Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/262

 220 ORIGIN OF THE WAR OF 1853 the repulsive nature of the science at which he laboured. Many men before him had suffered themselves to bring craft into politics ; many more, toiling in humbler grades, had applied their cunning skill to the conflicts which engage courts of law ; but no living man perhaps, except Prince Louis Bonaparte, had passed the hours of a studi- ous youth, and the prime of a thoughtful man- hood, in contriving how to apply stratagem to the science of jurisprudence. It was not, perhaps, from natural baseness that his mind took this bent. The inclination to sit and sit planning for the attainment of some object of desire — this, indeed, was in his nature; but the inclination to labour at the task of making law an engine of deceit — this did not come perforce with his blood. Yet it came with his parentage. It is true, he might have determined to reject the indication given him by the accident of his birth, and to re- main a private citizen; but when once he resolved to become a pretender to the imperial throne, he of course had to try and see how it was possible — how it was possible in the midst of this century — that the coarse Bonaparte yoke of 180-i could be made to sit kindly upon the neck of France ; and France being a European nation, and the yoke being in substance a yoke such as Tartars make for Chinese, it followed that the accommodating of the one to the other was only to be effected by guile. Therefore, by the sheer exigencies of his in- heritance rather than by inborn wickedness, Princo Louis was driven to be a contriver ; and