It was into such a political chaos as this that Louis Napoleon found himself plunged in 1848.  He had a difficult part to fill; and that he did not succeed in satisfying most of those who had been most prominent in elevating him was inevitable from the discrepancy between his views of his position and their views of it.  They had intended him to be a tool, and he was determined to be master of all the land.  There was a contest for power, which ended in the coup d’etat of 1851.  Victory waited on the heir of her old favorite.  The contest was marked by many deeds, on both sides, not defensible on strict moral grounds, but which bear too close a resemblance to the ordinary course of French politics to admit of the actors being sweepingly condemned, as if they had poisoned a pure fountain.  Neither party could afford to act with fairness, because each party was convinced that the other was seeking its destruction, according to the usual rule of Gallic political warfare.  That the world should have heard much of the errors of the victor, while those of the vanquished have been charitably passed over, is but natural.  Victors become objects of envy, while pity is the feeling that is created by thoughts of their foes.  It is only in America that the beaten party is so insolent that the conquerors are fairly over-crowed by it.  All the blunders, all the acts of violence of which the other side were guilty, have been forgotten, or are not alluded to, because parties are not held accountable for evils that never were perpetrated, though it was intended that they should take form and shape and bear fruit.  It is charged against the Emperor, that he deliberately planned the destruction of the Republic, and that he ceased not to labor until his purpose had been effected.  Admitting this charge to be strictly well founded, what is it more than can be brought against the very men who are so loud in preferring it?  The Republic was doomed from the hour of its birth, and the final struggle between the Imperialists and the Royalists was made over its carcass.  That struggle was neither a Pharsalia, in which two great men contended for supremacy in a republic, nor a Philippi, in which parties fought deliberately in support of certain principles, but an Actium; and the question to be decided was, With which of two energetic forms of force should the victory be?  Louis Napoleon contended for the imperial form, for the rehabilitation of the scheme of his uncle, and for an opportunity to develop the Napoleonic ideas.  The other side sought the restoration of the monarchy as it had been between 1814 and 1830, with Henry V. for their idol, as any attempt to make the Comte de Paris king must have failed, though in due time Henry V. might have been displaced, if not succeeded regularly, by the head of the Orleans family.  Of the two parties to the struggle that followed the election of Louis Napoleon to the Presidency, that of the President was the more friendly to liberal