“Upon the whole,” concluded the prince, “my impression is that neither in home nor foreign politics would the emperor naturally take any violent step, but that he appears in distress for means of governing, and is obliged to look about him from day to day.  Having deprived the people of any active participation in the government, and reduced them to the mere position of spectators, they grow impatient, like a crowd at a display of fireworks, whenever there is any cessation in the display.  Still, he appears the only man who has any hold on France, relying on the name of Napoleon.  He said to the Duke of Newcastle: 

’Former Governments have tried to reign by the support of one million of the educated classes; I claim to lay hold of the other twenty-nine.’  He is decidedly benevolent, and anxious for the good of the people, but has, like all rulers before him, a bad opinion of their political capacity.”

Strange to say, in the midst of war the Universal Exposition of 1855 took place in Paris.  The winter was horribly severe, and the armies in the Crimea suffered terribly.  The emperor was extremely desirous to go himself to the seat of war, but was urged by every one about him to remain at home.  All kinds of good reasons were put forward for this advice, but probably not the one subsequently advanced by one of his generals after the campaign of Italy in 1859.  “It used to be said that the presence of the First Napoleon with his army was worth a reinforcement of forty thousand men.  The army now feels that the presence of the Third Napoleon equals the loss of about the same number.”

We have seen that Queen Victoria had expressed a wish to welcome the emperor and empress at Windsor Castle.  It was on April 16, 1855, that the imperial pair reached England, and were received by Prince Albert on board their yacht.  They met with a hearty national greeting on their way to London.  In London itself crowds lined the streets.  “It was,” says an eye-witness, “one bewildering triumph, in which it was estimated that a million of people took part.”  The “Times” reporter noticed that as the emperor passed his old residence in King Street, St. James’s, he pointed it out to the empress as the place where he was living when the events of 1848 summoned him to Paris.

“Only seven years before,” observes his biographer, Mr. Jerrold, “he was wont to stroll unnoticed, with his faithful dog at his heels, from this house to the news-vendor’s stall by the Burlington Arcade, to get the latest news from revolutionary France; now he was the guest of the English people, on his way through cheering crowds to Windsor Castle, where the queen was waiting in the vestibule to receive him.”  The same rooms were prepared for him that had been given to Louis Philippe and to the Emperor Nicholas.  Queen Victoria tells us in her diary,—­