MODERN LEADERS:
BEING A SERIES OF
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES.
By JUSTIN McCARTHY,

Author of "Lady Judith: A Tale of Two Continents," etc.

NEW YORK:
SHELDON & COMPANY,
677 BROADWAY and 214 and 216 MERCER STREET.
1872.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

The sketches which make up this volume are neither purely critical nor merely biographical. They endeavor to give the American reader a clear and just idea of each individual in his intellect, his character, his place in politics, letters, and society. In some instances I have written of friends whom I know personally and well; in others of men with whom I have but slight acquaintance; in others still of persons whom I have only seen. But in every instance those whom I describe are persons whom I have been able to study on the spot, whose character and doings I have heard commonly discussed by those who actually knew them. In no case whatever are the opinions I have given drawn merely from books and newspapers. This value, therefore, these essays may have to an American, that they are not such descriptions as any of us might be enabled to put into print by the mere help of study and reading; descriptions for example such as one might make of Henry VIII. or Voltaire. They are in every instance, even when intimate and direct personal acquaintance least assist them, the result of close observation and that appreciation of the originals which comes from habitual intercourse with those who know them and submit them to constant criticism.

I have not made any alteration in the essays which were written some years ago. Let them stand as portraits bearing that date. If 1872 has in any instance changed the features and the fortunes of 1869 and 1870, it cannot make untrue what then was true. What I wrote in 1869 of the Prince of Wales, for example, will probably not wholly apply to the Prince of Wales to-day. We all believe that he has lately changed for the better. But what I wrote then I still believe was true then; and it is a fair contribution to history, which does not consent to rub out yesterday because of to-day. I wrote of a "Liberal Triumvirate" of England when the phrase was an accurate expression. It would hardly be accurate now. To-day Mr. Mill does not appear in political life and Mr. Bright has been an exile, owing to his health, for nearly two years from the scenes of parliamentary debate and triumph. But the portraits of the men do not on that account need any change. Even where some reason has been shown me for a modification of my own judgment I have still preferred to leave the written letter as it is. A distinguished Italian friend has impressed on me that King Victor Emanuel is personally a much more ambitious man than I have painted him. My friend has had far better opportunities of judging than I ever could have had; but I gave the best opinion I could, and still holding to it prefer to let it stand, to be taken for what it is worth.

I think I may fairly claim to have anticipated in some of the political sketches, that of Louis Napoleon, for instance, the judgment of events and history, and the real strength of certain characters and institutions.

These sketches had a gratifying welcome from the American public as they appeared in the "Galaxy." I hope they may be thought worth reading over again and keeping in their collected form.

Justin McCarthy.

48 Gower Street, Bedford Square, London, July 31, 1872.

QUEEN VICTORIA AND HER SUBJECTS.

"And when you hear historians tell of thrones, and those who sat upon them, let it be as men now gaze upon the mammoth's bones, and wonder what old world such things could see."

So sang Byron half a century ago, and great critics condemned his verse, and called him a "surly Democrat" because he ventured to put such sentiments and hopes into rhyme. The thrones of Europe have not diminished in number since Byron's day, although they have changed and rechanged their occupants; and the one only grand effort at the establishment of a new Republic—that of France in 1848—went down into dust and ashes. Naturally, therefore, the tendency in Europe is to regard the monarchical principle as having received a new lease and charter of life, and to talk of the republican principle as an exotic forced for a moment into a premature and morbid blossom upon European soil, but as completely unsuited to the climate and the people as the banyan or the cocoa tree.

I do not, for myself, quite agree in this view of the aspect of affairs. Of course, if one were inclined to discuss the question fairly, he must begin by asking what people mean when they talk of the republican principle. What is the republican principle? When you talk of a Republic, do you mean an aggressive, conquering, domineering State, ruled by faction and living on war, like the Commonwealth of Rome? or a Republic like that planned by Washington, which should repudiate all concern in foreign politics or foreign conquest? Do you mean a Federal Republic, like that of the United States, or one with a centralized power, like the French Republic of 1848? Do you mean a Republic like that of Florence, in which the people were omnipotent, or a Republic like that of Venice, in which the people had no power at all? Do you mean a Republic like that of Switzerland, in which the President is next to nobody, or a Republic like that of Poland, which was ornamented by a King? In truth, the phrase "republican principle" has no set meaning. It means just what the man who uses it wishes to express. If, however, we understand it to mean, in this instance, the principle of popular self-government, then it is obvious that Europe has made immense progress in that direction since Byron raged against the crimes of Kings. If it means the opposite to the principle of Divine Right or Legitimacy, or even personal loyalty—loyalty of the old-time, chivalric, enthusiastic fashion—then it must be owned that it shows all over Europe the mark of equal progress. The ancient, romantic, sentimental loyalty; the loyalty which reverenced the Sovereign and was proud to abase itself before him; the loyalty of the Cavaliers; the loyalty which went wild over "Oh, Richard! Oh, mon Roi!" is dead and gone—its relics a thing to be stared at, and wondered over, and preserved for a landmark in the progress of the world—just like the mammoth's bones.

The model Monarchy of Europe is, beyond dispute, that of Great Britain. In England there is an almost absolute self-government; the English people can have anything whatever which they may want by insisting on it and agitating a little for it. The Sovereign has long ceased to interfere in the progress of national affairs. I can only recollect one instance, during my observation, in which Queen Victoria put her veto on a bill passed by Parliament, and that was on an occasion when it was discovered, at the last moment, that the Lords and Commons had passed a bill which had a dreadful technical blunder in it, and the only way out of the difficulty was to beg of the Queen to refuse it her sanction, which her Majesty did accordingly, and the blunder was set right in the following session. If a Prime Minister were to announce to the House of Commons, to-morrow, that the Queen had boxed his ears, it would not create a whit more amazement than if he were to say, no matter in what graceful and diplomatic periphrasis, that her Majesty was unwilling to agree to some measure which her faithful Commons desired to see passed into law.

Nothing did Mr. Disraeli more harm, nothing brought greater contempt on him than his silly attempts last session to induce the Commons to believe, by vague insinuations and covert allusions, that the Queen had a personal leaning toward his policy and himself. So long ago as the time of the free trade struggle, the Tories, for all their hereditary loyalty, complained of and protested against the silent presence of Prince Albert in the Peers' gallery of the House of Commons, on the ground that it was an attempt to influence the Parliament improperly, and to interfere with the freedom of debate. No one has anything to say against the Queen which carries any weight or is worth listening to. She is undoubtedly a woman of virtue and good sense. So good a woman, I venture to think, never before reigned over any people, and that she is not a great woman, an Elizabeth, a Catherine of Russia, or even an Isabella of Castile, is surely rather to the advantage than otherwise of the monarchical institution in its present stage of existence. Here, then, one might think, if anywhere and ever, the principle of personal loyalty has a fair chance and a full justification. A man might vindicate his loyalty to Queen Victoria in the name of liberty itself; nay, he might justify it by an appeal to the very principle of democracy. Yet one must be blind, who, living in England and willing to observe, does not see that the old, devoted spirit of personal loyalty is dead and buried. It is gone! it is a memory! You may sing a poetic lament for it if you will, as Schiller did for the gods of Hellas; you may break into passionate rhetoric, if you can, over its extinction, as Burke did for the death of the age of Chivalry. It is gone, and I firmly believe it can never be revived or restored.

I do not mean to say that there are many persons in England who feel any strong objection to the Monarchy, or warmly desire to see a Republic substituted for it. I know in England several theoretical republicans—they are to be met with in almost any company. I have never met with any one Englishman living in England, who showed any anxious, active interest in the abolition of the Monarchy. I do not know any one who objects to drink the usual loyal toasts at a public dinner, or betrays any conscientious reluctance to listen to the unmeaning eulogy which it is the stereotyped fashion for the chairman of every such banquet to heap on "Her Majesty and the rest of the Royal Family." But this sort of thing, if it ever had any practical meaning, has now none. It has reached that stage at which profession and practice are always understood to be quite different things. Every one says at church that he is a miserable sinner; no one is supposed really to believe anything of the sort. Every one has some time or other likened women to angels, but we are not therefore supposed seriously to ignore the fact that women wear flannel petticoats, and have their faults, and are mortal. So of loyal professions in England now. They are understood to be phrases, like "Your obedient servant," at the bottom of a letter. They do not suggest hypocrisy or pretence of any kind. There is apparently no more inconsistency now in a man's loyally drinking the health of the Queen, and proceeding immediately after (in private conversation) to abuse or ridicule her and her family, than there would be in the same man beginning with "Dear Sir," a missive to one whom he notoriously dislikes. Every one who has been lately in London must have heard an immense amount of scandal, or at all events of flippant joking at the expense of the Queen herself; and of more serious complaint and distrust as regards the Prince of Wales. Yet the virtues of the Queen, and the noble qualities of the Prince of Wales are panegyrized and toasted, and hurrah'd at every public dinner where Englishmen gather together.

The very virtues of Queen Victoria have contributed materially toward the extinction of the old-fashioned sentiment of living, active loyalty. The English people had from the time at least of Anne to our own day a succession of bad princes. Only a race patient as Issachar could have endured such a line of sovereigns as George II., George III., and George IV. Then came William IV., who being a little less stupidly obstinate than George III., and not so grossly corrupt as George IV., was hailed for a while as the Patriot King by a people who were only too anxious not to lose all their hereditary and traditional veneration. Do what they would, however, the English nation could not get into any sincere transports of admiration about the Patriot King; and they soon found that any popular reform worth having was to be got rather in spite of the Patriot King, than by virtue of any wisdom or patriotism in the monarch. Great popular demonstrations and tumults, and threats of marching on London; and O'Connell meetings at Charing Cross, with significant allusion by the great demagogue to the King who lost his head at Whitehall hard by; the hanging out of the black flag at Manchester, and a general movement of brickbats everywhere—these seem to have been justly regarded as the persuasive influences which converted a Sovereign into the Patriot King and a Reformer. Loyalty did not gain much by the reforms of that reign. Then followed the young Victoria; and enthusiasm for a while wakened up fresh and genuine over the ascension of the comely and simple-hearted girl, who was so frank and winning; who ran down stairs in her night-dress, rather than keep her venerable councillors waiting when they sought her out at midnight; who openly acknowledged her true love for her cousin, and offered him her hand; who was at once queenly and maidenly, innocent and fearless.

But this sort of thing did not last very long. Prince Albert was never popular. He was cold; people said he was stingy; his very virtues, and they were genuine, were not such as anybody, except his wife and family, warmly admires in a man; he was indeed misunderstood, or at all events misprized in England, up to the close of his life. Then the gates of the convent, so to speak, closed over the Queen, and royalty ceased to be an animating presence in England.

The young men and women of to-day—persons who have not passed the age of twenty-one—can hardly remember to have ever seen the Sovereign. She is to them what the Mikado is to his people. Seven years of absolute seclusion on the part of a monarch must in any case be a sad trial to personal loyalty, at least in the royal capital. A considerable and an influential section of Queen Victoria's subjects in the metropolis have long been very angry with their Sovereign. The tailors, the milliners, the dressmakers, the jewellers, the perfumers, all the shopkeepers of the West End who make profit out of court dinners and balls and presentations, are furious at the royal seclusion which they believe has injured their business. So, too, are the aristocratic residents of the West End, who do not care much about a court which no longer contributes to their season's gayety. So, too, are all the flunkey class generally. Now, I am sure there are no three sections of the population of London more influential in the spreading of scandal and the nursing of this discontent than the shopkeepers, the aristocrats, and the flunkeys of the West End. These are actively and demonstratively dissatisfied with the Queen. These it is who spread dirty scandals about her, and laugh over vile lampoons and caricatures of which she is the object.

Every one knows that there is a low, mean scandal afloat about the Queen—and it is spread by the clubs, the drawing-rooms, the shops, and the servants'-halls of the West End. I am convinced that not one of those who spread the scandal really believes it; but they like to spread it because they dislike the Queen. There can be no doubt, however, that much dissatisfaction at the Queen's long seclusion is felt by persons who are incapable of harboring any motives so mean or spreading any calumnies so unworthy. Most of the London papers have always found fault rather sharply and not over decently with the royal retirement. Mr. Ayrton, representative of the Tower Hamlets—the largest constituency in England—openly expressed this sentiment at a public meeting; and though his remarks were at once replied to and condemned by Mr. Bright, they met with a more or less cordial response from most of his audience.

There is or was in the House of Commons (the general election has got happily rid of him), a foolish person named Reardon, a Piccadilly auctioneer, who became, by what we call in England "a fluke," a member of the House of Commons. This person moved last session a resolution, or something of the kind, calling on the Queen to abdicate. The thing was laughed down—poor Mr. Reardon's previous career had been so absurd that anything coming from him would have been hooted; and the House of Commons is fiercely intolerant of "bores" and men with crotchets. But I have reason to believe that Mr. Reardon's luckless project was concocted by a delegation of London tradesmen, and had the sympathy of the whole class; and I know that many members of the House which hooted and laughed him down had in private over and over again grumbled at the Queen's retirement, and declared that she ought to abdicate.

"What on earth does it matter," I asked of a member of Parliament—one of the most accomplished scholars and sharp logicians in the House—"What on earth does it matter whether or not the Queen gives a few balls to a few thousand West End people in the season? How can rational people care, one way or the other?" "My dear fellow," was the answer, "I don't care; but all that sort of thing is her business, and she is paid to do it, and she ought to do it. If she were a washerwoman with a family, she would have to do her work, no matter what her grief." Now this gentleman—who is utterly above any sympathy with scandal or with the lackey-like grumblings of the West End—did, undoubtedly, express fairly enough a growing mood of the public dissatisfaction.

Beyond all this, however, is the fact that people—the working-class especially—are beginning to ask whether we really want a Sovereign at all, seeing that we get on just as well during the eclipse of royalty as in its brightest meridian splendor. This question is being very often put; and it is probably more often thought over than put into words. Now I think nothing worse could possibly happen to royalty in England than that people should begin quietly to ask whether there really is any use in it. If there is a bad King or Queen, people can get or look for, or hope and pray for a good one; and the abuse of the throne will not be accounted a sufficient argument against the use of it. But how will it be when the subjects begin to find that during the reign of one of the best sovereigns possible to have, they can get on perfectly well although the monarch is in absolute seclusion?

George IV. was an argument against bad kings only—Queen Victoria may come to be accepted as an illustration of the uselessness of the very best kind of Sovereign. I think King Log was much better calculated to do harm to the institution of royalty than King Stork, although the frogs might have regretted the placid reign of the former when the latter was gobbling up their best and fattest.

Decidedly the people of England are learning of the Queen how to do without royalty. A small section of her subjects are angry with her and bitter of heart against her; a much larger number find they can do perfectly well without her; a larger number still have forgotten her. On a memorable occasion Prince Albert declared that constitutional government was on its trial in England. The phrase, like many that came from the same well-meaning lips, was unlucky. Constitutional government was not upon its trial then; but Monarchy is upon its trial now.

Do I mean to say that Great Britain is on the verge of a revolution; that the dynasty is about to be overthrown; that a new Cromwell is to make his appearance? By no means. It does not follow that even if the English people were to be convinced to-morrow of the absolute uselessness of a throne, and a sovereignty, they would therefore proceed to establish a republic. No people under the sun are more strongly governed by tradition and "the majesty of custom" than the English. Cobden used to say that they had a Chinese objection to change of any kind. The Lord Mayor's show, long threatened, and for a while partially obscured, has come out again in full gingerbread. There is a functionary who appears every night at the door of the House of Commons just at the moment when the sitting is formally declared to be over, and bawls out to the emptying benches the resonant question, "Who's for home?" I believe the practice originated at a time when Westminster was unpeopled, and midnight roads were dangerous, and members were glad to make up parties to travel home together; and, so a functionary was appointed to issue stentorian appeal to all who were thus willing to combine their strength and journey safely in company. The need of such an arrangement has, I need hardly say, passed away these many generations; but the usage exists. It oppresses no one to have the formal call thundered out; the thing has got to be a regular performance; it is part of the whole business and system; nobody wants it, but nobody heeds it or objects to it, and the functionary appears every night of every session and shouts his invitation to companionship as regularly as if the Mohocks were in possession of Charing Cross, and Claude Duval were coming full trot along Piccadilly.

Now, this may be taken as a sort of illustration of the manner in which the English people are naturally inclined to deal with any institutions which are merely useless, and have the recommendation of old age and long descent. The ordinary Englishman to-day would find it hard to bring up before his mind's eye a picture of an England without a Sovereign. If it were made fully plain to him, and thoroughly impressed upon his mind that he could do just as well without a Sovereign as with, and even that Monarchy never could possibly be of use to him any more, I think he would endure it and pay its cost, and drink its health loyally for all time, providing Monarchy did nothing outrageously wrong; or provided—which is more to my present purpose—that no other changes of a remarkable nature occurred in the meantime to remove ancient landmarks, to disturb the basis of his old institutions and to prepare him for a new order of things. This is indeed the point I wish to discuss just now. I have explained what I believe to be the depth and strength and meaning of the average Englishman's loyal feelings to his Sovereign at the present moment. I should like to consider next how that feeling will, in all probability, be affected by the changes in the English political system, which seem inevitable, and by the accession, or expected accession, of a new Sovereign to the throne.

