institutions, and the most disposed to govern in accordance with modern sentiments.  The President himself was attached to the liberal party, and leaned decidedly to the left wing of it.  Circumstances had all tended to make him a Constitutionalist.  His connections had been principally with those countries in which liberty is best understood, and whose histories are the histories of freedom.  By birth he was a prince of Holland.  He had lived much in Switzerland and in England, and he had visited the United States.  That part of his youth in which the mind is formed he had passed in those years in which the Bonapartists and Liberals had been allies.  His writings prove that he both understood and appreciated the constitutional system of government.  Such a man was not likely to become a despot merely from choice, though circumstances might make him one for the time, as they made Fabius a dictator.  His recent action, in extensively liberalizing the imperial system, and in providing for perfect freedom of discussion in the Senate and the Legislative Body,—­a freedom of which the supporters of the Pope have thoroughly availed themselves,—­confirms the belief that his original intention was to provide a free constitution for France.  Had he done so, there would have been civil war in that country within a year from the time that he became master of it.  He could not trust his enemies, who, could they have obtained power, would have granted him no mercy, and therefore had no right to expect it from him.  Had they been successful, we should have heard much of their acts of usurpation and cruelty, and of the injustice with which the President and his party and policy had been treated.  Severe criticism, often unfair both in matter and in manner, is that which every victorious party must experience, not only from those whom it has defeated, but from the world at large.  This is one of the items in the details of the heavy price which the victors must pay for their victory, no matter where it is won, or what the character of the contest the issue of which it has decided.  Men worship success, but they worship it much after the fashion that some savage tribes worship the gods created by their own hands, tearing and rending at one time the images that at another had been objects of their most abject devotion.

If we judge the conduct of Louis Napoleon by reference only to Napoleon III., we shall not be inclined to condemn it.  His rule has not been a perfect one, but it has been the best that France has known for fifty years, not only for the French themselves, but for foreign peoples.  He has lifted France out of that slough in which she had floundered under both branches of the Bourbons, and he has done so without being guilty of any act of injustice toward other nations.  The greatness of the France of Napoleon I. was unpleasingly associated with the idea of the degradation of neighboring countries, which implied the ultimate fall of the Empire, as it could not be