Litchfield enquirer., 1879-04-17
Shadows.

her. youthful beauty attracted the youngest and weakest of the great Napoleon's brothers, They were married just at the time when Napoleon was entering upon that career of vulgar ambition which proved 80 disastrous to Europe, to France, and finally to himself. This greatest soldier of all time was mere snob among kings. Beginning with the destruction of liberty at home, his genius extended the area of subjection abroad till it seemed likely to include all Europe. His great successes gained nothing for the people, they merely forced new kings upon them, and another emperor into the family of European sov- erigns. It is not wonderful that the man who afterwards sacrificed his own wife to his am- bition refused to spare the wife of his brother The American marriage of Jerome was de- cided invalid and his young wife and child
 were denied admission to France. Jerome yielded to the commands of his coarse and strong-willed brother, took German princess to wife, and became one of those subordinate kings set up on the borders of the new en- pire.
 The sixty years since the fall of Napoleon l have been one long struggle on the part of the Bonapartes to be received among the sovereigns of Europe as real royal family; and, on the part of Madame Patterson, te be received as real Bonaparte. She strOve, and intrigued, and insisted upon being admitted as shadow among those other shadows, and dreamed of 2 tue succession of her son and grandson te tho
 bogus" throne of tbs Napoleons ohe lVeo to be a penurlous and sharp -tongued old wo- man, evidently embittered by disappointed ambition and not by disappointed love. Yet she has always received a certain sympathy here at home, in spite of the fact that in her ambition to become Napoleon she had been disloyal to republicanism.
 It is because she is type of a certain class of American ambition, mostly female ambition, that the career of this remarkable woman is worthy of study. She aimed higher and failed more notably than others, but in what does she differ essentially from those American women who prefer i'm poverished and incapable foreign counts to ca- pablo American husbands? There is certain love of titles and distinctions an aping of aris- tocratic manners and fashions, which is one of the worst sins of American vulgarity It pre- vails notably among American women who in- sist on living abroad (where they are belied and dsspised), upon crowding into court re- captions such as those of the Lower Empire, on oll hot Sc American and republican. Indeed, there are counter-currents of emigration constantly mov- ing across the Manifestations of the con- man people of Europe coming over to share in American liberty, and thousands of Ameri- can aristocrats returning for share in the subjection from which their ancestors escaped.
 We attribute no small share of this disloyal- ty of American women to American ideas to the fact that they are denied all participation in government which is open to the meanest of the opposite sex They are taught from earliest childhood to consider voting degra- dation which they are themselves happily spared. They learn to regard republicanism as the chief misfortune of American society, and they long to add to the accumulations of some vulgar ancestor the titles and privileges of an European aristocracy. Their chief read ternational copyright, that fiction is chiefly imported from abroad. It pictures aristocracy in it's most favorable light it breathes that contempt of the commonalty which pervades # b<>IJ e. American imitation a foreign model vastly in ferior to the American woman in virtue, in in telligence and in independence So it comes to pass that our ''best society" becomes a school for treason in which women are care fully trained to hatred of the institutions Of their native land, and not few are misled in- to wearing out their lives in pursuit of some such shadow as for near eighty years cheated the restless ambition of the unhappy American wife of Bonaparte.
 The partisan press puts strictly partisan construction upon the negro exodus from the lower Mississippi The "stalwart" Times in- sists that it is fleeing of persecuted Republi- cans from their democratic oppressors; the "sOld" World that it is the stupid craze of restless ignorance in search of some earthly paradise not likely to be found even in the fertile fields of Kansas. Nc doubt recent per secutions of Southern Republicans have some- thing to do with thlsheadlong migration, but we see no reason to believe that they are its chief cause. It is the economical rather than the political system of Louisiana which the freed men find uncomfortable. Their labor is not only worse paid in amount, but in kind, than that of the northern laborer. There are ad- vances at inflated prices, to be repaid out of their portion of the crops. which afford the colored tenants something less than a bare maintenance for themselves and their families. Probably, now as of old, most of the profits of Southern agriculture go to middlemen who profit by the necessities of both planter and laborer. Whether the exodus will be a wise proceeding is matter that further develope- ments are needed to decide. It would be an unexpected result of emancipation if the negro should be found competing to any great extent
 with the white laborer for employment in the
 North.