The Bee-Hive. — 1876-12-23 (London, England)

THE BONAPARTES AND FRANCE. We doubt not that the Coup craat, looked at in connection with its most prominent attendant circumstances, is one of the greatest crimes in history. The temporary success of the man who made it closed tho eyes of .many Englishmen to its enormity, but in this country, as elsewhere, its true character has become fully known to all whose opinions on such a subject are worth anything. The shameful manner in which sworn pledges and solemn promises were violated; the ruthless way in which men, women, and children were openly murdered in the public streets ; the wicked arrest at midnight of some of the most notable men of the land; the wholesale deportation of multitudes of industrious, honest men, unconvicted of any offence ; the continual violations of liberty, and the hypocritical lies by which such villany was sought to be justified by a set of suborned officials, at the bare mention of whose names the gorge rises, culminating in a horribly disastrous war, present a picture of wanton profligacy of almost every conceivable kind so atrocious and so mean as to transcend any and every other wickedness known to history. The man who was the prime actor in this wickedness has gone to his account, but the evil he committed, in many of its consequences, lives after him. France, no doubt, will in time recover herself, and the glory of her new life may, and we hope will, utterly blot out the groat shames and disgraces Louis Napoleon Bonaparte inflicted on her; but that time has to come. 4.a yet there is a spawn of corruption, left behind by the recent Empire that keeps alive in the public mind remembrance of that organized brigandage which, under the late Emperor, plundered and degraded the French nation in the abused names of law and government. The immoral and ignorant in France yet hope to revive the Empire. The swindlers and rowdies having witnesSed the success of their late master's attempt, have persuaded themselves that the game is not yet played out; and the presence and conduct of Paul Cassignac in the Chamber of Deputies testifies to this hope as well as to the impudent, vulgar, and atrocious spirit by which it is sustained. But as the prevalence of such a thought as the restoration of the Bonaparte dynasty is not only an insult to the honest conscience of the world, but a menace to the peace of Europe, it is the duty of Englishmen to insist that no ground for such a hope shall be given in England without the direct disapproval of public opinion. We cannot shut our oyes to the fact that the next Bonaparte heir to the throne of Franco resides with the late Empress, his mother, in England. To this there can be no objection. England has always protected those political refuges, of whatever party, who have sought an asylum on her shores. The people of England would, we are sure, strongly object if the Bonapartes were refused what is so freely: accorded to others. Protection and patronage are not the same thing, however. We are bound to receive these people, but we are not called on to show them any kind of favour. We cannot prevent them from clinging to mischievous delusions; but we ought to abstain from encouraging in them hopes dangerous to the future peace of  France. Nobody doubts that when the widow of the late Bonaparte possessed power as Empress in France, she was a tool and an intriguer in the hands of the church in that country for the purpose of assisting to realise tho frantic ambition of Rome. The Protestant men of Inland, as well as the thoughtful men of France, know how deplorable the effects of such a policy, if successful, would be. Modern European thought and the policy of the Vatican never can be brought into harmony, and were there the remotest hope of such