Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/468

12, 1860.] he had made an attempt to get admission for his family into France, even petitioning for leave to serve as a private soldier in the army. Louis Philippe and his counsellors were too wary to open such a risk, and every successive application was rejected. The next step was to force an entrance; and, in 1836, the Strasburg raid showed Louis Napoleon in his permanent character of Adventurer, aiming at empire.

His failure in that snatch at the crown seemed to disclose a mind so unpractical, and an egotism so certain to be disgusting to the generality of men, that he was contemptuously spared the penalties of high treason. Such a man could never become formidable, it was thought; and he would form a good monument of the clemency of a citizen government. It is now believed, however, that he carried in his breast that vow which has been the grand difficulty of his career, the poison of his tranquillity, the disturber of his policy, and the cause of the great European warfare which we are all looking for as now inevitable. It is believed on all hands that while in Italy he bound himself by the vow of the chief Secret Society of the day to do all that ever might be in his power for the emancipation of Italy, taking upon himself the penalty of death, which is the established sanction of that vow. It is believed that when he knocked at the gate of Strasburg, to steal a throne, he was under the obligation of which Orsini ultimately reminded him, so forcibly that the consequences will live for ever in the history of Europe.

It must have been difficult for anybody but himself and his mother to believe that any world-wide interests could depend on a man who had made such a beginning, and who showed no trace in his procedure, any more than in his person, of any kinship to the great Conqueror whom he aped. The matter seemed more decided still in 1840, when the low-theatrical scene of Boulogne was played, with a tame eagle for the pathos of the piece. Its absurdity saved his life; but he was troublesome, and therefore he was put out of the way by imprisonment in the same apartments in which the retrograde ministers of the last Bourbon sovereign had mourned over the liberties of the nineteenth century, as curses preceding the end of the world.

In that prison of Ham, Louis Napoleon meditated and wrote, and nourished his dreams, and strengthened his prejudices, affording us an insight into his mind which we ought to have profited by more than we have. Among other things, we should, by due study, have perceived that one great element of character,—one essential condition of sound intellect, was absent from his constitution. He has no conscience; though he may possibly suppose that he has. He has sentiment; he has superstition; he has, perhaps, affections; but there is nothing in the whole course of his life which indicates the presence of any moral sense in his own person. If we had early understood how a man of ability may give out fine sentiments with a certain sincerity while incapable of good faith, the prospects of Europe might have been more cheerful than they are now; and if we had taken due heed to his scepticism in regard to human character, we should not now have to bear the provocation of his insults to the understanding of all the world. It may be true that the habit of rule, and the atmosphere of adulation in which he has been living for some years, have destroyed his perception of what men ordinarily are and can do; so that his attempts upon the credulity of society become more gross and weak from year to year; but still, it is abundantly evident that he never took into his account the general parity of power among thinking men, or the general existence of mutual trust as a basis of social action. So we might have foreseen, if we had suspected the importance of the study, that in time this schemer and dreamer would arrive at making incessant protestations which nobody believes, and manifestations which manifest only his delusions about the intellect of mankind.

His works and his ways were not studied, however; and one day he exchanged clothes with a carpenter who was employed on some repairs in the fortress, shouldered a plank, and walked forth into the free world which he hoped to enslave in true Bonaparte style. This was in 1846, after six years’ imprisonment; and he was left unnoticed in England as long as the Orleans family remained burdened with state cares.

In 1848, after the fall of that family, he found his opportunity. He was elected to the legislature, and afterwards to the Presidentship of the Republic. The nation had let in the Bonapartes again, and it needed no ghost from the grave to tell what would happen. There must be the old story over again—a Bonaparte absolutism; the extinction of popular liberty; a constant persecution of intellect and public spirit; a humouring of the lowest national foibles, in order to the extinction of its highest virtues; a retrogression, in short, to the furthest point of barbarism to which one man can carry a great nation.

This is precisely what we are witnessing: the only mystery in the case being the Italian war. It is still asked why a man who has murdered liberty at home went forth to resuscitate it anywhere else. The old Italian vow may have been at the bottom of it; and if a man is really under sentence of death, and aware that he is so, unless he pursues a certain course, it can be no wonder that that is the course which he pursues. There were, however, words dropped about Waterloo long before, and frequent expressions of jealousy of surrounding nations, and an eagerness for a war about the Holy Places, as soon as he was seated on his throne, which indicated a career of attempted conquest, though he was not a professional soldier. He had received a military education, we must remember; and his best work was on the artillery. He has since acted the part of a soldier in Lombardy; and he now attempts in vain to conceal imperialist purposes very like those of the First Empire. Our business here, however, is with his character and attributes rather than his policy.

His restlessness is now perhaps his most notorious attribute, next to his bad faith, which will always be the most prominent of his characteristics. In the combination of the two it seems easy to read his ultimate fate. Without attempting to