The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-08-31
THE EMPEROR IN FAILURE.

From, the London Spectator
One would give good deal for a single
hours insight into the dreams of the dejected
ruler and commander who, whatever his
nominal position at Metz, is we'll known to
be in no state of health for any large amount
of active exertion. 1t is apparently true that
he still keeps the name of Commander-in-
Chief which he has done SO much to make
name of reproach; but even in the hourly
expectation of his last trial in that capacity,
and with the enemy within a few miles of
his great fortress, the Emperor's physical
condition must compel him to leave
almost everything to his sabordinates
in command, and must secure for him in
this supreme crisis far more than can be
palatable of those hours of reverie which
have been the feeders at once of his power
and weakness, the secrets of his achieve
ments and his failures, of his political cum
ming and his military catastrophes 1t would
be worth great many biographies of great
men to have the chronicle of a single hour of
this certainly not great, but very singular,
mans reflections. M. Louis Blanc records
that when he visited him in the prison at
Ham, Louis Napoleon, while attempting to
detail the particulars of his failure at
Boulogne, faltered, struggled moment to
repress a sob, and burst into tears"-so to
some extent verifying what the most enthu-
siastic of his supporters, Mrs. Gordon, had
said of him, III me fait reffet dune femme. ,"
We quote this not to prove that the Emperor,
feeble as he has often been, deficient in
courage, (for against this, despite Mr.. King
lake, there seems to us the most
irrefragable historical evidence); but
to show that his temperament is precisely
of that brooding kind which enhances ten
fold the misery of failure, and accumulates
before its owners imagination the riches of
the stake for which he had played, and the
minutest details of the ruin and ignominy
involved in it's loss. For, Weissenburg,
Woerth, and Forbach, with all the miscalcu-
lation and shame they involve, can leave a
detected dreamer like the Emperor, conscious
of complete inability to do anything himself
towards preventing their natural sequel in a
general defeat of his dspirited forces, little
glimpse of hope-hO,o little, he himself be-
trayed in the utter despair of that fatal ad-
mission to France, "10ut pe,t Sc retGbLir, "
which is Just equivalent to physician say
ing, 'While there is life there is hope" 1t is
impossible to pity the murderer of
French liberty and the successful
poisoner of European morality, when
he is but just beginning to taste the full bit
terness of the fruit he has sown; but it is
hardly possible to conceive, we think, of a
state of mind which, were it not in the
strictest sense the harvest of the thinker
own bad deeds, would more dispose to pity,
than that which must haunt the Emperor in
the many hours of evil omen during which
M. Nelaton's orders and his own conscious
feebleness compel him to hold commune with
himself. Next Monday is his fete day, and
a day about which he has always been wont
to be superstitious, as if it were day of
destiny. The slow-footed hours will this
year have given him ample time for gloomy
memories and still blacker anticipations.
Without pretending to divine the course of
thought in one of the most inscrutable minds
of our generation, it is quite worth while to
conceive as distinctly as we can what trains
of political reflection are likely to be to him
at the present moment most inevitable and
most intolerable, for the Emperor is, in fact,
the impersonation of a political system, and
of a political system not without showy and
seductive side. Yet now, with an exhaustion
both of illness and failure upon him, which
must aggravate, of course, that permanent
deficiency in Wis and physical impulse to ac
tion which has made him the most hesitatine
and balf-hearted of great adventurers, hs
must feel as if he had never really planned
great and resolute action, bu
only slyly plotted what he might dc
if fortune and accomplices concurred. L have
succeeded, he must think, 'only when pitteC
myself against institutions with as little life
or vigor in them as myself. / succeeded
against the Republic only when the mass o.