‘We did not choose’, I answered, ’to disbelieve any thing.  We were simply ignorant. I knew all these facts, because I have passed a part of every year since 1847 in Paris; because I walked along the Boulevards on the 20th of December 1851, and saw the walls of every house, from the Bastille to the Madeleine, covered with the marks of musket-balls; because I heard in every society of the thousands who had been massacred, and of the tens of thousands who had been deportes; but the untravelled English, and even the travelled English, except the few who live in France among the French, knew nothing of all this.  Your press tells nothing.  The nine millions of votes given to Louis Napoleon seemed to prove his popularity, and therefore the improbability of the tyranny of which he was accused by his enemies. I knew that those nine millions of votes were extorted, or stolen by violence or fraud.  But the English people did not know it.  They accepted his election as the will of the nation, and though they might wonder at your choice, did not presume to blame it.’

‘The time,’ they answered, ’at which light broke in upon you is suspicious.  Up to the 14th of January 1858 the oppression under which thirty-four millions of people within twenty-four miles of your coast, with whom you are in constant intercourse, was unknown to you.  Their ruler insults you, and you instantly discover that he is an usurper and a tyrant.  This looks as if the insult, and the insult alone, opened your eyes.’

‘What opened our eyes,’ I answered, ’was not the insult but the loi de surete publique.  It was the first public act which showed to England the nature of your Government.

’When we found, erected in every department, a revolutionary tribunal, empowered to banish and transport without trial; when we found a rude soldier made Home Minister, and the country divided into five districts to be each governed by a marshal, we saw at once that France was under a violent military despotism.  Until that law was passed the surface was smooth.  There was nothing in the appearance of France to show to a stranger that she was not governed by a Monarch, practically, indeed, absolute, but governing as many absolute Monarchs have done, mildly and usefully.

’Of course we might have found out the truth sooner if we had inquired.  And perhaps we ought to have inquired.  We busy ourselves about our own affairs, and neglect too much those of other countries.  In that sense you have a right to say that we chose to be ignorant, since our conduct was such as necessarily to make us ignorant.  But it was not because Louis Napoleon was our ally that we chose to be ignorant, but because we habitually turn our eyes from the domestic affairs of the Continent, as things in which we have seldom a right to interfere, and in which, when we do interfere, we do more harm than good.’

We talked of the manner in which the loi de surete publique has been carried out.  And I mentioned 600 as the number of those who had suffered under it, as acknowledged to me by Blanchard in the beginning of March.