Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/361

 BETWEEN THE CZAR AND THE SULTAN. 319 armed and helpless, France was called upon chap. either to strive to levy a war of despair against XIV " the mighty engine of the French executive govern- FraI,oe, . ° » ° o succumbed. ment, and the vast army which stood over her, or else to succumb at once to Louis Bonaparte and Moray and Maupas and Monsieur Le Roy St Arnaud. She succumbed. The brethren of the Elysde had asked the country to say ' Yes ' or 'No:' should Louis Bonaparte alone build a new Constitution for the governance of the mighty nation ? and when, in the way already told, they had obtained the ' Yes ' from herds and flocks of men whom they ventured to number at nearly eight millions,* it was made known to Paris that the person who had long been the favourite sub- ject of her jests was now become sole lawgiver for Prince Loan i i o -n ti t • r.-ii sole lawgiver ner and tor t ranee. In the making of such laws of France. as he intended to give the country, Prince Louis was highly skilled, for he knew how to enfold the creation of a sheer Oriental autocracy in a nomen- clature taken from the polity of Free European States. With the advice and consent of Moray, and no doubt with the full approval of all the rest of the plotters, he virtually made it the law The laws h« that he should command, and that France should e ' pay him tribute and obey.-f p. 95. — Note to Ath Edition. t The free way in which the puree of France was laid open by the success of the coup d'etat may be in some measure gathered from the long catalogue of decrees opening supplemen- tary and extraordinary credits, which is given in the Appen- dix to the 'Annuaire,' pp. 95 rt seq. As was mentioned in a
 * 7,439,216, against 640,737 noes. 'Annuaire,' Appendix,