It cannot be
  But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
  To make oppression bitter; or ’ere this
  I should have fatted all the region kites
  With this slave’s offal.

We made dumb our anger and our honour; but it has not brought us peace.

VII—­The Midnight of Europe

Among the minor crimes of England may be classed the shallow criticism and easy abandonment of Napoleon III.  The Victorian English had a very bad habit of being influenced by words and at the same time pretending to despise them.  They would build their whole historical philosophy upon two or three titles, and then refuse to get even the titles right.  The solid Victorian Englishman, with his whiskers and his Parliamentary vote, was quite content to say that Louis Napoleon and William of Prussia both became Emperors—­by which he meant autocrats.  His whiskers would have bristled with rage and he would have stormed at you for hair-splitting and “lingo,” if you had answered that William was German Emperor, while Napoleon was not French Emperor, but only Emperor of the French.  What could such mere order of the words matter?  Yet the same Victorian would have been even more indignant if he had been asked to be satisfied with an Art Master, when he had advertised for a Master of Arts.  His irritation would have increased if the Art Master had promised him a sea-piece and had brought him a piece of the sea; or if, during the decoration of his house, the same aesthetic humourist had undertaken to procure some Indian Red and had produced a Red Indian.

The Englishman would not see that if there was only a verbal difference between the French Emperor and the Emperor of the French, so, if it came to that, it was a verbal difference between the Emperor and the Republic, or even between a Parliament and no Parliament.  For him an Emperor meant merely despotism; he had not yet learned that a Parliament may mean merely oligarchy.  He did not know that the English people would soon be made impotent, not by the disfranchising of their constituents, but simply by the silencing of their members; and that the governing class of England did not now depend upon rotten boroughs, but upon rotten representatives.  Therefore he did not understand Bonapartism.  He did not understand that French democracy became more democratic, not less, when it turned all France into one constituency which elected one member.  He did not understand that many dragged down the Republic because it was not republican, but purely senatorial.  He was yet to learn how quite corruptly senatorial a great representative assembly can become.  Yet in England to-day we hear “the decline of Parliament” talked about and taken for granted by the best Parliamentarians—­Mr. Balfour, for instance—­and we hear the one partly French and wholly Jacobin historian of the French Revolution recommending for the English evil a revival of the power of the Crown.  It seems that so far from having left Louis Napoleon far behind in the grey dust of the dead despotisms, it is not at all improbable that our most extreme revolutionary developments may end where Louis Napoleon began.