England has, just now, something very nearly approaching to manhood suffrage; and to manhood suffrage it will probably come before long. The ballot will, doubtless, be introduced. The Irish Church is as good as dead. I cannot doubt that the English State Church will, ultimately, and before very long, succumb to the same fate. Not that this logically or politically follows as a matter of necessity; and nothing could be more unwise in the interest of their own cause than the persistency with which the Tories keep insisting that the doom of the one is involved in the doom of the other. The Irish Church is the foreign church of a miserably small minority; the English Establishment is the Church of the majority, and is an institution belonging to the soil. The very principle which maintains the English Church ought of right to condemn the Irish Church. But it is the fact that an agitation more influential than it seemed to the careless spectator, has long been going on in England for the abolition of the State Church system altogether; and there can be no doubt that the fate of the Irish Establishment will lend immense courage and force to that agitation. Revolutionary movements are always contagious in their nature, and the movement against the Irish Church is in the strictest sense revolutionary. The Dutch or the Scotch would have carried such a movement to triumph across rivers of blood if it were needful; and no man of spirit could say that the end would not be worth the cost. I assume, then, that the overthrow of the Irish Church will inflame to iconoclastic fervor the movement of the English Dissenters against all Church establishments. I do not stop just now to inquire whether the movement is likely to be successful or how long it may take to accomplish the object. To me, it seems beyond doubt that it must succeed; but I do not care to assume even that for the purpose of my present argument. I only ask my readers to consider the condition of things which will exist in England when a movement resting on a suffrage which is almost universal, a movement which will have already overthrown one State Church within Great Britain, proceeds openly and exultingly to attack the English Church itself, within its own dominions. I ask whether it is likely that the institution which is supposed to be bound up inseparably with that Church, the Monarchy which is based upon, and exists by virtue of religious ascendency, is likely to escape all question during such a struggle, and after it? The State Church and the Aristocracy, if they cannot always be called bulwarks of the throne, are yet so completely associated with it in the public mind that it is hard even to think of the one without the others, and yet harder to think of the one as existing serene and uninjured after the decay or demolition of the others.

Now, the Aristocracy have, as Mr. Bright put it so truly and so effectively the other day, already capitulated. They have given up all notion of any longer making the laws of the country in the interest of their own class. One of the first things the Reformed Parliament will do, when it has breathing-time to think about such matters, will be to abolish the purchase system in the army, and throw open promotion to merit, without reference to class. The diplomatic service, that other great stronghold of the Aristocracy, will be thoroughly reorganized and made a real, useful department, doing solid work, and open to talent of whatever caste; or it will be abolished altogether. Something will have to be done with the House of Lords. It, too, must be made a reality, or dismissed into the land of shadows and the past. Efforts at reforming it, while it stands on its present basis, are futile. Its existence is, in its present form, the one great objection to it.

The good-natured, officious Lord Shaftesbury went to work, a few months ago, to prepare a scheme of reform for the House of Lords, in order to anticipate and conciliate the popular movement which he expected. He could think of nothing better than a recommendation that the House should meet an hour earlier every evening, in order, by throwing more time on their hands, to induce the younger Peers to get up debates and take part in them. This, however, is not precisely the kind of reform the country will ask for when it has leisure to turn its attention to the subject. It will ask for some reorganization which shall either abolish or reduce to a comparative nothing the hereditary legislating principle on which the House of Lords now rests. A set of law-makers or law-marrers intrusted with power only because they are born to titles, is an absurd anomaly, which never could exist in company with popular suffrage. "Hereditary law-makers!" exclaimed Franklin. "You might as well talk of hereditary mathematicians!" Franklin expressed exactly what the feeling of the common sense of England is likely to be when the question comes to be raised. I expect then, not that the House of Lords will be abolished, but that the rule of the hereditary principle will be brought to an end—that the Aristocracy there, too, will have to capitulate.

Now, I doubt whether an American reader can have any accurate idea, unless he has specially studied the matter and watched its practical operation in England, of the manner in which the influence of the Peers makes itself felt through the political life of Great Britain. Americans often have some kind of notion that the Aristocracy govern the country directly and despotically, with the high hand of imperious feudalism. There is nothing of the kind in reality. The House of Lords is, as a piece of political machinery, almost inoperative—as nearly as possible harmless. No English Peer, Lord Derby alone excepted, has anything like the political authority and direct influence of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Disraeli, or Mr. Bright. There are very few Peers, indeed, about whose political utterances anybody in the country cares three straws. But, on the other hand, the traditional prestige of the Peers, the tacit, time-honored, generally-conceded doctrine that a Peer has first right to everything—the mediæval superstition tolerated largely in our own time, which allows a sort of divinity to hedge a Peer—all this has an indirect, immense, pervading, almost universal influence in the practical working of English politics. The Peers have, in fact, a political droit du seigneur in England. They have first taste of every privilege, first choice of every appointment. Political office is their pasture, where they are privileged to feed at will. There does not now exist a man in England likely to receive high office, who would be bold enough to suggest the forming of a Cabinet without Peers in it, even though there were no Peers to be had who possessed the slightest qualification for any ministerial position. The Peers must have a certain number of places, because they are Peers. The House of Commons swarms with the sons and nephews of Peers. The household appointments, the ministerial offices, the good places in the army and the church are theirs when they choose—and they generally do choose—to have them. The son of a Peer, if in the House of Commons, may be raised at one step from his place in the back benches to a seat in the Cabinet, simply because of his rank. When Earl Russell, two or three years ago, raised Mr. Goschen, one of the representatives of the city of London and a partner in a great London banking-house, to a place in the Cabinet, the whole country wondered: a very few, who were not frightened out of their propriety, admired; some thought the world must be coming to an end. But when the Marquis of Hartington was suddenly picked out of West End dissipation and made War Secretary, nobody expressed the least wonder, for he was the heir of the House of Devonshire. Indeed, it was perfectly notorious that the young Marquis was presented to office, in the first instance, because it was hoped by his friends that official duties might wean him from the follies and frivolities of a more than ordinarily heedless youth. Sir Robert Peel the present, the magni nominis umbra, is not, of course, in the strict sense, an aristocrat; but he is mixed up with aristocrats, and is the son of a Peer-maker, and may be regarded as claiming and having the privileges of the class. Sir Robert Peel was presented with the First Secretaryship as something to play with, because his aristocratic friends, the ladies especially, thought he would be more likely to sow his wild oats if he were beguiled by the semblance of official business. A commoner must, in fact, be supposed to have some qualification for office before he is invited to fill a ministerial place. No qualification is believed necessary for the near relative or connection of a Peer. Even in the most favorable examples of Peers who are regular occupants of office, no special fitness is assumed or pretended. No one supposes or says that Lord Clarendon, or Lord Granville, or Lord Malmesbury has any particular qualification which entitles him, above all other men, to this or that ministerial place. Yet it must be a man of bold imagination indeed, who could now conceive the possibility of a British Cabinet without one of these noblemen having a place in it.

All this comes, as I have said, out of a lingering superstition—the faith in the divine right of Peers. Now, a reform in the constitution of the Upper House, which should purge it of the hereditary principle, would be the first great blow to this superstition. Julius Cæsar, in one of his voyages of conquest, was much perplexed by the priests, who insisted that he had better go back because the sacred chickens would not eat. At last he thought the time had come to prove his independence of the sacred chickens, "If they will not eat," he said, "then let them drink"—and he flung the consecrated fowls into the sea; and the expedition went on triumphantly, and the Roman soldiers learned that they could do without the sacred chickens. I think a somewhat similar sensation will come over all classes of the English people when they find that the hereditary right to make laws is taken from the English Peerage. I do not doubt that the whole fabric of superstition will presently collapse, and that the privilege of the Peer will cease to be anything more than that degree of superior influence which wealth and social rank can generally command, even in the most democratic communities. The law which gives impulse and support to the custom of primogeniture is certain to go, and with it another prop of the mediæval superstition. The Peerage capitulates, in fact—no more expressive word can be found to describe the situation.

Now, in all this, I have been foreshadowing no scheme of wild, vague, far-distant reform. I appeal to any one, Liberal or Tory, who is practically acquainted with English politics, to say whether these are not changes he confidently or timidly looks to see accomplished before long in England. I have not spoken of any reform which is not part of the actual accepted programme of the Radical party. To the reform of the House of Lords, of the military and diplomatic service; to abolition of the law of primogeniture, the whole body of the Liberals stands pledged; and Mr. Bright very recently renewed the pledges in a manner and with an emphasis which showed that change of circumstances has made no change in his opinions, brought no faltering in his resolution. The abolition of the English Church is not, indeed, thus openly sought by so powerful a party; but it is ostentatiously aimed at by that solid, compact, pertinacious body of Dissenters who, after so long a struggle, succeeded at last in getting rid of Church rates; and the movement will go on with a rush after the fall of the Irish establishment. Here then we have, in the not distant future, a prospect of an England without a privileged Aristocracy, and with the State Church principle called into final question. I return to my first consideration—the consideration which is the subject of this paper—how will this affect the great aristocratic, feudal and hierarchical institution of England, the Throne of the Monarch?

The Throne then will stand naked and alone, stripped of its old-time and traditional surroundings and associations. It cannot be like that of France, the throne of a Cæsar, a despotic institution claiming to exercise its despotism over the people by virtue of the will and delegated power of the people. The English Crown never can be an active governing power. It will be the last idol in the invaded sanctuary. It will stand alone, among the pedestals from which popular reform has swept the embodied superstitions which were its long companions. It must live, if at all, on the old affection or the toleration which springs out of custom and habit. This affection, or at least this toleration, may always be looked upon as a powerful influence in England. One can hardly imagine, for instance, anything occurring in our day to dethrone the Queen. However one class may grumble and another class may gibe, the force of habit and old affection would, in this instance, prove omnipotent. But, suppose the Prince of Wales should turn out an unpopular and ill-conditioned ruler? Suppose he should prove to be a man of low tastes, of vulgar and spendthrift habits, a maladroit and intermeddling king? He is not very popular in England, even now, and he is either one of the most unjustly entreated men living, or he has defects which even the excuse of youth can scarcely gloss over.

An illustrated weekly paper in London forced itself lately into a sudden notoriety by publishing a finely-drawn cartoon, in which the Prince of Wales, dressed as Hamlet, was represented as breaking away from the restraining arms of John Bull as Horatio, and public opinion as Marcellus, and rushing after a ghost which bore the form and features of George IV., while underneath were inscribed the words, "Lead on; I'll follow thee!" This was a bold and bitter lampoon; I am far from saying that it was not unjust, but I believe it can hardly be doubted that the Prince of Wales has, as yet, shown little inclination to imitate the example or cultivate the tastes of his pure-minded and intellectual father. Now suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Prince of Wales should turn out a George IV., or suppose, and which would be far worse from a national point of view, he or his son should turn out a George III. And suppose further that, about the same time any great crisis should arise in England—suppose the country entangled in a great foreign war, or disturbed by some momentous domestic agitation—can any one doubt that the Crown, in its then isolated condition, would be really in danger?

We must remember, when the strength of English institutions is boasted, that they have not, since 1815, stood any strain which could fairly be called critical. England has never had her national strength, her political position, or even her prestige seriously imperilled since that time. Even the Indian war could not be called a great supreme trial, such as other nations have lately had to bear. No one, even for a moment, could have doubted how that struggle would end. It was bitter, it was bloody; but the life of the nation was not staked upon it, even had its issue been uncertain; and its issue never was uncertain. It would be superfluous to say that England has passed through no ordeal like that to which the United States were lately subjected. She has not even had to confront anything like the crisis which Prussia voluntarily invited, which Austria had to meet, in 1866. It will be time to consider English feudal institutions, or what may remain of them, safe and firmly-rooted, when they have stood the worst result of such a crisis as that, and not been shaken down.

What I contend is that there is nothing in the present condition of the English public mind, and nothing in the prospect of the immediate future to warrant the almost universal assumption that the throne of England is founded on a rock. The stupidity of loyalty, the devotion as of the spaniel to his master, of the idolator to his god, is gone. I doubt if there exists one man in England who feels the sentiment of loyalty as his grandfather would have felt it. The mass of the people have learned satisfactorily that a sovereign is not a part of the necessary machinery of the government. The great problem which the Duke of Wellington used to present for solution—"How is the Queen's Government to be carried on?" has been solved in one and an unexpected sense. It can be carried on without a queen. Here then we have the institution proving itself superfluous, and falling into public indifference at the very same moment that some other institutions which seemed always involved with it as its natural and necessary companions, are about to be broken to pieces and thrown away. He must, indeed, be full of a verily transcendental faith in the destinies and divinity of royalty who does not admit that at least there is a time of ordeal awaiting it in England, such as it has not encountered before during this century.

To me it seems that the royal principle in England is threatened, not with sudden and violent extinction, but with death by decay. I do not expect any change of any kind to-morrow or the day after, or even the week after next. I do not care to dogmatize, or predict, or make guesses of any kind. I quite agree with my friend Professor Thorold Rogers, that an uninspired prophet is a fool. But I contend that as the evident signs of the times now show themselves, the monarchical principle in England does seem to be decaying; that the national faith which bore it up is sorely shaken and almost gone, and that some of the political props which most nearly supported it are already being cut away. There may, indeed, be some hidden virtue in the principle, which shall develop itself unexpectedly in the hour of danger, and give to the institution that seemed moribund a new and splendid vitality. Such a phenomenon has been manifested in the case of more than one institution that seemed on the verge of ruin—it may be the fortunate destiny of British royalty. But unless in the sudden and timely development of some such occult and unlooked-for virtue, I do not see what is to preserve the monarchical principle in England through the trials of the future.

Let it be remembered, too, that the one great plea hitherto always made in England for monarchy, is that it alone will work on a large scale. "We admit," it was said, "that your republican theory looks better and admits of more logical argument in its favor. But we are practical men, and we find that our system, with all its theoretical disadvantages, will work and stand a strain; and your republican theory, with all its apparent advantages in logic, is not suited for this rough world. Our machinery will stand the hardest trial; yours never did and never will. Don't tell us about Switzerland. Switzerland is a little country. Kept out of the stress and danger of European commotions, and protected by a guarantee of the great powers, any constitution ought to work under such advantages. But a great independent republic never did last; never did stand a sudden strain, and never will." So people thought and argued in England—even very intelligent people, until at last it became one of the British Philistine's articles of faith, that the republican principle never will work on a large scale. When Sir John Ramsden declared in the House of Commons at the beginning of the American civil war, that the republican bubble had burst, and all Philistinism in Britain applauded the declaration, the plaudits were given not so much because of any settled dislike Philistinism had to the United States, as because Philistinism beheld what it believed to be a providential testimony to its own wisdom and foresight. Since then Philistinism has found that after all republicanism is able to bear a strain as great as monarchy has ever yet borne, and can come out of the trial unharmed and victorious.

The lesson has sunk deeply. The mind of something better than Philistinism has learned that republics can be made to work on a large scale. I believe Mr. Gladstone is one of the eminent Englishmen who now openly admit that they have learned from the American war something which they did not know before, of the cohesiveness and durability of the republican system. Up to the time of that war in fact, most Englishmen, when they talked of republican principles, thought only of French republicanism, and honestly regarded such a system as a brilliant empty bubble, doomed to soar a little, and float, and dazzle, and then to burst.

That idea, it is quite safe to say, no longer exists in the English mind. The fundamental, radical objection to republicanism—the objection which, partly out of mere reaction and partly for more substantial reasons, followed the brief and romantic enthusiasm of the days of Fox—is gone. The practical Englishman admits that a republic is practicable. Only those who know England can know what a change in public opinion this is. It is, in fact, something like a revolution. I think the most devoted monarchist will hardly deny that if some extraordinary combination of chances (after all, even the British Throne is but a human institution) were to disturb the succession of the house of Brunswick, Englishmen would be more likely to try the republican system than to hunt about for a new royal family, or endeavor to invent a new scheme of monarchy. Here, then, I leave the subject. Take all this into account, in considering the probabilities of the future, and then say whether, even in the case of England, it is quite certain that Byron's prediction is only the dream of a cynical poet, destined never to be fulfilled among human realities.

THE REAL LOUIS NAPOLEON.

"How will it be with him," said Richard Cobden to a friend, one night, as they spoke of a great and successful adventurer whom the friend was striving to defend—"how will it be with him when life becomes all retrospect?" The adventurer they spoke of was not Louis Napoleon; but the inquiry might well apply just now to the Emperor of the French. Life has reached that point with him when little more than retrospect can be left. In the natural course of events, there can be no great triumphs for Louis Napoleon still to achieve. Great blunders are possible, though hardly probable; but the greatest of blunders would scarcely efface the memory of the substantial triumphs. "Not heaven itself," exclaimed an ambitious and profane statesman, "can undo the fact that I have been three times Prime Minister." Well, the Fates—let them do their best—can hardly undo the fact that the despised outcast of Constance, and Augsburg, and London, and New York, whom Lord Palmerston excused himself to Guizot for tolerating, on the ground that really nobody minded the dull, harmless poor fellow; the Fates cannot undo the fact that this man has elected himself Emperor of the French, has defeated the Russians and the Austrians, and made a friend and ally of England.

