gates.  The self-sacrifices which its whole population, supposed to be frivolous and enervated, made to preserve their homes and their works of art; their unparalleled sufferings; their patience and self-reliance under the most humiliating circumstances; their fertility of resources; their cheerfulness under hunger and privation; and, above everything else, their submission to law with every temptation to break it,—­proved that the spirit of the nation was unbroken; that their passive virtues rivalled their most glorious deeds of heroism; that, if light-headed in prosperity, they knew how to meet adversity; and that they had not lost faith in the greatness of their future.

Perhaps they would not have made so stubborn a resistance to destiny if they had realized their true situation, but would have opened their gates at once to overwhelming foes, as they did on the fall of the first Napoleon.  They probably calculated that Bazaine would make his escape from Metz with his two hundred thousand men, find his way to the banks of the Loire, rally all the military forces of the south of France, and then march with his additional soldiers to relieve Paris, and drive back the Germans to the Rhine.