The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-04-18

the parental authority is withdrawn,
every trace of orderly and intelligent
insight into the ends of life disappears
at once, and it becomes manifest that the
parental authority was not one of discipline
preparing for self-government, but one cal
culated to stifle and suppress all the inde-
pendent capacities of the individuals submit
ted to its rule? The Emperor himself knew
better, if he really said some five or six years
ago, as be is reported TO have said, that he
had but one remorse, and that was, that his
Government would render self lf-government
in France more than ever impossible. So, at
all events, it seems likely to prove. No one
can doubt that the situation in 1S48 was far
more hopeful than the situation seems to be
now in 1871. OF course the German con-
quest, and the excessive and humiliating
rigor OF the German terms of peace, must be
taken into account as one of the disor-
gsnizing elements of the present. Yet
had France gained in capacity of self
government since 1913, instead of losing, as
she undoubtedly has done, the external pres
sure might have welded France together
anew, instead of exposing the utter anarchy
of wishes and purposes within her. The
Assemblies of 1913 and 1S49 unquestionably
contained wild and lawless elements, but they
contained also far greater elements of strength
than any which have shown themselves in
this distracted and reactionary medley assem-
bled at Versailles in the hour of Frances
greatest peril Louis Philippe's Government
was a narrow-minded and, in some respects
a mean one, but it did, at least, teach the
middle classes the alphabet of political life;
it brought out not few eminent men; it de-
veloped party-leaders of certain amount of
force; it did more in the direction of political
education than any Government France has
had since the revolution. Now, twenty years
of suppression, twenty years of parental rule,
during which no man who valued his dignity
or independence ever dreamt of aspiring to
the position of French statesman, have left
France in utter political impotence, without
parties which know their own political ends
without leaders who have the confidence of
their parties and guide their counsels, with
out the Difference for each other which is of
the essence of political liberty, without a
trace of the self-reliance which is at the root
of all sobliety and moderation. And this is
notoriously the late Emperor's doing. When,
in 1851, instead of steadily resisting encroach-
ments under the Constitution, he plotted to
upset the Constitution aud put down the Par
hsmentary life of France by the help of that
popular panic and ignorance the expression
of which he organized in the plebiscite, he
really shut up, and knew that he shut up,
the political school of France, and suppressed
political education, which is the only
root of true order, in the so-called interests
of order. Thenceforth every Assembly of
Deputies recognized that if it displeased the
Emperor, plebiscite would shut its mouth;
and all power accordingly dropped from its
hands. Imperial clerks and secretaries took
the place of statesmen. The opposition, per-
fectly conscious that they had no responsible
ity for France, became q mere knot of viru-
lent literary antagonists of the empire. The
ministerial party knew that it existed only to
support the throne; the tradition of political
responsibility and party bonds was lost; the
half learned lessen of self-government was
utterly forgotten; and the experience, valu-
able enough of its kind, narrow and limited
as that kiEd was of the eighteen
years OF middle,class government in
France, was utterly wasted-a generation
having arisen to which its lessons are as
though they had never been taught. And all
this is, We say, emphatically due to the En-
peror. Had he acted as Cavaignac acted in
194S, France might have had less material
prosperity, might have passed through more
dangerous-looking crises between 1850 and
1870 than she did, but she would not now be
the helpless chaos she is. Louis Napoleon,
by the deliberate policy of making his appeal
to the timid ignorance of the nation to over
rule and extieguish the discussing intellect
of the nation, brought these things about,
and is guilty of that political impotence of the
nation at which all Europe stands aghast.
And though this is the great count in the
indictment against the ex-Emperor, and the
very root of all his sin, it is not the only one.
1t was hardly his fault, perhaps, that he had
not even small fraction of the intellectual
and moral energy necessary for the awful re-
sponsibilities he took upon himself in order
ing the coup detat-or, at least, it is his fault,
but only in this sense, that q man not con-
scious of the enormous power requisite to
infuse energy and intelligence into the guild
ance of the State after he had concentrated
power in his own hands, ought to have known
that he was committing crime of far more
fatal immediate consequences in bringing
about condition of things in which the
only spring of vitality was his own will and
brain, than he would have committed if he
had really possessed the genius to direct
great administration well. He
made himself essential to France without
having mind or an industry or q power of
impulse anything like as great as that of any
| of our recent English prime ministers. We
do not deny his intellect certain detach-
ment and impartiality and partly artificial
stateliness of its own. But it was radically
languid; constantly under the dangerously
| sedative influence of love of pleasure, and
entirely without the restless and impulsive
| vigilance of all great administrative natures.
| The consequence was that when the late Em-
peror found himself the centre of a great
political system, he was compelled to make
money do, or rather seem to- the work
which he ought to have done by the un-
wearied energy of his own will. The
political liberty, and the concentration of
great power in the hands of a lazy and some
what enfeebled valetudinarian, was q vast sys-
tenn of corruption. We do not charge the
Emperor with any personal meanness in the
! matter. For this there is no evidence, and