So much of the past, then, is secure; but there are hardly any triumphs to be won in the future. If one may venture to predict anything, he may venture to predict that the Emperor of the French will not live to be a very old man. He has already led many lives—fast, hard, exhausting lives, "that murder the youth in a man ere ever his heart has its will." Exile, conspiracy, imprisonment, hard thinking, hard working, wild and reckless dissipation, prolonged to the very outer verge of middle life, the brain, the nerves, the muscles, the whole physical and mental constitution always strained to the utmost—these are not the ways that secure a long life. Louis Napoleon is already an "abgelebter mann"—an outworn, used-up, played-out man. The friends and familiars with whom he started in life are nearly all gone. Long since laid in earth is the stout form of the wild Marquis of Waterford, who was a wonder to our fathers (his successor to the title ran away with somebody's wife the other day; and I thought Time had turned back by thirty years when I read of the escapade, with the name, once so famous, of the principal performer), and who rode by Louis Napoleon's side at the celebrated, forgotten Eglintoun Tournament, and was, like Louis Napoleon, one of the Knights Challengers in that piece of splendid foolery. Dead, lang syne, is Eglintoun himself, the chivalrous Earl of the generous instincts and the florid, rotund eloquence, reminding one of Bulwer Lytton diluted. I do not know whether the Queen of Beauty of that grand joust is yet living and looking on the earth; but if she be, she must be an embodied sermon on the perishableness of earthly charms. De Morny is dead, the devoted half-brother, son of Louis Napoleon's mother, the chaste Hortense, and the Count de Flahault—De Morny, the brilliant, genial, witty, reckless gambler in politics and finance, the man than whom nobody ever, perhaps, was more faithful to friendship and false to morality, more good-natured and unprincipled. I have seen tears in men's eyes when De Morny died—in the eyes of men who owned all the time, smiling through their tears like Andromache, that the lost patron and friend was the most consummate of roués and blacklegs. Walewski is dead—Walewski of romantic origin, born of the sudden episode of love between the great Napoleon and the Polish lady—Walewski, who, like Prince Napoleon-Jerome, carried his pedigree stamped upon his face—Walewski, the lover of Rachel, and, to do him justice, the steady friend of Poland. Old Mocquard is gone, the faithful scribe and confidant: he is dead, and the dramas he would persist in writing are dead with him, nay, died even before him. I do not know whether the faithful, devoted woman who worked for Louis Napoleon, and believed in him when nobody else did; the woman to whose inspirings, exertions, and ready money he owes, in great measure, the fact that he is now Emperor of the French—I do not know whether this woman is alive or dead. I think she is dead. Anyhow, I suppose the dignity of history, as the phrase is, can hardly take account of her. She helped to make an Emperor, and the Emperor, in return, made her a Countess; but then he had to marry—and so we take leave of the woman who made the Emperor, and do our homage to the woman who married him. All those are gone; and St. Arnaud, of the stormy youth, and Pelissier, the bland, sweet-tempered chevalier, who, getting into a dispute (on his way to be governor of Algeria) with the principal official of a Spanish port, invited that dignitary to salute a portion of the Pelissier person which assuredly the foes of France were never allowed to see—all these are gone, and many more, and only a very few, fast fading, of the old friends and followers remain. Life to Louis Napoleon must now, indeed, be nearly all retrospect. His career, his Imperial reign may be judged even now as fairly and securely as as if his body had just been laid beside that of his uncle, under the dome of the Invalides.

Recent events seem specially to invite and authorize that judgment. Within the past twelve months, the genuine character of Louis Napoleon has displayed itself, strikingly, nakedly, in his policy. He has tried, in succession, mild liberalism, severe despotism, reactionary conservatism, antique Cæsarism, and then, in an apologetic, contrite sort of way, a liberalism of a rather pronounced character. Every time that he tried any new policy he was secretly intriguing with some other, and making ready for the possible necessity of having to abandon the former and take up with the latter. He was like the lady in "Le Diable Boiteux," who, while openly coquetting with the young lover, slily gives her hand behind her back to the old admirer. So far as the public could judge, Louis Napoleon has, for many months back, been absolutely without any settled policy whatever. He has been waiting for a wind. Such a course is probably the safest a man in his position can take; but one who, at a great crisis, cannot originate and initiate a policy, will not be remembered among the grand rulers of the world. I do not remember any greater evidence given in our time of absolute incapacity to seize a plan of action and decide upon it, than was shown by the Emperor of the French during the crisis of June and July. So feeble, so vague, halting, vacillating was the whole course of the government, that many who detest Louis Napoleon, but make it an article of faith that he is a sort of all-seeing, omnipotent spirit of darkness, were forced to adopt a theory that the riots in Paris and the provinces were deliberately got up by the police agents of the Empire, for the purpose of frightening the bourgeois class out of any possible hankering after democracy. No doubt this idea was widely spread and eagerly accepted in Paris; and there were many circumstances which seemed to justify it. But I do not believe in any such Imperial stage-play. I fancy the riots surprised the Government, first, by their sudden outburst, and next, by their sudden collapse. Probably the Imperial authorities were very glad when the disturbances began. They gave an excuse for harsh conduct, and they seemed, for the time, to put the Government in the right. They restored Louis Napoleon at that moment, in the eyes of timid people, to that position, as a supreme maintainer of order, which for some years he had not had an opportunity effectively to occupy. But the obvious want of stamina in the disturbing force soon took away from the Imperial authorities this opportune prestige, and very little political capital was secured for Imperialism out of the abortive barricades, and incoherent brickbats, and effusive chantings of the "Marseillaise." In truth, no one had anything else to offer just then in place of the Empire. The little crisis was no test whatever of the Emperor's hold over his people, or of his power to deal with a popular revolution. To me it seems doubtful whether the elections brought out for certain any fact with which the world might not already have been well acquainted, except the bare fact that Orleanism has hardly any more of vitality in it than Legitimacy. Rochefort, and not Prevost Paradol, is the typical figure of the situation.

The popularity and the success of Rochefort and his paper are remarkable phenomena, but only remarkable in the old-fashioned manner of the straws which show how the wind blows. Rochefort's success is due to the fact that he had the good-fortune to begin ridiculing the Empire just at the time when a general notion was spreading over France that the Empire of late had been making itself ridiculous. Louis Napoleon had reached the turning-point of his career—had reached and passed it. The country saw now all that he could do. The bag of tricks was played out. The anticlimax was reached at last.

The culmen, the crisis, the turning-point of Louis Napoleon's career seems to me to have been attained when, just before the outbreak of the Schleswig-Holstein war—so small a war in itself, so fateful and gigantic in its results—he appealed to the Emperors and Kings of Europe, and proposed that the nations should hold a Congress, to settle, once and forever, all pending disputes. I think the attitude of Louis Napoleon at that moment was dignified, commanding, imperial. His peculiar style, forcible, weighty, measured—I have heard it well described as a "monumental" style—came out with great effect in the language of the appeal. There was dignity, and grace, there was what Edmund Burke so appropriately terms "a proud humility," in Louis Napoleon's allusion to his own personal experience in the school of exile and adversity as an excuse for his presuming to offer advice to the sovereigns of Europe. One was reminded of Henry of Navarre's allusion to the wind of adversity which, blowing so long upon his face, had prematurely blanched his hair. I do not wonder that the proposed Congress never met. I do not wonder that the European governments put it aside—some with courteous phrase and feigned willingness to accept the scheme, like Russia and Austria; some with cold and brusque rejection, like England. Nothing worth trying for could have come of the Congress. Events were brooding of which France and England knew nothing, and which could not have been exorcised away by any resolutions of a conclave of diplomatists. But that was, I think, the last occasion when Louis Napoleon held anything like a commanding, overruling position in European affairs, and even then it was but a semblance. After that, came only humiliations and reverses. In a diplomatic sense, nothing could be more complete than the checkmate which the Emperor of the French drew upon himself by the sheer blundering of his conduct with regard to Prussia. He succeeded in placing himself before the world in the distinct attitude of an enemy to Prussia; and no sooner had he, by assuming this attitude, forced Prussia to take a defiant tone, than he suddenly sank down into quietude. He had bullied to no purpose; he had to undergo the humiliation of seeing Prussia rise in public estimation, by means of the triumph which his unnecessary and uncalled-for hostility had enabled her to win. In fact, he was outgeneralled by his pupil, Bismarck, even more signally than he had previously been outgeneralled by his former pupil, Cavour. More disastrous and ghastly, by far, was the failure of his Mexican policy. That policy began in falsehood and treachery, and ended as it deserved. Poetic and dramatic justice was fearfully rendered. Never did Philip II., of Spain, never did his father, never did Napoleon I., never did Mendez Pinto, or any other celebrated liar, exceed the deliberate monstrosity of the falsehoods which were told by Louis Napoleon or Louis Napoleon's Ministers at his order, to conceal, during the earlier stages of the Mexican intervention, the fact that the French Emperor had a protégé in the background, who was to be seated on a Mexican throne. The world is not much affected by perfidy in sovereigns. It laughs at the perjuries of princes as Jove does at those of lovers. But it could not overlook the appalling significance of Louis Napoleon's defeat in that disastrous chapter of his history. Wisdom after the event is easy work; but many, many voices had told Louis Napoleon beforehand what would come of his Mexican policy. Not to speak of the hints and advice he received from the United States, he was again and again assured by the late Marshal O'Donnell, then Prime Minister of Spain; by General Prim, who commanded the allied forces during the earlier part of the Mexican expedition; by Prince Napoleon, by many others—that neither the character of the Mexican people nor the proximity of the United States would allow a French proconsulate to be established in Mexico under the name of an Empire. It is a certain fact that Louis Napoleon frequently declared that the foundation of that Empire would be the great event of his reign. This extraordinary delusion maintained a hold over his mind long after it had become apparent to all the world that the wretched bubble was actually bursting. The catastrophe was very near when Louis Napoleon, in conversation with an English political adventurer, who then was a Member of Parliament, assured him that, however the situation might then look dark, history would yet have to record that he, Louis Napoleon, had established a Mexican Empire. The English member of Parliament, although ordinarily a very shrewd and sceptical sort of person, was actually so impressed with the earnestness of his Imperial interlocutor that he returned to London and wrote a pamphlet, in which, to the utter amazement of his acquaintances, he backed the Empire of Mexico for a secure existence, and said to it esto perpetua. The pamphlet was hardly in circulation when the collapse came. If Louis Napoleon ever believed in anything, he believed in the Mexican Empire. He believed, too, in the certain success of the Southern Confederation. No Belgravian Dundreary, no exaltée Georgian girl, could have been more completely taken by surprise when the collapse of that enterprise came than was the Emperor Napoleon III., whose boundless foresight and profound sagacity we had all for years been applauding to the echo. "That which is called firmness in a King," said Erskine, "is called obstinacy in a donkey." That which is called foresight and sagacity in an Emperor, is often what we call blindness and blundering in a newspaper correspondent. The question is whether we can point to any great event, any political enterprise, subsequent to his successful assumption of the Imperial crown, in regard to which Napoleon III., if called upon to act or to judge, did not show the same aptitude for rash judgments and unwise actions? Certainly no great thing with which he has had to do came out in the result with anything like the shape he meant it to have. The Italian Confederation, with the Pope at the head of it; the Germany irrevocably divided by the line of the Main; the Mexican Empire; the "rectification" of frontier on the Rhine; the acquisition of Luxembourg; these are some of the great Napoleonic ideas, by the success or failure of which we may fairly judge of the wisdom of their author. At home he has simply had a new plan of government every year. How many different ways of dealing with the press, how many different schemes for adjusting the powers of the several branches of legislation, have been magniloquently announced and floated during the last few years, each in turn to fail rather more dismally than its predecessor? Now, it seems, we are to have at last something like that ministerial responsibility which the Imperial lips themselves have so often described as utterly opposed to the genius of France. Assuredly it shows great mental flexibility to be able thus quickly to change one's policy in obedience to a warning from without. It is a far better quality than the persistent treachery of a Charles I., or the stupid doggedness of a George III. But unless it be a characteristic of great statesmanship to be almost always out in one's calculations, wrong in one's predictions, and mistaken in one's men, the Emperor has for years been in the habit of doing things which are directly incompatible with the character of a great statesman.

Contrasting the Louis Napoleon of action and reality with the Louis Napoleon of the journals, I am reminded of a declaration once made by a brilliant, audacious, eccentric Italian journalist and politician, Petruccelli della Gattina. Petruccelli was, and perhaps still is, a member of the Italian Parliament, and he had occasion to find fault with some office or dignity, or something of the kind, conferred by Count Cavour on the Neapolitan, Baron Poerio, whose imprisonment and chains, during the reign of the beloved Bomba, aroused the eloquent anger of Mr. Gladstone, and through Gladstone's efforts and appeals became the wonder and the horror of the world. Petruccelli insisted that Poerio's undeserved sufferings were his only political claim. "You know perfectly well," he said, in effect, to Cavour, "that there is no such man as the Poerio of the journals. It suited us to invest the poor victim with the attributes of greatness, and therefore, we, the journalists, created a Poerio of our own. This imposed upon the world, but it did not impose upon you, and you have no right to take our Poerio au serieux." I do not know whether the journals created an imaginary Poerio, but I am convinced that they have created an imaginary Louis Napoleon. The world in general now so much prefers the imaginary to the real Louis, that it would for the present be as difficult to dethrone the unreal and set up the real, as it would be to induce the average reader to accept Lane's genuine translation of the "Arabian Nights" instead of the familiar translation from a sprightly, flippant, flashy French version, which hardly bears the slightest resemblance to the original. English journalism has certainly created a Disraeli of its own—a dark, subtle, impenetrable, sphinx-like being, who never smiles, or betrays outward emotion, or is taken by surprise, or makes a mistake. This Disraeli is an immense success with the public, and is not in the least like the real Disraeli, who is as good-natured and genial in manner as he is bold and blundering in speech and policy. So, on a wider scale, of Louis Napoleon. We are all more or less responsible for the fraud on the public; and, indeed, are to be excused on the ground that, enamored of our own creation, we have often got the length of believing in it. We have thus created a mysterious being, a sphinx of far greater than even Disraelian proportions, an embodiment of silence and sagacity, a dark creature endowed with super-human self-control and patience and foresight; one who can bend all things, and all men, and destiny itself to his own calm, inexorable will.

I do not believe there is anything of the sphinx about Louis Napoleon. I do not believe in his profound sagacity, or his foresight, or his stupendous self-control. I have grown so heretical that I do not even believe him to be a particularly taciturn man. I am well satisfied that Louis Napoleon is personally a good-natured, good-tempered, undignified, awkward sort of man, ungainly of gesture, not impressive in speech, a man quite as remarkable for occasional outbursts of unexpected and misplaced confidence as for a silence that often is, if I may use such an expression, purely mechanical and unmeaning. I calmly ask my confrères of the press, is it not a fact that Louis Napoleon is commonly made the dupe of shallow charlatans, that he has several times received and admitted to confidential counsel and conference, and treated as influential statesmen and unaccredited ambassadors, utterly obscure American or English busybodies who could hardly get to speech of the Mayor of a town at home; that he has entered into signed and sealed engagements with impudent adventurers from divers countries, under the impression that they could render him vast political service; that he has paid down considerable sums of money to subsidize the most obscure and contemptible foreign journals, and never seemed able for a moment to comprehend that in England and the United States no journal that can be bought for any price, however high, is worth buying at any price, however low; that his personal inclinations are much more toward quacks and pretenders than toward men of real genius and influence; that Cobden was one of the very few great men Louis Napoleon ever appreciated, while impostors, and knaves, and blockheads, of all kinds, could readily find access to his confidence? Of course, a man might possibly be a great sovereign although he had these weaknesses; but the Louis Napoleon of journalism is not endowed with these, or indeed with any other weaknesses.

Those who know Paris well, know that there is yet another Louis Napoleon there, equally I trust a fiction with him of the journals. I speak of the Louis Napoleon of private gossip, the hero of unnumbered amours such as De Grammont or Casanova might wonder at. I have heard stories poured into my patient but sceptical ears which ascribed to Louis Napoleon of to-day, adventures illustrating a happy and brilliant combination of Haroun Al Raschid and Lauzun—the disguises of the Caliph employed for the purposes of Don Juan. Now, Louis Napoleon certainly had, and perhaps even still has, his frailties of this class, but I reject the Lauzun or Don Juan theory quite as resolutely as the sphinx theory.

What we all do really know of Louis Napoleon is, that having the advantage of a name of surpassing prestige, and at a moment of unexampled chances not created by him, he succeeded in raising himself to the throne made by his uncle; that when there, he held his place firmly, and by maintaining severe order in a country already weary of disturbance and barren revolution, he favored and stimulated the development of the material resources of France; that he entered on several enterprises in foreign politics, not one of which brought about the end for which it was undertaken, and some of which were ludicrous, disastrous failures; that he strove to compensate France for the loss of her civil liberty, by audaciously attempting to make her the dictator of Europe, and that he utterly failed in both objects; for here toward the close of his rule, France seems far more eager for domestic freedom than ever she was since the coup d'état, while her influence over the nations of Europe is considerably less than it was at any period since the fall of Sebastopol. Now, if this be success, I want to know what is failure? If these results argue the existence of profound sagacity, I want to know what would show a lack of sagacity? Was Louis Napoleon sagacious when he entered Lombardy, to set Italy free from the Alps to the sea, and sagacious also when, after a campaign of a few weeks, he suddenly abandoned the enterprise never to resume it? Was he wise when he told Cavour he would never permit the annexation of Naples, and wise also when, immediately after, he permitted it? Was he a great statesman when he entered on the Mexican expedition, and also a great statesman when he abandoned it and his unfortunate pupil, puppet, and victim together? Did it show a statesmanlike judgment to bully Prussia until he had gone near to making her an irreconcilable enemy, and also a statesmanlike judgment then to "cave in," and declare that he never meant anything offensive? Was it judicious to demand a rectification of frontier on the Rhine, and judicious also to abandon the demand in a hurry, when it was received as anybody might have known that a proud, brave nation, flushed with a splendid success, would surely have received it? Did it display great foresight to count with certainty that the Southern Confederation would succeed, and that Austria would win an easy victory over Prussia? Was it judicious to instruct an official spokesman to declare that France had taken steps to assure herself against any spread of Prussian influence beyond the Main, and to have to stand next day, amazed and confounded, before an amazed and amused Europe, when Bismarck made practical answer by contemptuously unrolling the treaties of alliance actually concluded between France and the principal States of South Germany? Was it a proof of a great ruling mind to declare that France could never endure a system of ministerial responsibility, and also a proof of a great ruling mind to declare that this is the one thing needful to her contentment? All this bundle of paradoxes one will have to sustain, if he is content to accept as a genuine being that monstrous paradox, the Louis Napoleon of the press. Of course, I do not deny to Louis Napoleon certain qualities of greatness. But I believe the public was not a whit more gravely mistaken when it regarded the King street exile as a dreamy dunce, than it is now, when it regards Napoleon III. as a ruler of consummate wisdom.

