Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/288

 produced in England, by what took place in France at the beginning of December, 1851:—

"'Are there no symptoms that we have spirits amongst us who want not the will, if the power and occasion be afforded, to play the part of Burke in our day? He excited the indignation of his countrymen against a republic which had decapitated a king; now our sympathies are roused in behalf of a republic which has been strangled by an emperor.'"

Mr. Cobden's argument which follows, namely, "that the French nation are the legitimate tribunal for disposing of the grievance," and what he Says a page or two after that "the French people, for reasons best known to themselves, acquiesced in his rule," amount to this, that they could never have got rid of the tyrant who had got upon their shoulders, like the old man of the sea upon the shoulders of Sinbad, unless they had received assistance from without from the genius of Moltke, for whom the night-strangler who inherited neither the genius nor the valour of the great man whose name he bore, was no match. I agree with Mr. Cobden that no good is done by levelling at Louis Napoleon the same invectives which were hurled at the Constituent Assembly sixty years before. Invective is nothing without originality. If a man were to attempt to hurl at his enemy some of the