would have remained Louis Napoleon to the end of his days, for all the support he would have received at their hands.  They wished for a sort of high-constable, whose business it should be to maintain order by breaking the heads or seizing the persons of all who did not take their view of men’s political duties.  It is the custom to speak of this class of men as if they were peculiar to France, and to say that their existence there is one of the many reasons why that country can never long enjoy a period of constitutional liberty.  This is not just to France.  The French are a great people, who have their faults, but who are in no sense more servile than are Americans, or Englishmen, or Germans.  Extreme disciples of order, men who are ready to sacrifice everything else for the privileges of making and spending or hoarding money in peace, are to be found in all countries; and nowhere are they more numerous, and nowhere is their influence greater or more noxious, than in the United States.  The difference of populations considered, there are as many of them in Boston as in Paris; and our breed is ready to go as far in sacrificing freedom, and in treating right with contempt, as were their French brothers of 1848.  The infirmity belongs, not to French nature, but to human nature.

Louis Napoleon received not a little assistance, in the early part of his French career, from the strongest of his political enemies.  The friends of both branches of the Bourbons were his friends—­at that time, and for their own purposes.  A restoration was what they desired, and they held that it would be easier to convert the Comte de Chambord or the Comte de Paris into a king as the consequence of another Bonapartean usurpation, than as the consequence of the Republic’s continuance.  Louis Napoleon was to destroy the Republic, and they were to destroy him, with the aid of foreign armies.  The fate which Cicero wished for Octavius, that he should be elevated and then destroyed, was what they meant for him.  They counted upon the effect of that reaction which so soon set in against the revolutions of 1848, and which they did not believe would spare any government which had grown out of any one of those revolutions.  They also believed the Prince to be a fool, and thought he would be a much easier person to be disposed of, after he had been sufficiently used, than any one of his rivals.  They overrated their own power as much as they underrated his abilities; and down to the last moment, and when the contest had become one for life or death, they bore themselves as if they were sure that they were acting against a man who had been elevated solely through the force of circumstances, and who could not maintain his position.  The coup d’etat opened their eyes, but it was not until the event of the Russian War had secured for the Emperor the first place in Europe, that they became convinced that in the man who was the ruler of France they had a master.  Even now, when the