There was much of sound sense as well as wit in the saying ascribed to Thiers, that the second Empire had developed two great statesmen—Cavour and Bismarck. I do not know of any one great idea, worthy of being called a contribution to the science of government, which Louis Napoleon has yet embodied, either in words or actions. The recent elections, and the events succeeding them, only demonstrate the failure of Imperialism or Cæsarism, after a trial and after opportunities such as it probably will never have again in Europe. I certainly do not expect any complete collapse during the present reign. Doubtless the machine will outlast the third Emperor's time. He has sense and dexterity enough to trim his sails to each breeze that passes, and he will, probably, hold the helm till his right hand loses its cunning with its vital power. But I see no evidence whatever which induces me to believe that he has founded a dynasty or created an enduring system of any kind. Some day France will shake off the whole thing like a nightmare. Meantime, however, I am anxious to help in dethroning the Louis Napoleon of the journals rather than him of the Tuileries. The latter has many good qualities which the former is never allowed to exhibit. I believe the true Louis Napoleon has a remarkably kind and generous heart; that he is very liberal and charitable; that he has much affection in him, and is very faithful to his old friends and old servants; that people who come near him love him much; that he is free and kindly of speech; that his personal defects are rather those of a warm and rash, than of a cold and stern nature. But I think it is high time that we were done with the melodramatic, dime-romance, darkly mysterious Louis Napoleon of the journals. He belongs to the race of William Tell, of the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, the Sphinx to whom he is so often compared, the mermaid, the sea-serpent, Byron's Corsair, and Thaddeus of Warsaw.

EUGENIE, EMPRESS OF THE FRENCH.

There are certain men and women in history who seem to have a peculiarity, independent of their merits or demerits, greatness or littleness, virtues or crimes—a peculiarity which distinguishes them from others as great or as little, as virtuous or as criminal. They are, first and above all things, interesting. It is not easy to describe what the elements are which make up this attribute. Certainly genius or goodness, wit or wisdom, splendid public services, great beauty, or even great suffering, will not always be enough to create it. The greatest English king since the First Edward was assuredly William the Third; the greatest military commanders England has ever had were Marlborough and Wellington; but these three will hardly be called by any one interesting personages in the sense in which I now use the word. Why Nelson should be interesting and Wellington not so, Byron interesting and Wordsworth not so, is perhaps easy enough to explain; but it is not quite easy to see why Rousseau should be so much more interesting than Voltaire, Goethe than Schiller, Mozart than Handel, and so on through a number of illustrations, the accuracy of which nearly all persons would probably acknowledge. Where history and public opinion and sentiment have to deal with the lives and characters of women, the peculiarity becomes still more deeply emphasized. What gifts, what graces, what rank, what misfortunes have ever surrounded any queens or princesses known to history with the interest which attaches to Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette? Lady Jane Grey was an incomparably nobler woman than either, and suffered to the full as deeply as either; yet what place has she in men's feelings and interest compared with theirs? Who cares about Anna Boleyn, though she too shared a throne and mounted a scaffold?

Absit omen! I am about to speak of an illustrious living lady, who has in common with Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette two things at least: she has a French sovereign for a husband, and she has the fame of beauty. But she has likewise that other peculiarity of which I spoke: she is interesting. It is only speaking by the card to say that by far the most interesting of all the imperial and royal ladies now living is Eugénie, Empress of the French. I think there are princesses in Europe more beautiful and even more graceful than she is, or than she ever could have been; I fancy there are some much more highly gifted with intellect; but there is no woman living in any European palace in whom the general world feels half so much interest. There is not the slightest reason to believe that she is a woman of really penetrating or commanding intellect, and should she be happy enough to live out her life in the Tuileries and die peacefully in her bed, history will find but little to say about her, good or bad. Yet so long as her memory remains in men's minds, it will be as that of a princess who had above all things the gift of being interesting—the power of attracting toward herself the eyes, the admiration, the curiosity, the wonder of all the civilized world.

"We count time by heart-throbs, not by figures on a dial," says a poet who once nearly secured immortality, Philip James Bailey. There certainly are people whose age seems to defy counting by figures on a dial. Ask anybody what two pictures are called up in his mind when he hears the names of Queen Victoria and the Empress of the French, no matter whether he has ever seen the two illustrious ladies or not. In the case of the former I may safely venture to answer for him that he sees the face and figure of a motherly, homely body; a woman who has got quite beyond the age when people observe how she dresses; to whom personal appearance is no longer of any importance or interest. In the case of the latter he sees a dazzling court beauty; a woman who, though not indeed in her youth, is still in a glorious prime; a woman to captivate hearts, and inspire poets, and set scandal going, and adorn a ball-room or a throne. The first instinctive idea would be, I think, that the Empress of the French belonged positively to a later generation than the good, unattractive, dowdyish Queen of England. Yet I believe the difference in actual years is very slight. To be sure, you will find in any almanac that Queen Victoria was born on the 24th of May, 1819, and is consequently very near to fifty-one years of age; while the fair Eugénie is set down as having been born on May 5th, 1826, and consequently would now appear to be only in her forty-fourth year. But then Queen Victoria was born in the purple, and cannot, poor thing, make any attempt at reducing by one single year the full figure of her age. History has taken an inexorable, ineffaceable note of the day and hour of her birth; and even court flattery cannot affect to ignore the record. Now Eugénie was born in happy obscurity; even the place of her birth is not known by the public with that certainty which alone satisfies sceptics; and I have heard that the date recorded as that of her natal hour is only a graceful fiction, a pretty bit of polite biography. Certainly I have heard it stoutly maintained that if any historian or critic were now to be as ungallant in his researches as John Wilson Croker was in the case of Lady Morgan (was it not Lady Morgan?), he would find that the birth of the brilliant Empress of the French would have to be dated back a few years, and that after all the difference between her and the elderly Queen Victoria is less an affair of time than of looks and of heart-throbs.

About a dozen years, I suppose, have passed away since I saw the Empress Eugénie and Queen Victoria sitting side by side. Assuredly the difference even then might well have been called a contrast, although the Queen was in her happiest time, and has worn out terribly fast since that period. But the quality which above all others Queen Victoria wanted was just that in which the Empress of the French is supreme—the quality of imperial, womanly grace. I have never been a rapturous admirer of the beauty of the Empress; a certain narrowness of contour in the face, the eyes too closely set together, and an appearance of artificiality in every movement of the features, seem to me to detract very much from the charms of her countenance. But her queenly grace of gesture, of attitude, of form, of motion, must be admitted to be beyond cavil, and superb. She looks just the woman on whom any sort of garment would hang with grace and attractiveness; a blanket would become like a regal mantle if it fell round her shoulders; I verily believe she would actually look graceful in Mary Walker's costume, which I consider decidedly the most detestable, in an artistic sense, ever yet indued by mortal woman. Poor Queen Victoria looked awkward and homely indeed by the side of this graceful, noble form; this figure that expressed so well the combination of suppleness and affluence, of imperial dignity and charming womanhood. Time has not of late spared the face of the Empress of the French. Lines and hollows are growing fast there; the bright eyes are sinking deeper into their places; the complexion is fading and clouding; malicious people now say that, like that of the lady in the "School for Scandal," it comes in the morning and goes in the night; and the hair is apparently fast growing thin. But the grace of form and movement is still there, unimpaired and unsurpassed. The whitest and finest shoulders still surmount a noble bust, which, but that its amplitude somewhat exceeds the severe proportions of antique Grecian beauty, might be reproduced in marble to illustrate the contour of a Venus or a Juno. I have seldom looked at the Empress of the French or at any picture or bust of her without thinking how Mary Wortley Montagu would have gone into bold and eloquent raptures over the superb womanhood of that splendid form.

Well, the face always disappointed me at least. It seems to me cold, artificial, narrow, insincere. It wants nobleness. It does not impress me as being the face of a frivolous woman, a coquette, a court butterfly; but rather that of one who is always playing a part which sometimes wearies. If I were to form my own impressions of the Empress of the French merely from her face, I should set her down as a keen, politic woman, with brains enough to be crafty, not enough to be great. I should set her down as a woman who needs and loves the stimulus of incessant excitement, just as much as a certain class of actress does. Indeed, I think I have seen in the face of more than one actress just such an habitual expression, off the stage, as one may see in the countenance of the French Empress. I fear that sweet and gracious smile, which is said to be so captivating to those for whose immediate and special homage it is put on, changes into sudden blankness or weariness when its momentary business has been done. Sam Slick tells us of a lady whose smile dropped from her face the moment the gazer's eyes were withdrawn "like a petticoat when the strings break;" and if I might apply this irreverent comparison to the smile of an Empress, I would say that I think I have noted just such a change in the expression of the brilliant Eugénie. Indeed, it must be a tiresome part, that which she has had to play through all these resplendent years; a part thrilling with danger, made thorny by many sharp vexations. Were the Empress of the French the mere belle of a court, she might doubtless have joyfully swallowed all the bitternesses for the sake of the brightness and splendor of her lot; were she a woman of high, imperial genius, a Maria Theresa, an Anne of Austria, she might have found in the mere enjoyment of power, or in the nobler aspirings of patriotism, abundant compensation for her individual vexations. But being neither a mere coquette nor a woman of genius, being neither great enough to rise wholly above her personal troubles, nor small enough to creep under them untouched, she must have suffered enough to render her life very often a weary trial; and the traces of that weariness can be seen on her face when the court look is dropped for a moment.

The Empress seems to have passed through three phases of character, or at least to have made on the public opinion of France three successive and different impressions. For a long time she was set down as a mere coquette, a creature whose soul soared no higher than the aspiration after a bonnet or a bracelet, whose utmost genius exhausted itself in the invention of a crinoline. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any invention known to modern Europe had so sudden and wonderful a success or made the inventor so talked about as Eugénie's famous jupon d'acier. A sour and cynical Republican of my acquaintance once declared that anybody might have known the Empress to be a parvenue by the mere fact that she could and did invent a petticoat; for he maintained that no born emperor or empress ever was known to have done even so much in the way of invention. Decidedly, the Empress did a great deal of harm in those her earlier and more brilliant days. To her influence and example may be ascribed the passion for mere extravagance and variety of dress which has spread of late years among all the fashionable and would-be fashionable women of Europe and America. It is not too much to say that the Empress of the French demoralized, in this sense, the womanhood of two generations. How literally debauching her influence was to the women immediately under its control, the women of the fashionable world of Paris, I need not stop to tell. Graceful, gracious, and elegant as she is, she did undoubtedly succeed in branding with a stamp of vulgarity the brilliant court of the Second Empire. It is not wonderful if scandal said coarse and bitter things about the goddess of prodigality who presided over the revels of the Tuileries. The most absurd stories used to be told of the amusements which went on in the private gardens of the palace and in its inner circles; and the levity and occasional flightiness of a vivacious young woman thirsting for fresh gayeties and new excitements were perverted and magnified into reckless and wanton extravagances. Of course it was inevitable that there should be scandal over the birth of the Prince Imperial. Were the Empress Eugénie chaste as ice, pure as unsunned snow, she could not, under the circumstances, escape that calumny.

About the time of her sudden and mysterious escapade to London, the Empress began to emerge a little from the character of a mere woman of fashion, and to become known and felt as a politician. People say that some at least of the influence and control which she began to obtain over her husband was owing to her knowledge of his many infidelities and his reluctance to provoke her into open quarrel. Unless Eugénie was wholly free from the jealousy which is supposed to lie in the heart of every other woman, she must have suffered cruelly in this way for many years. In her own court circles, at her own side, were ladies whom universal report designated as successive maîtresses en titre of the Emperor Napoleon. Stories, too, of his indulgence in low and gross amours were told everywhere, and, true or false (charity itself could not well doubt that some of them were true), must have reached the Empress's ears. She suffered severely, and she took to politics—perhaps as a harassed man sometimes takes to drinking. Her political influence was, in its day, simply disastrous. She was always on the wrong side, and she was always impetuous, unreasoning, and pertinacious, as cynical people say is the way of women. She became a devotee of the narrowest kind; and just as Madame de Maintenon's religious bigotry did infinitely more harm to France than the vilest profligacy of a Pompadour or a Dubarry could have done, so the religious fervor of the Empress Eugénie threatened at one time to prove a worse thing for the State and for Europe than if she had really carried on during all her lifetime the palace orgies which her enemies ascribed to her. Reaction, Ultramontanism, illiberalism, superstition, found a patroness and leader in her. She fought for the continued occupation of Rome; she battled against the unity of Italy; she recommended and urged the Mexican expedition. Louis Napoleon is personally a good-natured, easy-going sort of man, averse to domestic disputes, fully conscious, no doubt, of his frequent liability to domestic censure. What wonder if European politics sometimes had to suffer heavily for the tolerated presence of this or that too notorious lady in the inner circles of the French court? "Who is the Countess de ——?" I once asked of a Parisian friend who was attached to the Imperial household—I was speaking of a lady whose beauty and whose audacities of dress were then much talked of in the French capital. "The latest favorite," was the reply. "I shouldn't wonder if her presence at court cost another ten years of the occupation of Rome."

With the Empress's introduction to politics and political intrigue, the era of scandal seems to have closed for her. She dressed as brilliantly and extravagantly as ever, and she would take as much pains about her toilet for the benefit of Persigny and Baroche and Billault at a Council of State as for a ball in the Tuileries. She received the same sort of company, was surrounded by the same ladies and the same cavaliers as ever. But she ceased to be herself a subject of scandal—a fact which is not a little remarkable when one remembers how many bitter enemies she made for herself at this period of her career. She seems to have seriously contemplated the assumption of a great political and religious part—the part of the patroness and protectress of the Papacy. I believe she studied hard to educate herself for this part, and indeed for the work in politics generally which devolved upon her. The position of Vicegerent, assigned to her by the Emperor during his absence in the Lombardy campaign, stirred up political ambition within her, and she seems to have shown a remarkable aptitude for political work. She certainly sustained the opinion expressed by John Stuart Mill in his "Subjection of Women," that the business of politics, from which laws in general shut women out, is just the one intellectual occupation in which, whenever they have had a chance, they have proved themselves the equals of men. When Eugénie was raised to the Imperial throne, she appears to have had no better education than any young Spanish woman of her class, and that certainly is not much. A lady once assured me that she was one of a group who were presented to the Empress at the Tuileries, and that there being in the group two beautiful girls from America, to whom Eugénie desired to be particularly gracious, her Imperial Majesty began to ask them several questions about their native land, and astonished them almost beyond the capacity to reply by kindly inquiring whether they had come from New York "over the sea, or over the land." But the Empress has read up a good deal, and mastered much other knowledge besides that of geography, since those salad days. Meanwhile, she became more and more the divinity of the Ultramontanes; and the French court presented the interesting spectacle of having two rival and extreme parties, one led by the Emperor's wife, and the other by his cousin, Prince Napoleon, between whom the Emperor himself maintained an attitude something like that of the central figure in a game of seesaw. I presume there can be little doubt that the Empress regarded her husband's portly cousin with a cordial detestation. She is not a woman endowed with a keen sense of humor, nor in any case would she be quite likely to enjoy anything which was humorous at her own expense; and Prince Napoleon is credited broadly with having said things concerning her which doubtless made his friends and followers and boon companions laugh, but which, reported to her, as they assuredly would be, must have made her cheek flame and her lips quiver. Moreover, the Red Prince was notoriously in the habit of turning into jest some things more sacred in the eyes of the Imperial devotee than even her own reputation. She feared his tongue, his reckless wit, his smouldering ambition. She feared him for her boy, whose rival and enemy he might come to be; and Prince Napoleon had more sons than one. Therefore the rivalry was keen and bitter. She was for the Pope; he was for Italy and the Revolution. She sympathized with the South in the American civil war; Prince Napoleon was true to his principles and stood by the North. She favored the Mexican enterprise; he opposed it. She was for all manner of repressive action as regarded political speaking and writing; he was for a free platform and free press. Her triumph came when, during the Emperor's visit to Algeria, Prince Napoleon delivered his famous Ajaccio speech—a speech terribly true and shockingly indiscreet—and was punished by an Imperial rebuke, which led him to resign all his political offices and withdraw absolutely from public life for several successive years.

But just when the Empress seemed to have the field all to herself, her political influence began somehow to wane. Perhaps she grew a little weary of the work of statecraft; perhaps she had not been so successful in some of her favorite projects as she had expected to be. The Mexican expedition turned out a dismal, ghastly failure, and that enterprise had always been regarded as the joint work of the two influences which cynical people say have usually been most disastrous in politics—the priest and the petticoat. Then the idea of working out the scheme of European politics from the central point of the Tuileries was suddenly exploded by the unexpected intrusion of Prussia, and the dazzling victory in which the Bonaparte as well as the Hapsburg was overthrown and humbled. The old framework of things was disjointed by this surprising event. A new political centre of gravity had to be sought for Europe. France was rudely pushed aside. The fair Empress, who had been training herself for quite a different condition of things, found herself now confronted by new, strange, and bewildering combinations. One thing is highly to her credit. I have been assured by people who claim to know something of the matter, that her earnest influence was used to induce the French Government to accept, without remonstrance, the new situation. While Louis Napoleon was committing the inexcusable blunder of feeling his way towards a war with Prussia, and thereby subjecting himself to the ignominy of having to draw hastily back, the voice of the Empress, I am assured, was always raised for peace. But I think the new situation was too much for her. She had made up for a game of politics between the Pope and Italy; when other players and other stakes appeared, the Empress was disinclined to undertake a new course of education. She thereupon passed into the third phase—that of philanthropic devotee, Lady Bountiful, and mother of her people; and since then, if she cannot be said to have grown universally popular, she may fairly be described as having got rid of nearly all her former unpopularity. Her good deeds began to be magnified everywhere, and even ancient enemies were content to sing her praises, or, at least, to hear them sung.

