draymen off a cart behaved with the direct quixotry of Sir Lancelot or Sir Galahad.  He had beaten women and they beat him.  They regarded themselves simply as avengers of ladies in distress, breaking the bloody whip of a German bully; just as Cobbett had sought to break it when it was wielded over the men of England.  The boorishness was in the Germanic or half-Germanic rulers who wore crosses and spurs:  the gallantry was in the gutter.  English draymen had more chivalry than Teuton aristocrats—­or English ones.

I have dwelt a little on this Italian experiment because it lights up Louis Napoleon as what he really was before the eclipse, a politician—­perhaps an unscrupulous politician—­but certainly a democratic politician.  A power seldom falls being wholly faultless; and it is true that the Second Empire became contaminated with cosmopolitan spies and swindlers, justly reviled by such democrats as Rochefort as well as Hugo.  But there was no French inefficiency that weighed a hair in the balance compared with the huge and hostile efficiency of Prussia; the tall machine that had struck down Denmark and Austria, and now stood ready to strike again, extinguishing the lamp of the world.  There was a hitch before the hammer stroke, and Bismarck adjusted it, as with his finger, by a forgery—­for he had many minor accomplishments.  France fell:  and what fell with her was freedom, and what reigned in her stead only tyrants and the ancient terror.  The crowning of the first modern Kaiser in the very palace of the old French kings was an allegory; like an allegory on those Versailles walls.  For it was at once the lifting of the old despotic diadem and its descent on the low brow of a barbarian.  Louis XI. had returned, and not Louis IX.; and Europe was to know that sceptre on which there is no dove.

The instant evidence that Europe was in the grip of the savage was as simple as it was sinister.  The invaders behaved with an innocent impiety and bestiality that had never been known in those lands since Clovis was signed with the cross.  To the naked pride of the new men nations simply were not.  The struggling populations of two vast provinces were simply carried away like slaves into captivity, as after the sacking of some prehistoric town.  France was fined for having pretended to be a nation; and the fine was planned to ruin her forever.  Under the pressure of such impossible injustice France cried out to the Christian nations, one after another, and by name.  Her last cry ended in a stillness like that which had encircled Denmark.

One man answered; one who had quarrelled with the French and their Emperor; but who knew it was not an emperor that had fallen.  Garibaldi, not always wise but to his end a hero, took his station, sword in hand, under the darkening sky of Christendom, and shared the last fate of France.  A curious record remains, in which a German commander testifies to the energy and effect of the last strokes of the wounded lion of Aspromonte.  But England went away sorrowful, for she had great possessions.