Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/294



Louis Bonaparte would have been null. An elector was only permitted to vote 'Yes,' or 'No;' and it seems plain that the prospect of anarchy involved in the negative vote would alone have operated as a sufficing menace. Therefore, even if the collection of the suffrages had been carried on with perfect fairness, the mere stress of the question proposed would have made it impossible that there should be a free election: the same central power which, nearly four years before, had compelled the terrified nation to pretend that it loved a republic, would have now forced the same helpless people to kneel, and say they chose for their one only lawgiver the man recommended to them by Monsieur de Morny.

"Having the army and the whole executive power in their hands, and having preordained the question to be put to the people, the brethren of the Elysée, it would seem, might have safely allowed the proceeding to go to its sure conclusion without further coercing the vote; and if they had done this, they would have given a colour to the assertion that the result of the plebiscite was a national ratification of their act. But remembering what they had done, and having blood on their hands, they did not venture upon a free election. What they did was this: they placed thirty-two departments under martial law; and since they wanted nothing more than a sheet of paper and a pen and ink in order to place every other department in the same predicament, it can be said without straining a word, that potentially, or actually, the whole of France was under martial law.

"Therefore men voted under the sword. But martial law is only one of the circumstances which constitute the difference between an honest election and a plebiscite of the Bonaparte sort. To the adversaries of the Elysée all effective means of concerted action were forbidden by Morny and Maupas. Except