Undoubtedly she has a kindly, charitable heart, and can do heroic as well as graceful things. Her famous visitation of the cholera hospitals may doubtless have been done partly for effect, but even in this sense it showed a lofty appreciation of the duties of an Empress, and could not have been conceived or carried out by an ignoble nature. When the cholera appeared in Madrid, the fat, licentious woman who then cumbered and disgraced the throne of Spain, fled in dismay from her capital; and this act of peculiarly unwomanlike cowardice told heavily against her and hurried her deeply down into that public contempt which is so fatal to sovereigns. The Empress Eugénie, on the other hand, dignified and served herself and her husband by her fearless exposure of her own life in the cause of humanity and charity. Kindly and generous deeds of hers are constantly reported in Paris, and these things go far in keeping up the superstition of loyalty. Every one knows how gracious and winning the Empress can be in her personal relations with those who approach her. Sometimes her demeanor and actions come into sharp contrast with those of other sovereigns in matters less momentous than the visiting of death-charged hospital wards. I have heard of an American lady who once made some rich and complete collections of specimens of American foliage, collected them at immense labor, arranged them with exquisite taste in two large and beautiful volumes, and sent one as an offering to Queen Victoria, the other to the Empress of the French. From the British court came back the volume itself, with a formal reply from an official intimating that Her Majesty the Queen made it a rule not to accept such gifts. From Paris came a letter of genial, graceful acceptance, written by the Empress Eugénie herself, full of good taste, good feeling, and courteous, ladylike expression. These are small things, but womanly tact and grace seldom have much opportunity of expressing themselves save in just such small things.

The Empress then has of late years faded a little out of political life. I think it may be taken for granted that although she is a quick, clever woman, with talents far beyond the mere inventing of bonnets and petticoats, she is not gifted with any political genius, not qualified to see quickly into the heart of a difficult question, not endowed with the capacity to surmount a great crisis. I have never heard anything which induces me to think that Eugénie's intellect and power would count for much in the chances of the dynasty should Louis Napoleon die while his son is yet a boy. Like Louis Napoleon himself, she was twice misjudged: first when people set her down as an empty-headed coquette, and next when they cried her up as a woman with a genius for government. So far as one may venture to predict, I think she would not prove strong enough for the place, if evil fortune should throw upon her the task of preserving the throne for her boy.

Recent events seem to me to prove that the imperial system is less strong and more shaky than most of us would have supposed six months ago. I for one do fully believe that the recent disturbances are the genuine indications of a profound and bitter popular discontent. I beg the readers of The Galaxy to be very cautious how they form an estimate of the situation from the correspondence and editorial articles of the London press. If the "Times" believes Bonapartism safe and strong in Paris, I have only to remark that the "Times" believed the same, almost up to the bitter end, of Bonapartism in Mexico. There are very few London journals which can be trusted where the politics of France are concerned. Not that the journals are bribed; everybody knowing anything of the London press knows how absurd the idea of such bribery is; but that all London Philistinism (and Philistinism does a good deal of the writing for the London papers) considers it genteel and respectable, and the right sort of thing generally, to go in for the Empire and sneer at revolution. I have read with no little wonder many of the comments of the London, and indeed some of the New York journals, on Henri Rochefort and his colleagues. One would think that in order to prove a certain revolutionary movement powerless and contemptible, you had only to show that its leaders were themselves contemptible and disreputable persons. Some of the journals here and in London write as if the Empire must be safe because the satire of the "Lanterne" and the "Marseillaise" seems to them coarse and witless, and because they have heard that Henri Rochefort is an insincere man, of doubtful courage and tainted moral character. One longs to ask whether the "Père Duchesne" and the "Vieux Cordelier" were publications fit to be read in the drawing-rooms of virtuous families; whether Mirabeau's private character was quite blameless; whether Marat and Hébert had led reputable lives; whether Camille Desmoulins was habitually received into the highest circles; whether Théroigne de Méricourt was the sort of young woman one's wife would like to invite to tea. The imbecility with which certain journalists go on day after day trying to assure themselves and the world that imperialism has nothing to fear at the hands of a movement led by scurrilous and disreputable men, has something in it at once amusing and provoking. The strength of a revolutionary movement is not exactly to be estimated by the claims of its leaders to carry off the prix Monthyon or the Holy Grail. Perhaps if it were to be so estimated, it would be hard to say where the victory should go in the present instance. For the worst of Rochefort's colleagues have never been accused of any profligacies and basenesses so bad as those which universal public opinion ascribes to the leading Bonapartes and some of their most influential supporters. Undoubtedly there is a great deal of scurrility and even worse in the papers conducted by Rochefort. It is not in good taste to go on asking who was the mother of De Morny, who was the father of Walewski; how the present Walewski, Walewski fils, comes to be called a count, and who was his mother, and so on; and the direct and libellous attacks on the Empress are utterly indefensible. If one were making up a memoir of Henri Rochefort, or engaged in a debating society's controversy on his character, one would have to admit that he is by no means a model demagogue, a pattern patriot. But one might at the same time hint that, judging by historical precedent, he is probably all the more formidable as a revolutionary leader for that very reason. His literary attacks on the Government are by no means all vulgar, or scurrilous, or contemptible. There was fresh and genuine humor as well as telling satire in the "Lanterne's" early declaration of allegiance to the Napoleons, the purport of which was that, feeling bound to express his devotion to a Napoleon, Rochefort had selected as the object of his loyal homage Napoleon the Second, the sovereign who never coerced the press, or corrupted the Senate, or robbed the nation of its liberty, or exiled its patriots, or carried on a Mexican expedition, or impoverished the country to maintain a gigantic army. But there is one thing certain—that whether Rochefort is witty or not, wise or not, he has waked an echo throughout France and Europe in general which even very wise and undeniably witty enemies of the Empire did not succeed in creating. Nothing he has written will compare in artistic strength of satire or invective with Victor Hugo's "Châtimens" or "Napoléon le Petit." Eugène Pelletan's "Nouvelle Babylone" was a prolonged outpouring of indignant eloquence by a gentleman, a scholar, and a thinker. Rogeard's "Propos de Labienus" was a piece of really fine sarcasm. But not the most celebrated of these attacks on the Empire created anything like the sensation which Rochefort has succeeded in creating by the constant "pegging away" of his bitter, envenomed, and unscrupulous pen. Indeed, the reason is obvious—at least to those who, like me, believe that the great mass of the Parisian population (the army, the officials, and the priests not counted) are heartily sick of Bonapartism, and would get rid of it if they could. Rochefort assails the Empire and the Emperor in a style which they can understand. He is a master of a certain kind of coarse, rasping ridicule, which delights the disaffected ouvrier; and he has no scruple about assailing any weak place he can find in his enemy, even though in doing so the heart of a woman has likewise to be wounded. An angry and disaffected populace delights in this kind of thing. The fact that Rochefort has created such a sensation is the best proof in the world that the Parisian populace is angry and disaffected. Rochefort has a happy gift of epithets, which goes a long way with admirers and followers such as his. I doubt whether a whole chapter could have described more accurately and vividly the person, character, and career of Prince Pierre Bonaparte than Rochefort did when he branded him as "a social bandit." Personally, Rochefort is not qualified to be a demagogue in the sense that Danton was a demagogue, and he can make no pretension to be a revolutionary leader of a high class. But he can incite a populace, madden the hearts of disaffected crowds, as the bitter tongue of a shrill woman might do, and as the tongue of a great orator might perhaps fail to do. Doubtless Rochefort and his literary sword-and-buckler men are not strong enough to create a serious disturbance of themselves alone. But if a moment of general uncertainty and unsettlement came, they might prove a dangerous disturbing force. If, for example, there should come a crisis which of itself rendered change of some kind necessary, when all the chances of the future might depend upon a single hour or perhaps a single decisive command, and when it was not certain who had the right, who would assume the responsibility to give the command, then indeed the bitter screams, and jeers, and invectives of these reckless literary bravos might have much to do with the ordering of the situation. If, for example, the Emperor were to die just now, who shall venture to say how much the chances of the Empress and her son might not be affected at that moment of terrible crisis by the pens and the tongues of Rochefort and his followers?

Some time, in the natural course of things, the Empress may expect to have to face such a crisis. It is highly probable that the time will come while yet her boy is young and dependent upon her guardianship and care. Has she won for herself the affection, confidence, and loyalty of France, to such an extent that she could count upon national support? I am convinced that she has not. She is much liked and even loved by those who know her. They have countless anecdotes to tell of her affectionate ways as a mother, of her generosity and kindness as a woman. But although she has outlived many of the early prejudices against her, she is still regarded with distrust and dislike by the older families of France; and I am confident that a large proportion of the working classes in Paris and the large towns delight to believe the worst things that malice and slander can say to her detriment. The priests and the shopkeepers are probably her best friends; but I am not aware that priests and shopkeepers have ever proved themselves very powerful bulwarks against sudden popular revolution. The generals and the army might of course remain perfectly loyal to her; probably would if they had no time to consider the situation, and there were no favorite rival in the way (if Prince Napoleon, for example, were a brilliant soldier, she would not have a ghost of a chance against him); but it must be remembered that the loyalty of an army is something like the epigrammatic description of the honor of a woman: when there is any deliberation, it is likely to be lost; and the claims of the Empress are certainly not such as absolutely to forbid deliberation and render it impossible. Much of course would depend on the woman herself. There was a moment when Catharine of Russia's unfortunate husband might have carried all before him if he had only seized the chance; and he did not seize it, and so lost all. There was a moment when Catharine might have utterly failed if she had not risen to the height of the crisis, and seized the opportunity with both hands; and she did rise to the height of the crisis, did seize the opportunity, and so won all. Place Eugénie in such a position, and is she a woman to win? Is she in fact a woman of genius? I think not. Nothing that I have ever heard of her—and I have known many who were her intimate friends—has led me to believe her endowed with a quick, strong, commanding intellect. Mentally she seems to be narrow and shallow; in temper she is quick, capricious, full of warm personal affections and almost groundless personal dislikes. I have a strong idea that no matter what the urgency of the crisis, she would stay to make herself picturesque before taking any public action; and I venture to think she would be guided by counsel only where she happened to have a personal liking for the counsellor. She cannot, I fancy, be trusted at a great crisis to make the fortune of her son. Enough if she do not mar it at such a time.

Political considerations apart, one can only wish her well. Her face is one which ought to smile sweetly and gracefully through history. If fate and France will endure the Bonapartes for another generation or so, there will be some consolation to gallant and romantic souls in the thought that thereby this gracious, queenly woman will be allowed to make a happy end of her brilliant, not untroubled life. Thus far we may, in summing up her career, describe her, first, as a bright, vivacious young coquette, with a dash of the adventuress about her, ranging the world in search of a husband; then a woman suddenly and surprisingly raised to the dazzling rank of an Empress, and a little bewildered by the change; then a splendid leader of the world's fashion, magnificently frivolous and heedless; then a political intrigante, the supreme patroness of Ultramontanism; and now a quiet, queenly mother, verging toward that kind of devoteeism in which some satirical person declares that coquetry in France is sure to end. She is not a woman to make any deep impression on history. She has neither gifts enough nor faults enough. As a politician she has been a failure, and perhaps worse than a failure; but she has been fortunate enough to escape from all public responsibility for her mistakes, and may get quietly into history as merely an intelligent, good-natured, and beautiful woman. Posterity will probably see her and appreciate her sufficiently in her portrait by Winterhalter: a name, a vague memory, and a smooth fair picture with bright complexion, shining hair, and noble shoulders, alone carrying down to other times the history of the Third Napoleon's wife. Only great misfortunes could redeem her from this destiny of half oblivion; and history has names enough that are burnt by misfortune into eternal memory, and may well spare hers. One great claim she has to a liberal construction of her character: her personal enemies are those who do not know her well; her intimates seem to be always her friends. She has one good quality, which her husband with all his faults likewise possesses: she has never in her imperial splendor forgotten or neglected or been ashamed of old acquaintances and friends. I have heard scores of anecdotes from people who know her well—I have heard one such anecdote since I began writing this article—which prove her to be entirely above the mean and vulgar weakness of the parvenu, who shrinks in her magnificence from any acquaintanceship or association likely to remind her of less brilliant days. Taken on the whole, the Empress Eugénie is better than her fortunes and her surroundings might have made her. She is, I think, a woman much more deserving of respect than Josephine Beauharnais, whose misfortunes, joined with the quiet pathetic dignity of her retirement and her later years, have made the world forget the levities, frivolities, and follies of her earlier life. She has shown a quicker and better appreciation of the duties and difficulties of her station, and the temper of the people among whom she had to live, than was at any time shown by Marie Antoinette. Whether she could ever under the most favorable conditions prove an Anne of Austria may well be doubted; and we must all hope for her own sake that she may never be put to the proof. She has at least made it clear that she is no mere Reine Crinoline; she has shown that she possesses some heart, some courage, and some brains; she has had sense enough to retrieve blunders, and merit enough to live down calumny. The best thing one can hope for her is that she may never again be placed in a position which would tempt and allow her to make political influence the instrument of religious bigotry. The greatest woman her native country ever produced, Isabella of Castile, became with all her virtues and genius a curse to Spain, because of her bigotry and her power; and there was a time when it seemed as if the Empress Eugénie was likely to make for herself an odious fame as the chief patroness of a conspiracy against the religious and political liberties of the south of Europe. Let us hope that in her future career she may be saved from any such temptation, and that she may be kept as much as possible out of all political complications where religion interferes; and if she be thus graced by fortune, it is all but certain that whatever her future years may bring, she will deserve and receive a genial record in the history of France.

THE PRINCE OF WALES.

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years," says Edmund Burke, in that famous passage to which one is almost ashamed to allude any more, so hackneyed has it been, "since first I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision." That glowing, impassioned apostrophe did more to make partisans and admirers for poor Marie Antoinette among all English-speaking peoples, probably for all time, than any charms, or virtues, or misfortunes of the Queen and the woman could have done. I can never of late read or recall to mind the burning words of Burke, without thinking of a certain day in March some seven years ago, when I stood on a platform in Trafalgar Square, London, and saw a bright, beautiful young face smiling and bending to a vast enthusiastic crowd on either side, and I, like everybody else, was literally stricken with admiration of the beauty, the sweetness, and the grace of the Princess Alexandra of Denmark. In truth, I am not in general an enthusiast about princes or princesses; I do not believe that the king's face usually gives grace. In this instance the beauty of the Princess Alexandra had been so noisily trumpeted by literary lacqueys already, that one's natural instinct was to feel disappointed, and to say so, when the Princess herself came in sight. But it was impossible to feel disappointment, or anything but admiration, at the sight of that bright, fair face, so transparent in the clearness of its complexion, so delicate and refined in its outlines, so sweet and gracious in its expression. I think something like the old-fashioned, chivalric, chimerical feeling of personal loyalty must have flamed up for the moment that day in the hearts of many men, who perhaps would have been ashamed to confess that their first experience of such an emotion was due to a passing glimpse of the face of a pretty, tremulous girl.

If ours were days of augury, men might have shuddered at the omens which accompanied the wedding ceremonies of the Prince and Princess of Wales. When Goethe, then a youth, surveyed the preparations for the reception of Marie Antoinette at Strasbourg, on her way to Paris, he observed significantly on the inauspicious fact that in the grand chamber adorned for her coming, the tapestry represented the wedding of Jason and Medea. The civil authorities of London certainly did not greet the fair stranger with any such grisly and ghastly emblazonings; but there were other and even more inauspicious omens offered by chance and the hour. The sky darkened, a dreary wind whistled; presently the rain came down in drenching streams that would not abate. There was a mourning-garb at the wedding—the black dress of the Queen, who would not lay aside her widow's-weeds even for that hour; and the night of the wedding, when the streets of London were illuminated, the crowd was so great that, as on a memorable occasion in the early married life of Marie Antoinette, people were crushed and trampled to death amid the universal jubilation.

Well, we defy augury, with Hamlet. But I think some at least in the crowd who welcomed Alexandra felt a kind of doubt and pity as to her future, which needed no inspiration from omens and superstition. No foreign princess has ever been so popular in England as Alexandra; and assuredly some at least of the affection felt for her springs from a pity which, whether called for or not, is genuine and universal. The last time I saw the Princess of Wales was within a very few days of my leaving England to visit the United States. It was in Drury Lane Theatre, then fitted up as an opera house in consequence of the recent burning of Her Majesty's Theatre. The Prince of Wales, his wife, and one of his sisters were in their box. I had not seen the Princess for some time, and I was painfully impressed with the change which had come over her. Remembering, as it was easy to do, the brightness of her beauty during the early days of her marriage, there was something almost shocking in the altered appearance of her face. It looked wasted and haggard; the complexion, which used to be so dazzlingly fair, had grown dull, and, if I may say so, discolored; and I must be ungracious enough to declare bluntly that, to my eyes at least, there seemed little trace indeed of the beauty of a few years before left in that dimmed and worn countenance. "Only the eyes remained—they would not go." Of course, it must be remembered that the Princess was then only just recovering from a long, painful, and exhausting illness; and she may have—I truly hope she has—since then regained all her brightness and beauty. In any case, it would be unjust indeed to assume that the wasted look of the Princess was to be attributed to domestic unhappiness. But even a very matter-of-fact and unsentimental person, looking at her then, and remembering what she so lately was, might be excused if he fancied that some of the unpropitious omens which surrounded the Princess's marriage had already begun to justify themselves in practical fulfilment.

