We also see in this letter one of Louis Napoleon’s characteristics,—­a fondness for taking people by surprise.  Nearly everything he did was a surprise to the public, and yet it had long been maturing in his own mind.

The next time M. Ollivier saw the emperor he was told of his intention to grant the right of holding political meetings; the responsibility of cabinet ministers to the Chamber; and the almost entire freedom of the Press.  The emperor added, with a smile:  “I am making considerable concessions, and if my government immediately succeeded that of the First Empire, this would be acknowledged; but since I came after parliamentary governments, my concessions will be considered small.”

The emperor’s experiment was a failure.  The moment restraint was taken off, and the French had liberty of speech and freedom of the Press, they became like boys released from school and its strict discipline.  The brutal excesses of language in the Parisian newspapers, the fierceness of their attacks upon the Government, and the shamelessness of their slander, alarmed the emperor and the best of his personal adherents, who had been by no means supporters of his policy.  But though the experiment gave signs of never being likely to succeed, and no one seemed pleased with the new system, the emperor persevered.  He refused to withdraw his reforms; he declined to make what children call “an Indian gift” to his people:  but the effect of the divided counsels by which he was embarrassed was that these reforms were accepted by the public merely as experiments, to be tried during good behavior, and not as the basis of a new system definitively entered upon.

All through the year 1869 the difficulties of the course which the emperor adopted grew greater and greater.  The emancipated Press was rampant.  It knew no pity and no decency.  Its articles on the emperor’s failing health (which he insisted upon reading) were cruel in the extreme.  Terrible anxieties for the future must have haunted him.  If his project for self-government in France must prove a failure, when he was dead, what then?  Could a child and a woman govern as he had done by a despotic will?  He had done so in his days of health and strength; but events now seemed to intimate that his government had been a failure rather than a success.

Lord Palmerston, writing from Paris in Charles X.’s time, said:  “Bonaparte in the last years of his reign crushed every one else, both in politics and war.  He allowed no one to think and act but himself.”

Somewhat the same remark could be applied to the Third Napoleon.  But Napoleon I. was a great administrator as well as a great general; his activity was inexhaustible, he corresponded with everybody, he looked after everything, he knew whether he was well or ill served; and his mode of obtaining power did not hinder his availing himself of the best talent in France.  The case of his nephew was the reverse of this.  His highest