Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/291

 Napoleon "plunge the country into war"? What else could he do? He was compelled for the very life of him to do something to other people to help to make Frenchmen forget what he had done to them. He had stamped out the life of the French nation and left it but a mere corpse—galvanized, indeed, into occasional starts of vitality by the springs of that vast system of machinery by which a clerk can dictate to a nation. But Mr. Cobden's statement must be examined in detail.

In the first place it may be admitted that the election to the presidency had been conducted with perfect fairness. Mr. Cobden, however, seems to proceed to the further conclusion, though he does not say so in so many words, that the election to the office of Emperor was also conducted with fairness—with as much fairness indeed as the election to the office of President had been conducted. But between the two elections certain strange events had taken place. There had been sudden imprisonment; there had been sudden murder; there had been sudden massacre on a larger scale, as far as my historical knowledge goes, than had been known since the wholesale murders of Sulla called proscriptions. It is impossible to judge of the relation to each other of the two elections by