For even at the time of the marriage of the Prince and Princess there were not wanting prophets of evil who predicted that this royal union would not prove much happier than state-made marriages commonly are. Even then there were stories and reports afloat which ascribed to the Prince habits and tendencies not likely to promote the domestic happiness of a delicate and refined young wife, hardly more than a mere child in years. Indeed, there was already considerable doubt in the public mind as to the personal character of the Prince of Wales. He certainly did not look a very intellectual or refined sort of person even then, and some at least were inclined to think him, as Steerforth says of little Em'ly's lover, "rather a chuckle-headed kind of fellow," to get such a girl. There was, certainly, a breath of serious distrust abroad. On the Prince's coming of age, and again, I think, on the announcement of his approaching marriage, the London daily papers had set themselves to preaching sermons at him; and a very foolish chorus of sermons that was which broke out from all those tongues together. The only marked effect of this outburst of lay-preaching was, I fancy, to impress the public mind with the idea that the Prince was really a very much more dreadful young man than there was any good reason to believe him. People naturally imagined that the writers who poured forth such eloquent, wise, and suggestive admonitions must know a great deal more than they felt disposed to hint at; whereas, I venture to think that, in truth, the majority of the writers were disposed to hint at a great deal more than they knew. For, indeed, almost all that is generally and substantially known of the Prince of Wales has been learned and observed since his marriage.

Still, even before, and long before the marriage, there were ominous rumors. Those that I mention I give simply as rumors—not, indeed, the mere babble of the streets, but as the kind of thing which people told you who professed to know—the talk of the House of Commons, and the clubs, and the fashionable drawing-rooms and smoking-rooms. People told you that the Prince and his father had had many quarrels arising out of the extravagance, dissipation, and wrong-headedness of the former; and there was even a painful and cruel report thus whispered about that the death of Prince Albert was the result of a cold he had taken from walking incautiously in a heavy rain during excitement caused by a quarrel with his son. Stories were told of this and that amour and liaison in Ireland when the Prince of Wales was with the camp on the Curragh of Kildare; of his excesses when he was a student at the University; of his escapades at many other times and places. Certain actresses of a low class, and other women of a still lower class, were pointed out in London as special favorites of the Prince of Wales. Of course every man of sense knew, first, that stories of this kind must be taken with a large amount of allowance for exaggeration; and, next, that the public must not expect all the virtues of a saint to belong to the early years of a prince of the family of Guelph. In England public opinion, although it has grown much more exacting of late years on the score of decorum than it used to be, is still disposed to look over without censure a good deal of extravagance and dissipation in young and unmarried men, especially if they be men of rank. Therefore, if the rumors which attended the early career of the Prince of Wales had not followed him into his married years, the world would soon have forgotten all about his youthful indiscretions. But it became a serious question for the whole nation when it began to be whispered everywhere that the Prince was growing worse instead of better during his married life, and when to the suspicion that he was wasting his own youth and his own credit came to be added the belief that he was neglecting and injuring the young and beautiful woman whom state reasons had assigned to him as a wife. In good truth, it is really a question of public and historical interest whether the Queen of England is likely to be succeeded by an Albert the Good or another George the Fourth; and I am not therefore inviting the readers of The Galaxy to descend to the useless discussion of a mere piece of idle court scandal when I ask them to consider with me the probabilities of the future from such survey as we can take of the aspects of the present.

Those who saw the Prince of Wales when he visited this country, would surely fail to recognize the slender, fair-haired, rather graceful youth of that day in the heavy, fat, stolid, prematurely bald, elderly-young-man of this. It would not be easy to see in any assembly a more stupid-looking man than the Prince of Wales is now. On horseback he shows to best advantage. He rides well, and the pleasure he takes in riding lends something of animation to his usually inexpressive face. But when his eyes and features lapse into their habitual condition of indolent, good-natured, stolid repose, all light of intellect seems to have been banished. The outline of the head and face, and the general expression, seemed to me of late to be growing every day more and more like the head and face of George the Third. Anybody who may happen to have a shilling or half-crown of George the Third's time, can see on the coin a very fair presentment of the countenance of the present heir-apparent of the English throne. Whether the Prince of Wales resembles George the Fourth in character and tastes or not, he certainly does not resemble him in face. Even a court sycophant could not pretend to see beauty or grace in our present Prince.

I think that to the eye of the cynic or the satirist the Prince of Wales shows to greatest advantage when he sits in his box at an advanced hour of some rather heavy classic opera, or has to endure a long succession of speeches at a formal public dinner. The heavy head droops, the heavy jaws hang, the languid eyes close, the heir-apparent sinks into a doze. Loyalty itself can see nothing dignified or kingly in him then. I have watched him thus as he sat in his box during some high-class, and to him, doubtless, very heavy performance at the Italian opera, and have thought that at times he might remind irreverent and disloyal observers of Pickwick's immortal fat boy. I have sometimes observed that his little dozes appeared to afford innocent amusement to his sisters, if any of them happened to be in the box; and occasionally one of the Princesses would playfully poke her slumbering brother in the princely ribs, and the Heir of all the Ages would open his eyes and smile languidly, and try to look at the stage and listen to the music; and then, after a while, the heavy head would sink once more on the vast expanse of shirt-front in which the Prince seems to delight, and the fat boy would go to sleep again. But this would only happen at certain performances. There were times when the Prince had eyes and ears open and attentive, even in the opera house. His tastes in general, however, are not for high art in music or the drama. He is very fond of the little theatres where the vivacious blondes display their unconcealed attractions. There are, as everybody knows, several minor theatres in London where the audience, or, I should say more properly, the spectators, will be found to consist chiefly of men, while, on the other hand, the performers are chiefly women. These are the temples of the leg drama. "Pièce aux jambes? Pièce aux cuisses!" indignantly exclaims Eugene Pelletan, denouncing such performances in his "Nouvelle Babylone"; and he goes on to add some cumulative illustrations which I omit. Well, the Prince of Wales loves the pièce aux jambes, and the theatres where it flourishes. He constantly visits theatres at which his wife and sisters are never seen, and in which it would be idle to deny that there are actresses who have made themselves conspicuous objects of popular scandal.

Now, I am far from saying that this necessarily implies anything worse than a low taste on the part of the Prince of Wales. But there are stations in life which render private bad taste a public sin. In London, of late, there has been a just outcry against a certain kind of theatrical performance. It is held to be demoralizing and degrading that the stage should be made simply a show-place for the exhibition of half-naked women, for the audacious display of legs and bosoms. Now, I beg to say for myself that I have entire faith in the dramatic as in every other art; that I believe it always when truthfully pursued vindicates itself, and that I think any costume which the true and legitimate needs of the drama require is fitting, proper, and modest. I regard the ballet, in its place, as a graceful and delightful entertainment; and I do not believe that any healthy and pure mind ought to be offended by the kind of costume which the dance requires. But artists and moralists in London alike objected, and justly objected, to performances the whole purpose, and business, and attraction of which was the exhibition of a crowd of girls as nearly naked as they could venture to show themselves in public.

Now this was undoubtedly the kind of exhibition which the Prince of Wales especially favored and patronized. Night after night, even during the long and lamentable illness of his young wife, he visited such theatres, and gazed upon "those prodigies of myriad nakednesses." Likewise did he much delight in the performances of Schneider—that high priestess of the obscene, rich with the spoils of princes. I say emphatically that there were actions, gestures, bouffonneries performed amid peals of laughter and thunders of applause by this fat Faustina in the St. James's Theatre, London, which were only fit to have gladdened the revels of Sodom and Gomorrah. And this woman was, artistically at least, the prime favorite of the Prince of Wales; and when his brother, the Duke of Edinburgh, reached England for the first time after his escape from the Fenian bullet in Sydney, the par nobile fratrum celebrated the auspicious event by hastening to the theatre where Schneider kicked and wriggled and helped out the point of lascivious songs by a running accompaniment of obscene gestures.

So much at least has to be said against the Prince of Wales, and cannot be gainsaid. All that he could do by countenance and patronage to encourage a debauching and degrading style of theatric entertainment, he has done. He is said to be fond of the singing of the vulgar and low buffoons of the music-halls, and to have had such persons brought specially to his residence, Marlborough House, to sing for him. I have been assured of this often by persons who professed to know; but I do not know anything of it myself, nor is it indeed a matter of any importance. The other facts are known to everybody who reads the London papers. The manager or manageress of a theatre takes good care to announce in the journals when a visit from the Prince of Wales has taken place, and we all thus come to know how many times a week the little theatric temples of nakedness have been honored by his presence.

Am I attaching too much importance to such matters as this? I think not. The social influence and moral example of a royal personage in England are now almost the only agencies by which the royal personage can affect us for good or evil. I hold that no man thoughtful or prudent enough, no matter what his morals, to be fit to occupy the position assigned to the Prince of Wales, would be guilty of lending his public and constant patronage to such exhibitions and amusements as those which he especially patronizes. Moreover, the Prince has often shown a disregard, either cynical or stupid—probably the latter—for public opinion, a heedlessness of public scandal, in other matters as well. He has made companionship for himself among young noblemen conspicuous for their debauchery. At a time, not very long ago, when the Divorce Court was occupied with the hearing of a scandalous cause, in which a certain young duke figured most prominently and disgracefully, this young duke was daily and nightly to be seen the close companion of the Prince of Wales.

Let me touch upon another subject, of a somewhat delicate nature. I have said that there were times when our Prince was always wide awake at the opera house. There is a certain brilliant and capricious little singer whom all England and Germany much admire, and who in certain operatic parts has, I think, no rival. Now, public scandal said that the Prince of Wales greatly admired this lady, and paid her the most marked attentions. Public scandal, indeed, said a great deal more. I hasten to record my conviction that, so far as the fair artiste was concerned, the scandal was wholly unfounded, and that she is a woman of pure character and honor. But the Prince was credited with a special admiration for her; and I am sure the Prince's father under such circumstances would have taken good care to lend no foundation, afford no excuse, for scandal to rest upon. Now, I speak of what I have myself observed when I say that the Prince of Wales, whenever he had an opportunity, always demeaned himself as if he really desired to give the public good reason for believing the scandal, or as if he was too far gone in infatuation to be able to govern his actions. For he was always at the opera when this lady sang; and he always conducted himself as if he wished to blazon to the world his ostentatious and demonstrative admiration. When the prima donna went off the stage, the Prince disappeared from his box; when she came on the stage again, he returned to his seat; he lingered behind all his party at the end, that he might give the last note of applause to the disappearing singer; he made a more pertinacious show of his enthusiasm than even the military admirer of Miss Snevellicci was accustomed to do. Now, all this may have been only stolidity or silliness, and may not have denoted anything like cynicism or coarse disdain of public opinion; but whatever it indicated, it certainly did not, I think, testify to the existence of qualities likely to be found admirable or desirable in the heir to a throne.

Of the truth or falsehood of the private scandals in general circulation concerning the Prince of Wales I know nothing whatever. But everybody in England is aware that such stories are told, and can name and point out this or that titled lady as the heroine of each particular story. It need hardly be said that when a man acquires the sort of reputation which attaches to the Prince of Wales, nothing could be more unjust or unreasonable than to accept, without some very strong ground of belief, any story which couples his name with that of any woman belonging to the society in which he moves. Obviously, it would be enough, in the eyes of an English crowd, that the Prince should now pay any friendly attention to any handsome duchess or countess in order to convert her into an object of scandal. I am myself morally convinced that some of the titled ladies who are broadly and persistently set down by British gossip as mistresses of the Prince of Wales are as innocent of such a charge as if they had never been within a thousand miles of a court. But the Prince is a little unlucky wherever he goes, for scandal appears to pursue him as Horace's black care follows the horseman. When the Prince of Wales happens to be in Paris, he seems to be surrounded at once by the same atmosphere of suspicion and evil report. Some two years ago I chanced to be in Paris at the time the Prince was there, and I can answer for it that observers who had never heard or read of the common gossip of London formed the same impression of his general character that the public of London had already adopted. The Prince was then paying special attention to a brilliant and beautiful lady moving in the court circles of the French capital, a lady who had but very recently distinguished herself by appearing at one of the fancy balls of the Tuileries in the character of the Archangel Michael or Raphael—it does not much matter which—and attired in a costume which left the company no possibility of doubting the symmetry of her limbs and the general shapeliness of her person. Malicious satirists circulated thereupon an announcement that the lady was to appear at the next fancy ball as "La Source," the beautiful naked nymph so exquisitely painted by Ingres. This lady received the special attentions of the Prince of Wales. He followed her, people said, like her shadow; and a smart pun was soon in circulation, which I refrain from giving because it contrives ingeniously to blend with his name the name of the lady in question, and I am not writing a scandalous chronicle. This was the time when the Prince made his royal mother so very angry by attending the Chantilly races on a Sunday. When he came back to London he had to take part in some public ceremonial—I forget now what it was—at which the Queen had consented to be present. Her Majesty was present, and I have been assured by a friend who stood quite near that a sort of little scene was enacted which much embarrassed those who had to take part in the official pageantry of the occasion. Up came the Prince, who had travelled in hot haste from Paris, and with a somewhat abashed and sheepish air approached his royal mother. She looked at him angrily, and turned away. The Duke of Cambridge, her cousin, made an awkward effort to mend matters by bringing up the Prince again, and with the action of a friendly and deprecating intercessor presenting the delinquent. This time, I am assured, the Queen, with determined and angry gestures, and some words spoken in a low tone, repelled intercessor and offender at once; and the Prince of Wales retired before the threatened storm. The Duke of Edinburgh, who had been lingering a little in the background—he, too, had just come from Paris, and he had been to Chantilly—anxious to see what kind of reception would be accorded to his brother, thought, apparently, that he had seen enough to warrant him in keeping himself at a modest distance on that occasion, and not encountering the terrors of what Thackeray, in "The Rose and the Ring," describes as "the royal eye."

I have little doubt that Queen Victoria is a somewhat rigorous and exacting mother, and I should be far from accepting her frown as decisive with regard to the delinquencies of one of her sons. Cigar-smoking alone would probably be accounted by the Queen a sin hardly allowing of pardon. Her husband, Prince Albert, was a man so pure of life, so free from nearly all the positive errors of manhood, so remarkably endowed with at least all the negative virtues, that his companionship might easily have spoiled her for the toleration of natures less calm and orderly. I suspect that the Queen is one of that class of thoroughly good women who, from mere lack of wide sympathies and genial toleration, are not qualified to deal to the best advantage with children who show a little inclination for irregularity and self-indulgence. Nor do I believe that the Prince of Wales is the wicked and brutal profligate that common libel makes him out. The shocking story which one sees so often alluded to in the London correspondence of certain American papers, and which attributes the long illness of the Princess of Wales to the misconduct of her husband, I believe to be utterly unfounded and unjustifiable. One of the London medical journals, the "Lancet" I think it was, had the courage to refer directly to this monstrous statement, and to give it an emphatic and authoritative refutation. If the worst things said of the Prince of Wales with any appearance of foundation were true, it is certain that he would still not be any worse than many other European princes and sovereigns. I have never heard anything said of the Prince of Wales half so bad as the stories which are believed everywhere in Paris of the enormous profligacies of Prince Napoleon; and it would be hardly possible for charity itself to doubt that up to a very recent period the private life of the Emperor of the French himself was stained with frequent and reckless dissipation. Those who were in Vienna anywhere about the autumn of 1866, will remember the stories which were told about the fatal results of the exalted military command given by the imperial will to certain favored generals, and the kind of influence by which those generals had acquired imperial favor. Common report certainly describes the Empress of Austria as being no happier in her domestic relations than the Princess of Wales. Everybody knows what Victor Emanuel's private character is, and what sort of hopeful youth is his eldest son, Umberto. Therefore, the Prince of Wales could doubtless plead that he is no worse than his neighbors; and even in his own family he might point to other members no better than himself. The Duke of Cambridge, for instance, has often been accused of profligacy and profligate favoritism. I wish I could venture to repeat here, for the sake of the genuine wit and keen satire of it, a certain epigram in Latin, composed by an English military officer, to describe the influence which brought about the sudden and remarkable promotion of another officer who was not believed to be personally quite deserving of the rank conferred on him by the Duke of Cambridge, commander-in-chief of the British army. But the position of the Prince of Wales is very different from that of the Duke of Cambridge, and he has to face a public opinion quite unlike that which surrounds Prince Napoleon or the Emperor of the French. People in France are not inclined to make any very serious complaint about the amours of a prince, or even of an emperor. I do not venture to say that there is much more of actual immorality in Paris than in London; but, assuredly, a man may, without harm to his public and political influence, acknowledge an amount of immorality in Paris which would be utterly fatal to his credit and reputation in London. Moreover, some of the illustrious profligates I have mentioned are distinguished by other qualities as well as profligacy; but I cannot say that I have ever heard any positively good quality, either of heart or intellect, ascribed to the Prince of Wales.

Unless his face, his head, his manners in public, and the tastes he so conspicuously manifests wholly belie him, the heir to the British throne is a remarkably dull young man. He cannot even deliver with any decent imitation of intelligence the little speeches which Arthur Helps or somebody else usually gets up for him when the exigencies of the situation compel the Prince to make a speech in public. He is reputed to be parsimonious even in his pleasures, and has managed to get himself deeply into debt without being supposed to have wasted any of his substance in obedience to a generous impulse. The Prince inherited a splendid property. His prudent father had looked well after the revenues of the duchy of Cornwall, which is the appanage of the Prince of Wales (even in some very dingy parts of London you may if you hire a house find that you have the Prince of Wales for a landlord), and the property of the heir must have been raised to its very highest value. Yet it is notorious that a very few years after he had attained his majority, Albert Edward had contrived to get deeply immersed in debt. There was for some time a scheme in contemplation to apply to Parliament for an addition to the huge allowance made to the Prince of Wales; and the "Times" and other newspapers were always urging the fact that the Queen left the Prince to perform nearly all her social duties for her, as a reason why the nation ought to award him an augmented income. It puzzles people in London, who read the papers and who study, as most Britons do, the occupations and pastimes of royalty, to know where the lavish and regal hospitalities take place which the Prince of Wales is supposed to dispense on behalf of his mother. However, the project for appealing to the generosity of Parliament seems to have been put aside or to have fallen through—I have read somewhere that the Queen herself has agreed to increase her son's allowance out of her own ample and well-hoarded purse—and the English public are not likely to be treated to any Parliamentary debate on the subject just yet. But this much is certain, that the same almost universal rumor which attributes coarse and dissipated habits to the Prince of Wales attributes to him likewise a mean and stingy parsimony where aught save his own pleasure is concerned; and even there, if by any possibility the pleasure can be obtained without superfluous cost.

