’We disapprove in many respects of the manner in which Louis Napoleon employs his power, as we disapprove in all respects of the means by which he seized it; but, on the whole, we place him high among the sovereigns of France.  As respects his foreign policy we put him at the very top.  The foreign policy of the rulers of mankind, whether they be kings, or ministers, or senates, or demagogues, is generally so hateful, and at the same time so contemptible, so grasping, so irritable, so unscrupulous, and so oppressive—­so much dictated by ambition, by antipathy and by vanity, so selfish, often so petty in its objects, and so regardless of human misery in its means, that a sovereign who behaves to other nations with merely the honesty and justice and forbearance which are usual between man and man, deserves the praise of exalted virtue.  The sovereigns of France have probably been as good as the average of sovereigns.  Placed indeed at the head of the first nation of the Continent, they have probably been better; but how atrocious has been their conduct towards their neighbour!  If we go back no further than to the Restoration, we find Louis XVIII. forming the Holy Alliance, and attacking Spain without a shadow of provocation, for the avowed purpose of crushing her liberties and giving absolute power to the most detestable of modern tyrants.  We find Charles X. invading a dependence of his ally, the Sultan, and confiscating a province to revenge a tap on the face given by the Bey of Algiers to a French consul.  We find Louis Philippe breaking the most solemn engagements with almost wanton faithlessness; renouncing all extension of territory in Africa and then conquering a country larger than France—­a country occupied by tribes who never were the subjects of the Sultan or of the Bey, and who could be robbed of their independence only by wholesale and systematic massacre; we find him joining England, Spain, and Portugal in the Quadruple Alliance, and deserting them as soon as the time of action had arrived; joining Russia, Prussia, Austria and England, in the arrangement of the Eastern question, on the avowed basis that the integrity of the Ottoman empire should be preserved, and then attempting to rob it of Egypt.  We find him running the risk of a war with America, because she demanded, too unceremoniously, the payment of a just debt, and with England because she complained of the ill-treatment of a missionary.  We find him trying to ruin the commerce of Switzerland because the Diet arrested a French spy, and deposing Queen Pomare because she interfered with the sale of French brandies; and, as his last act, eluding an express promise by a miserable verbal equivocation, and sowing the seeds of a future war of succession in order to get for one of his sons an advantageous establishment in Spain.