The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1852-11-02 00:00:00

!ns, you roust I'

Alcibiades and

preference when the choice lies between
Apemantus. If you are a non-elector, you can at all
events, bellow—if you have a vote, we defy you to escape
the poll. Indeed, it is wonderful how soon and keenly a
man will warm to a contest. We have heard an old gen-
tleman protest, of a Monday, that no comideration upon
earth would induce him to register his vote, and on the

Indeed

he be an adver-

sary, who withholds his vote on such an occasion, with
feelings little short of contempt. He has a vote, and he
ought to exercise it one way or another. If he abstains,

without alleging some intelligible reason, you are at
liberty to set him down as a sneak."

LOUIS NAPOLEON

"The position of Louis Napoleon with regard to
France is one of the most extraordinary phenomena of the
present century. Here is a man who has been generally
represented as devoid of commanding ability—as destitute
of principle and character—as obstinate, vain, sensual,
and even silly—as false to his engagements, unfaithful to
his friends, and as one on whose word no possible reliance
could be placed ; and yet this man, without means, and
without influence—one day a prisoner, the next an exile—
has contrived to achieve the entire and despotic command
of the very foremost nation of civilised Europe—to tread
tinder foot all opposition—and to be able to appeal to the
voice of the immense majority of the people, as his pass-
port and title to the throne ! He could refer to no favour-
able antecedents; yet, at his first important step, we find
him elevated, through the medium of universal suffrage,
to the Presidency of the Republic, over the head of one
who was justly esteemed as the first living soldier of
France. Next we find him in collision with the so-called
representatives of the people, and triumphant almost
without a struggle. With a strong heel he crushed out at
once the fire of insurrection, grappled with a licentious
press and strangled it, smote down the rising power of
socialism, and then appealed to the nation at large for a
confirmation of what he had done. That confirmation
was given to him, by an increased majority of voices ; and
in less than a year thereafter we find him bailed, almost
by universal France, as a political deliverer, and solicited
to assume, as his reward, the grand prize of the imperial
crown ! We state these things, not in laudation of him,
but as a practical rebuke to the blindness of those who
could see, in this extraordinary man, nothing more than
the features of the common adventurer.. Since the crea-
tion of the world no common adventurer has ever achieved
so much. Chance did not place him where he is : if it
had been so, his first step would also have been his last.
Reviled, maligned, derided as be has been, how comes it
that he yet maintains such a hold of the heart of France ?
To attribute his power solely to the adhesion of the army,
as some egregious idiots still attempt to do, is obviously
and ludicrously false. The army is with him, it is true;
but the army is with him only because the people are also
on his side."

MUNICIPAL CORPORATIONS.

" What is a municipality, town-council, or by whatever
name such a body may be known ? Simply a committee
of the citizens to administer the affairs of the urban com-
munity—to look after its property, and to protect its
rights. But we are seriously disposed to differ from those
who think that the municipalities have a cosmopolitan
sphere, and are entitled to supersede the functions both of
the Houses of Parliament and of Her Majesty's Secretary
of State for the Foreign Department. We admit the
extreme respectability of the constituent members, and—
in the average—their intelligence. What work really is
theirs they do reasonably well, though sometimes in a
cheese-paring spirit; but we really must demur to their
interference with matters which—•to state our views
broadly—nre utterly beyond the comprehension or the
grasp of the great majority of their number. For
shall suppose, in Modena or

a—in other words, an attempt at rovolution. Vari-

le affair are toe.

rged in pri.