This then is the character which the son of the Queen of England bears, in the estimation of the vast majority of his mother's subjects. Almost any and every one you meet in London will tell you, as something beyond doubt, that the Prince of Wales is dull, stingy, coarse, and profligate. As for the anecdotes which are told of his habits and tastes by the artists and officials of the theatres which he frequents, I might fairly leave them out of the question, because most of them that I have heard seem to me obvious improbabilities and exaggerations. They have nevertheless a certain value in helping us to a sort of historical estimate of the Prince's character. Half the stories told of the humors and debaucheries of Sheridan and Fox are doubtless inventions or exaggerations; but we are quite safe in assuming that the persons of whom such stories abound were not frugal, temperate, and orderly men. If the Prince of Wales is not a young man of dissipated habits, then a phenomenon is exhibited in his case which is, I fancy, without any parallel in history—the phenomenon of a whole watchful nation, studying the character and habits of one whose position compels him to live as in a house of glass, and coming, after years of observation, to a conclusion at once unanimous and erroneous. But were it proved beyond the remotest possibility of doubt that the Prince is personally chaste as a Joseph, temperate as Father Mathew, tender to his wife as the elder Hamlet, attached to his mother as Hamlet the younger, it would still remain a fact indisputable to all of us in London, who have eyes to see and ears to hear, that the Prince is addicted to vulgar amusements; that he patronizes indecent exhibitions; that he is given to the companionship of profligate men, and lends his helping hand to the success and the popularity of immoral and lascivious women.

What is to be the effect upon England of the reign of the Prince of Wales? Will England and her statesmen endure the rule of a profligate sovereign? No country can have undergone in equal time a greater revolution in public taste and sentiment at least, if not in morals, than England has since the time of George the Fourth. No genius, no eloquence, no political wisdom or merits could now induce the English people to put up with the open and undisguised excesses of a Fox; nor could any English statesman of the rank of Fox be found now who would condescend to pander to the vices of a George the Fourth. Thirty years of decorum in the Court, the Parliament, and the press have created a public feeling in England which will not long bear to be too openly offended by any one. But, although I may seem at first to be enunciating a paradox, I must say that all this is rather in favor of the chances of the Prince of Wales than against them. It will take so small a sacrifice on his part to satisfy everybody, that only the very extravagance of folly could lead him long astray on any unsatisfactory course, when once he has become directly responsible to the nation. We are not exacting in England as regards the private conduct of our great people. We only ask them to be publicly decorous. Everywhere in English society there is a quite unconscious, naive sort of Pharisaism, the unavowed but actual principle of which is that it matters very little if a man does the wrong thing, provided he publicly acts and says the right thing. I am perfectly satisfied that the great bulk of respectable and Philistine society in England would regard Robert Dale Owen, with his pure life and his views on the question of divorce, as a far more objectionable person than the veriest profligate who did evil stealthily, and professed to maintain the theory of a rigid marriage bond. The Prince of Wales will therefore need very little actual improvement in his way of life, in order to be all that his future subjects will expect, or care to ask. No one wants the Prince to be a man of ability; no one wishes him to be a good speaker. If Albert Edward were to rise in the House of Lords some night, and deliver a powerful and eloquent speech, as Prince Napoleon has often done in the French Senate, the English public would be not only surprised but shocked. Such a feat performed by a Prince would seem almost as much out of place, as if he were to follow the example of Caligula or Nero and exhibit himself in the arena as a gladiator. Of course the idea of the Prince of Wales fulminating against the policy of the Crown and the Government, after the fashion of Prince Napoleon, would be simply intolerable to the British mind of to-day—a thing so outrageous as indeed to be practically inconceivable. The Prince of Wales's part during the coming years, whether as first subject or as ruler, is as easy as could well be assigned to man. It is the very reverse of Bottom's; it is to avoid all roaring. He must be decorous, and we will put up with any degree of dulness; he must be decent, and we will all agree to know nothing of any private compensations wherewith he may repay himself for public propriety. All the influences of English statesmanship, rank, religion, journalism, patriotism, Philistinism, and flunkeyism, will instinctively combine to screen the throne against scandal, if only the throne will consent to allow of the possibility of such a protection. I have hardly ever known an Englishman whose hostility to monarchical institutions went so far that he would not be ready to say, "We have got a monarchy; let us try to make the best we can of it." Therefore the Prince of Wales must be the very Marplot or L'Etourdi of princes, if he cannot contrive to make himself endurable to a people who will bear so much rather than be at the trouble of a change. Of course it is possible that his faults may become grosser and more unmanageable with years (indeed, he is quite old enough already to have sown his wild oats long since); and it would be a hard trial upon decorous English statesmen and the English public to endure an openly profligate King. Yet even that nuisance I think would be endured for one lifetime at all events, rather than encounter the danger and trouble of any organic change.

So long as the Prince of Wales keeps out of politics, he may hold his place well enough; the England of to-day could far better endure even a George the Fourth than a George the Third. I have little doubt that the Prince of Wales, when he comes to be King, will be discreet in this matter at least. He has never indeed shown any particular interest in political affairs, so far as I have heard. He seems to care little or nothing about the contests of parties. Some three or four years ago, at the time of the celebrated Adullamite secession from the Liberal party, there was some grumbling among Radicals because it was reported that the Prince of Wales had expressed a wish to make the acquaintance of Robert Lowe, the brilliant, eccentric chief of the secession, and had had Lowe brought to him and spent a long time talking with him; and it was urged that this was done by the Prince to mark his approval of the Adullamites and his dislike of radicalism. But just about the very same time the Prince took some trouble to make the acquaintance of John Bright, and paid what might have been considered very flattering attentions to the great popular tribune. The Prince has more than once visited the Pope, and he has likewise more than once visited Garibaldi. Indeed, he seems to have a harmless liking for knowing personally all people who are talked about; and I fancy he hunted up the Pope, and Garibaldi, and John Bright, and Robert Lowe, just as he sends for Mr. Toole the comic actor, or Blondin, or Chang the giant. Nothing can be safer and better for the Prince in the future than to keep to this wholesome indifference to politics. In England we could stand any length of the reign of King Log. I shall not venture to conjecture what might happen if the Prince of Wales were to develop a perverse inclination to "meddle and muddle" in politics, because I think such a thing highly improbable. My impression is, on the whole, that things will go on under the reign of the next sovereign in England very much as they have been going on under the present; that the Prince of Wales will be induced to pay a little more attention to decorum and public propriety than he has hitherto done; and that the people of England will laugh at him and cheer for him, talk scandal about him and sing God save him, and finally endure him, on somewhat the same principle as that which induces the New York public to endure overcrowded street-cars and miserable postal arrangements—just because it is less trouble to each individual to put up with his share of a defective institution, than to go out of his way for the purpose of endeavoring to organize any combination to get rid of it.

THE KING OF PRUSSIA.

Ronsard, in one of his songs addressed to his mistress, tells her that in her declining years she will be able to boast that "When I was young a poet sang of me." In a less romantic spirit the writer of this article may boast in old age, should he attain to such blest condition, that "When I was young a king spoke to me." That was the only king or sovereign of any kind with whom I ever exchanged a word, and therefore I may perhaps be allowed to be proud of the occasion and reluctant to let it sleep in oblivion. The king was William, King of Prussia, and the occasion of my being spoken to by a sovereign was when I, with some other journalists, was formally presented to King William after his coronation, and listened to a word or two of commonplace, good-humored courtesy.

The coronation of King William took place, as many readers of The Galaxy are probably aware, in the old historic town of Königsberg, on the extreme northeastern frontier of Prussia, a town standing on one of the inlets of the Baltic Sea, where once the Teutonic Knights, mentioned by Chaucer, were powerful. Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" had brought Königsberg prominently before the eyes and minds of English-speaking readers, just previously to the ceremony in which King William was the most conspicuous performer. It is the city where Immanuel Kant passed his long and fruitful life, and which he never quitted. It is a picturesque city in its way, although not to be compared with its neighbor Dantzic. It is a city of canals and streams, and many bridges, and quaint, narrow, crooked streets, wherein are frequent long-bearded and gabardined Jews, and where Hebrew inscriptions are seen over many shop-windows and on various door-plates. In its centre the city is domineered over by a Schloss, or castle-palace, and it was in the chapel of this palace that the ceremony of coronation took place, which provoked at the time so many sharp criticisms and so much of popular ridicule.

The first time I saw the King was when he rode in procession through the ancient city, some two or three days before the performance of the coronation. He seemed a fine, dignified, handsome, somewhat bluff old man—he was then sixty-four or sixty-five years of age—with gray hair and gray moustache, and an expression which, if it did not denote intellectual power, had much of cheerful strength and the charm of a certain kind of frank manhood about it. He rode well—riding is one of the accomplishments in which kings almost always excel—and his military costume became him. Certainly no one was just then disposed to be very enthusiastic about him, but every one was inclined to make the best of the sovereign and the situation; to forget the past and look hopefully into the future. The manner in which the coronation ceremony was conducted, and the speech which the King delivered soon after it, produced a terrible shock of disappointment; for in each the King manifested that he understood the crown to be a gift not from his people, but from heaven. To me the ceremonies in the chapel, splendid and picturesque as was the mise en scène, appeared absurd and even ridiculous. The King, bedizened in a regal costume which suggested Drury Lane or Niblo's Garden, lifting a crown from off the altar (was it, by the way, an altar?) and, without intervention of human aid other than his own hands, placing it upon his head, to signify that he had his crown from heaven, not from man; then putting another crown upon the head of his wife, to show that she derived her dignities from him; and then turning round and brandishing a gigantic sword, as symbolical of his readiness to defend his State and people—all this seemed to me too suggestive of the opéra comique to suit the simple dignity of the handsome old soldier. Far better and nobler did he look in his military uniform and with his spiked helmet, as he sat on his horse in the streets, than when, arrayed in crimson velvet cloak and other such stage paraphernalia of conventional royalty, he stood in the castle chapel, the central figure in a ceremonial of mediæval splendor and worse than mediæval tediousness.

But the King's face, bearing, and manner, as I saw him in Königsberg, and immediately afterwards in Berlin, agreeably disappointed me. It was one of the best faces to be seen among all the throng at banquet and ball and pageant during those days of gorgeous and heavy ceremonial. At the coronation performances there were two other personages who may be said to have divided public curiosity and interest with the King. One was the illustrious Meyerbeer, who composed and conducted the coronation ode, which thus became almost his swan-song, his latest notes before death. The other was a man whose name has lately again divided attention with that of the King of Prussia—Marshal MacMahon, Duke of Magenta. MacMahon was sent to represent the Emperor of the French at the coronation, and he was then almost fresh from the glory of his Lombardy battles. There was great curiosity among the Königsberg public to get a glimpse of this military hero; and although even Prussians could hardly be supposed to take delight in a fame acquired at the expense of other Germans, I remember being much struck by the quiet, candid good-humor with which people acknowledged that he had beaten their countrymen. There was, indeed, a little vexation and anger felt when some of the representatives of Posen, the Prussian Poland, cheered somewhat too significantly for MacMahon as he drove in his carriage from the palace. The Prussians generally felt annoyed that the Poles should have thus publicly and ostentatiously demonstrated their sympathy with France and their admiration of the French general who had defeated a German army. But except for this little ebullition of feeling, natural enough on both sides, MacMahon was a popular figure at the King's coronation; and before the ceremonies were over, the King himself had become anything but popular. The foreigners liked him for the most part because his manners were plain, frank, hearty, and agreeable, and to the foreigners it was a matter of little consequence what he said or did in the accepting of his crown. But the Germans winced under his blunt repudiation of the principle of popular sovereignty, and in the minds of some alarmists painful and odious memories began to revive and to transform themselves into terrible omens for the future.

For this pleasant, genial, gray-haired man, whose smile had so much of honest frankness and even a certain simple sweetness about it, had a grim and bloodstained history behind him. Not Napoleon the Third himself bore a more ominous record when he ascended the throne. The blood of the Berliners was purple on those hands which now gave so kindly and cheery a welcome to all comers. The revolutionists of Baden held in bitter hate the stern prince who was so unscrupulous in his mode of crushing out popular agitation. From Cologne to Königsberg, from Hamburg to Trieste, all Germans had for years had reason only too strong to regard William Prince of Prussia as the most resolute and relentless enemy of popular liberty. When the Pope was inspiring the hearts of freemen and patriots everywhere in Europe with sudden and splendid hopes doomed to speedy disappointment, the Prince of Prussia was execrated with the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, and the Romanoffs. The one only thing commonly said in his favor was that he was honest and would keep his word. The late Earl of Clarendon, one of the most incautious and blundering of diplomatists (whom after his death the English newspapers have been eulogizing as a very sage and prince of statesmen), embodied this opinion sharply in a few words which he spoke to a friend of mine in Königsberg. Clarendon represented Queen Victoria at the coronation ceremonies, and my friend happened in conversation with him to be expressing a highly disparaging opinion of the King of Prussia. "There is just this to be said of him," the British Envoy remarked aloud in the centre of a somewhat miscellaneous group of listeners—"he is an honest man and a man of his word; he is not a Corsican conspirator."

Yes, this was and is the character of the King of Prussia. In good and evil he kept his word. You might trust him to do as he had said. During the greater part of his life the things he promised to do and did were not such as free men could approve. He set out in life with a genuine detestation of liberal principles and of anything that suggested popular revolution. William of Prussia is certainly not a man of intellect or broad intelligence or flexibility of mind. He would be in private life a respectable, steady, rather dull sort of man, honest as the sun, just as likely to go wrong as right in his opinions, perhaps indeed a shade more likely to go wrong than right, and sure to be doggedly obstinate in any opinion which he conceived to be founded on a principle. Horror of revolution was naturally his earliest public sentiment. He was one of the princes who entered Paris in 1815 with the allied sovereigns when they came to stamp out Bonapartism; and he seemed to have gone on to late manhood with the conviction that the mission of honest kings was to prevent popular agitation from threatening the divine right of the throne. Naturally enough, a man of such a character, whose chief merits were steadfastness and honesty, was much disgusted by the vacillation, the weakness, the half-unconscious deceitfulness of his brother, the late Frederick William. Poor Frederick William! well-meaning, ill-doing dreamer, "wind-changing" as Warwick, a sort of René of Anjou placed in a responsible position and cast into a stormy age. What blighted hopes and bloody streets were justly laid to his charge—to the charge of him who asked nothing better than to be able to oblige everybody and make all his people happy! Frederick William loved poetry and poets in a feeble, dilettante sort of way. He liked, one might say, to be thought to like the Muses and the Graces. He used to insist upon Tieck the poet reading aloud his new compositions to the royal circle of evenings; and when the bard began to read the King would immediately fall asleep, and nod until he nodded himself into wakefulness again; and then he would start up and say, "Bravo, Tieck! Delightful, Tieck! Go on reading, Tieck!" and then to sleep again. He liked in this sort of fashion the poetic and sentimental aspects of revolution, and he dandled popular movements on his royal knee until they became too demonstrative and frightened him, and then he shook them off and shrieked for the aid of his strong-nerved brother. One day Frederick William would be all for popular government and representative monarchy, and what not; the next day he became alarmed and receded, and was eager to crush the hopes he had himself awakened. He was always breaking his word to his people and his country, and yet he was not personally an untruthful man like English Charles the First. In private life he would have been amiable, respectable, gently æsthetical and sentimental; placed in a position of responsibility amid the seething passions and conflicting political currents of 1848, he proved himself a very dastard and caitiff. Germany could hardly have had upon the throne of Prussia a worse man for such a crisis. He was unlucky in every way; for his vacillation drew on him the repute of hypocrisy, and his whimsical excitable manners procured for him the reproach of intemperance. A sincerely pious man in his way, he was almost universally set down as a hypocrite; a sober man who only drank wine medicinally on the order of his physicians, he was favored throughout Europe with the nickname of "King Clicquot." His utter imbecility before and after the massacre of those whom he called his "beloved Berliners," made him more detestable to Berlin than was his blunt and stern brother, the present King, who gave with his own lips the orders which opened fire on the population. A more unkingly figure than that of poor, weak, well-intentioned, sentimental, lachrymose Frederick William, never in our days at least has been seen under a royal canopy.

It was but natural that such a character or no-character as this should disgust his brother and successor, the present King. Frederick William, as everybody knows, had no son to succeed him. The stout-hearted William would have liked his brother and sovereign to be one thing or the other; a despot of course he would have preferred, but he desired consistency and steadfastness on whatever side. William, it must be owned, was for many years a downright stupid, despotic old feudalist. At one of his brother's councils he flung his sword upon the table and vowed that he would rather appeal to that weapon than consent to rule over a people who dared to claim the right of voting their own taxes. He appears to have had the sincere stupid faith that Heaven directly tells or teaches kings how to rule, and that a king fails in his religious duty who takes counsel of aught save his own convictions. Perhaps a good many people in lowlier life are like William of Prussia in this respect. He certainly was not the only person in our time who habitually accepted his own likings and dislikings as the appointed ordinances of Heaven. In my own circle of acquaintance I think I have known such individuals.

Thus William of Prussia strode through life sword in hand menacing and, where he could, suppressing popular movement. Yet he was saved from utter detestation by the admitted integrity of his character—a virtue so dear to Germans, that for its sake they will pardon harshness and sometimes even stupidity. People disliked or dreaded him, but they despised his brother. There was a certain simplicity, too, always seen in William's mode of living which pleased the country. There was no affectation about him; he was almost as much of a plain, unpretending soldier as General Grant himself. Since he became King, anybody passing along the famous Unter den Linden might see the white-haired, simple old man writing or reading at the window of his palace. He was in this respect a sort of military Louis Philippe; a Louis Philippe with a strong purpose and without any craft. Therefore, when the death of his brother in 1861 called him to the throne, he found a people anxious to give him credit for every good quality and good purpose, willing to forget the past and look hopefully into the coming time. They only smiled at his renewal of the coronation ceremonies at Königsberg, believing that the old soldier thought there was something of a religious principle somehow mixed up in them, and that it was the imaginary piety, not the substantial pomp, which commended to his mind so gorgeous and costly an anachronism. After the coronation ceremonies, however, came back the old unpopularity. The King, people said, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing since he was Prince of Prussia. Every act he did after his accession to the crown seemed only more and more to confirm this impression. It was, I think, about this time that the celebrated "Diary" of Varnhagen von Ense was published by the niece of the deceased diplomatist; a diary full in itself of the most piquant interest, but made yet more piquant and interesting by the bitter and foolish persecution with which the King's officials endeavored to suppress the work and punish its publishers. I have not read or even seen the book for years, but the impression it made on me is almost as distinct just now as it was when I laid down the last of its many and vivacious volumes.

Varnhagen von Ense was a bitter creature, and the pen with which he wrote his diary seems to have been dipped in gall of special acridity. The diary goes over many years of Berlin court life, and the present King of Prussia is one of its central figures. The author does not seem to have had much respect for anybody; and King William was evidently an object of his particular detestation. All the doings of the days of 1848 are recorded or commented on, and the pages are interspersed with notices of the sharp ungenial things said by one royal personage of another. If the late Frederick William chose to say an ill-natured thing of Queen Victoria of England, down goes the remark in Varnhagen's pages, and it is chronicled for the perusal of all the world. We learn from the book that the present King of Prussia does not live on the most genial terms with his wife Augusta; that Augusta has rather a marked inclination towards Liberalism, and would find nothing more pleasant than a little coquetry with Revolution. Varnhagen intimates that the illustrious lady loved lions and novelties of any kind, and that at the time he writes she would have been particularly glad to make the acquaintance of Louis Blanc; and he more than hints at a decided inclination on her part to porter le pantalon—an inclination which her husband was not at all likely to gratify, consciously at least. Of the progressive wife Varnhagen speaks with no whit more respect than of the reactionary husband; and indeed he seems to look with irreverent and cynical eyes on everything royal that comes under his observation. Throughout the whole of the diary, the figure of the present King comes out consistently and distinctly. William is always the blunt, dull, wrong-headed, I might almost say pig-headed soldier-fanatic, who will do and suffer and make others do and suffer anything, in a cause which he believes to be right. With all Varnhagen von Ense's bitterness and scorn, he gives us no worse idea of King William than just this. But judging from the expression of the King's face, from his manner, and from what I have heard of him in Berlin and elsewhere, I should say there was a good deal of individual kindness and bonhomie in him for which the critic did not give him credit. I think he is, on the whole, better than Varnhagen von Ense chose to paint him or see him.

From Alexander Humboldt, as well as from Varnhagen von Ense, we learn a good deal of the inner life of kings and queens and princes in Berlin. There is something almost painful in reflecting on the kind of life which Humboldt must have led among these people, whom he so cordially despised, and whom in his private chroniclings he so held up to scorn. The great philosopher assuredly had a huge treasure of hatred locked up in his heart. He detested and scorned these royal personages, who so blandly patronized him, or were sometimes so rough in their condescending familiarity. Nothing takes the gilt off the life of courts so much as a perusal of what Humboldt has written about it. One hardly cares to think of so great, and on the whole so noble a man, living a life of what seems so like perpetual dissimulation; of his enduring these royal dullards and pert princesses, and doubtless seeming profoundly reverential, and then going home of nights to put down on paper his record of their vulgarity, and selfishness, and impertinence. Sometimes Humboldt was not able to contain himself within the limits of court politeness. The late King of Hanover (father of the now dethroned King George) was a rough brutal trooper, who had made himself odious in England as the Duke of Cumberland, and was accused by popular rumors of the darkest crimes—unjustly accused certainly, in the case where he was charged with the murder of his valet. The Duke did not make a very bad sort of King, as kings then went; but he retained all his roughness and coarseness of manner. He once accosted Humboldt in the palace of the late King of Prussia, and in his pleasant graceful way asked why it was that the Prussian court was always full of philosophers and loose women—describing the latter class of visitors by a very direct and expressive word. "Perhaps," replied Humboldt blandly, "the King invites the philosophers to meet me, and the other persons to please your Majesty!" Humboldt seems to have had little liking for any of the illustrious personages he met under the roof of the King of Prussia. A brief record he made of a conversation with the late Prince Albert (for whom he expressed a great contempt) went far when it was published to render the husband of Queen Victoria more unpopular and even detested in Ireland than another George the Fourth would have been. The Irish people will probably never forget that, according to the statement of Humboldt, the Prince spoke contemptuously of Irish national aspirations, declared he had no sympathy with the Irish, and that they were as restless, idle, and unmanageable as the Poles—a pretty speech, the philosopher remarks, to be made by the husband of the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Some attempt was made when this record of Humboldt's came to light to dispute the truth of it; but Humboldt was certainly not a liar—and anyhow the Irish people believed the story and it did no little mischief; and Humboldt in his grave might have had the consolation of knowing that he had injured one prince at least.

What we learn of the King of Prussia through Humboldt is to the same effect as the teaching of Varnhagen's cynical spirit; and I think, if these keen irreverent critics did not do him wrong, his Majesty must have softened and improved with the responsibilities of royalty. In many respects one might be inclined to compare him with the English George the Third. Both were indeed dull, decent, and fanatical. But there are some wide differences. George the Third was obstinate in the worst sense; his was the obstinacy of a stupid, self-conceited man who believes himself wise and right in everything. Now, I fancy the King of Prussia is only obstinate in what he conceives, rightly or wrongly, to be questions of duty and of principle; and that there are many subjects, political and otherwise, of which he does not believe himself to be the most competent judge, and which therefore he is quite willing to leave to the consideration and decision of others. For instance, it was made evident that in the beginning of the transactions which were followed by (although they cannot be said to have caused) the present war, the King more than once expressed himself willing to do certain things, of which, however, Count von Bismarck subsequently disapproved; and the King quietly gave way. "You know better than I do; act as you think best," is, I believe, a quite common sentence on the lips of King William, when he is talking with this or that trusted minister. Then again it has been placed beyond all doubt that George the Third could be, when he thought fit, the most unabashed and unscrupulous of liars; and not even hatred itself will charge King William with any act or word of falsehood or duplicity.

Steadily did the King grow more and more unpopular after his coronation. All the old work of prosecuting newspapers and snubbing, or if possible punishing, free-spoken politicians, came into play again. The King quarrelled fiercely with his Parliament about the scheme of army reorganization. I think he was right as to the scheme, although terribly wrong-headed and high-handed in his way of forcing it down the throats of the people, and, aided by his House of Peers, he waged a sort of war upon the nation's representatives. Then first came to the front that extraordinary political figure, which before very long had cast into the shade every other in Europe, even including that of the Emperor Napoleon; that marvellous compound of audacity and craft, candor and cunning, the profound sagacity of a Richelieu, the levity of a Palmerston; imperturbably good-humored, illimitably unscrupulous; a patriot without lofty emotion of any kind, a statesman who could sometimes condescend to be a juggler; part bully, part buffoon, but always a man of supreme courage, inexhaustible resources of brain and tongue—always in short a man of genius. I need hardly add that I am speaking of the Count von Bismarck.

At the time of the Schleswig-Holstein campaign, there was probably no public man in Europe so generally unpopular as the King of Prussia, except perhaps his Minister, the Count von Bismarck. In England it was something like an article of faith to believe that the King was a bloodthirsty old tyrant, his Prime Minister a combination of Strafford and Sejanus, and his subjects generally a set of beer-bemuddled and servile blockheads. The dislike felt toward the King was extended to the members of his family, and the popular conviction in England was that the Princess Victoria, wife of the King's son, had a dull coarse drunkard for a husband. It is perfectly wonderful how soon an absurdly erroneous idea, if there is anything about it which jumps with the popular humor, takes hold of the public mind of England. The English people regarded the Prussians with utter detestation and contempt. Not only that, but they regarded it as quite a possible and even likely thing that poor brave little Denmark, with a population hardly larger than that of the city of New York, could hold her own, alone, against the combined forces of Austria and Prussia. One might have thought that there never was a Frederick the Great or an Archduke Charles; that the only part ever played in history by Germans was that of impotent braggarts and stupid cowards. When there seemed some prospect of England's drawing the sword for Denmark, "Punch" published a cartoon which was very popular and successful. It represented an English sailor and soldier of the conventional dramatic style, looking with utter contempt at two awkward shambling boobies with long hair and huge meerschaums—one booby supposed to represent Prussia, the other Austria; and Jack Tar says to his friend the redcoat: "They can't expect us to fight fellows like those, but we'll kick them, of course, with pleasure." This so fairly represented the average public opinion of England that there was positively some surprise felt in London when it was found that the Prussians really could fight at all. Towards the Austrians there was nothing like the same ill-feeling; and when Bismarck's war against Austria (I cannot better describe it) broke out shortly after, the sympathy of England went almost unanimously with the enemy of Prussia. Ninety-nine men out of every hundred firmly believed that Austria would clutch Italy with one hand and Prussia with the other, and easily choke the life out of both. About the merits of the quarrel nobody in England outside the range of a very few politicians and journalists troubled himself at all. It was settled that Austria had somehow come to represent the cause of human freedom and progress; that the King of Prussia was a stupid and brutal old trooper, hurried to his ruin by the evil counsels of a drunken Mephistopheles; and that the Austrian forces would simply walk over the Prussians into Berlin. There was but one newspaper in London (and it has since died) which ventured to suggest, first, that perhaps the Prussians had the right side of the quarrel, and next, that perhaps they would have the better in the fight.

With the success of Prussia at Sadowa ended King William's personal unpopularity in Europe. Those who were prepared to take anything like a rational view of the situation began to see that there must be some manner of great cause behind such risks, sacrifices, and success. Those who disliked Prussia more than ever, as many in France did, were disposed to put the King out of their consideration altogether, and to turn their detestation wholly on the King's Minister. In fact, Bismarck so entirely eclipsed or occulted the King, that the latter may be said to have disappeared from the horizon of European politics. His good qualities or bad qualities no longer counted for aught in the estimation of foreigners. Bismarck was everything, the King was nothing. Now I wish the readers of The Galaxy not to take this view of the matter. In everything which has been done by Prussia since his accession to the throne, King William has counted for something. His stern uncompromising truthfulness, seen as clearly in the despatches he sent from recent battle-fields as in any other deeds of his life, has always counted for much. So too has his narrow-minded dread of anything which he believes to savor of the revolution. So has his thorough and devoted Germanism. I am convinced that it would have been far more easy of late to induce Bismarck to make compromises with seemingly powerful enemies at the expense of German soil, than it would have been to persuade Bismarck's master to consent to such proposals. The King's is far more of a typical German character (except for its lack of intellect) than that of Bismarck, in whom there is so much of French audacity as well as of French humor. On the other hand, I would ask my readers not to rush into wild admiration of the King of Prussia, or to suppose that liberty owes him personally any direct thanks. King William's subjects know too well that they have little to thank him for on that score. Strange as the comparison may seem at first, it is not less true that the enthusiasm now felt by Germans for the King is derived from just the same source as the early enthusiasm of Frenchmen for the first Napoleon. In each man his people see the champion who has repelled the aggression of the insolent foreigner, and has been strong enough to pursue the foreigner into his own home and there chastise him for his aggression. The blind stupidity of Austria and the crimes of Bonapartism have made King William a patriot King. When Thiers wittily and bitterly said that the Second Empire had made two great statesmen, Cavour and Bismarck, he might have said with still closer accuracy that it had made one great sovereign, William of Prussia. Never man attained such a position as that lately won by King William with less of original "outfit" to qualify him for the place. Five or six years ago the King of Prussia was as much disliked and distrusted by his own subjects as ever the Emperor of the French was by the followers of the Left. Look back to the famous days when "Bockum-Dolff's hat" seemed likely to become a symbol of civil revolution in Germany. Look back to the time when the King's own son and heir apparent, the warrior Crown Prince who since has flamed across so many a field of blood, felt called upon to make formal protest in a public speech against the illiberal, repressive, and despotic policy of his father! Think of these things, and say whether any change could be more surprising than that which has converted King William into the typical champion and patriot of Germany; and when you seek the explanation of the change, you will simply find that the worst enemies of Prussia have been unwittingly the kindest friends and the best patrons of Prussia's honest and despotic old sovereign.

I think the King of Prussia's subjects were not wrong when they disliked and dreaded him, and I also think they are now not wrong when they trust and applaud him. It has been his great good fortune to reign during a period when the foreign policy of the State was of infinitely greater importance than its domestic management. It became the business of the King of Prussia to help his country to assert and to maintain a national existence. Nothing better was needed in the sovereign for this purpose than the qualities of a military dictator, and the King, in this case, was saved all trouble of thinking and planning. He had but to accept and agree to a certain line of policy—a certain set of national principles—and to put his foot down on these and see that they were carried through. For this object the really manly and sturdy nature of the King proved admirably adapted. He upheld manfully and firmly the standard of the nation. His defective qualities were rendered inactive, and had indeed no occasion or chance to display themselves, while all that was good of him came into full activity and bold relief. But I do not believe that the character of the King in any wise changed. He was a dull, honest, fanatical martinet when he turned his cannon against German liberals in 1848; he was a dull, honest, fanatical martinet when he unfurled the flag of Prussia against the Austrians in 1866 and against the French in 1870. The brave old man is only happy when doing what he thinks right; but he wants alike the intellect and the susceptibilities which enable people to distinguish right from wrong, despotism from justice, necessary firmness from stolid obstinacy. But for the wars and the great national issues which rose to claim instant decision, King William would have gone on dissolving Parliaments and punishing newspapers, levying taxes without the consent of representatives, and making the police-officer the master of Berlin. The vigor which was so popular when employed in resisting the French, would assuredly otherwise have found occupation in repressing the Prussians. I see nothing to admire in King William but his courage and his honesty. People who know him personally speak delightedly of his sweet and genial manners in private life; and I have observed that, like many another old moustache, he has the art of making himself highly popular with the ladies. There is a celebrated little prima donna as well known in London as in Berlin, who can only speak of the bluff monarch as der süsse König—"the sweet King." Indeed, there are not wanting people who hint that Queen Augusta is not always quite pleased at the manner in which the venerable soldier makes himself agreeable to dames and demoiselles. Certainly the ladies seem to be generally very enthusiastic about his Majesty when they come into acquaintanceship with him, and to the prima donna I have mentioned his kindness and courtesy have been only such as are well worthy of a gentleman and of a king. Still we all know that it does not take a great effort on the part of a sovereign to make people, especially women, think him very delightful. I do not, therefore, make much account of King William's courtesy and bonhomie in estimating his character. For all the service he has done to Germany let him have full thanks; but I cannot bring myself to any warmth of personal admiration for him. It is indeed hard to look at him without feeling for the moment some sentiment of genuine respect. The fine head and face, with its noble outlines and its frank pleasant smile, the stately, dignified form, which some seventy-five years have neither bowed nor enfeebled, make the King look like some splendid old paladin of the court of Charlemagne. He is, indeed, despite his years, the finest physical specimen of a sovereign Europe just now can show. Compare him with the Emperor Napoleon, so many years his junior—compare his soldierly presence, his manly bearing, his clear frank eyes, his simple and sincere expression, with the prematurely wasted and crippled frame, the face blotched and haggard, the lack-lustre eyes which seem always striving to avoid direct encounter with any other glance, the shambling gait, the sinister look of the nephew of the great Bonaparte, and you will say that the Prussians have at least had from the beginning of their antagonism an immense advantage over their rivals in the figurehead which their State was enabled to exhibit. But I cannot make a hero out of stout King William, although he has bravery enough of the common, military kind, to suit any of the heroes of the "Nibelungen Lied." He never would, if he could, render any service to liberty; he cannot understand the elements and first principles of popular freedom; to him the people is always, as a child, to be kept in leading strings and guided, and, if at all boisterous or naughty, smartly birched and put in a dark corner. There is nothing cruel about King William; that is to say, he would not willingly hurt any human creature, and is, indeed, rather kind-hearted and humane than otherwise. He is as utterly incapable of the mean spites and shabby cruelties of the great Frederick, whose statue stands so near his palace, as he is incapable of the savage brutalities and indecencies of Frederick's father. He is, in fact, simply a dull old disciplinarian, saturated through and through with the traditions of the feudal party of Germany, his highest merit being the fact that he keeps his word—that he is "a still strong man" who "cannot lie;" his noblest fortune being the happy chance which called on him to lead his country's battles, instead of leaving him free to contend against, and perhaps for the time to crush, his country's aspirations after domestic freedom. Kind Heaven has allowed him to become the champion and the representative of German unity—that unity which is Germany's immediate and supreme need, calling for the postponement of every other claim and desire; and this part he has played like a man, a soldier, and a king. But one can hardly be expected to forget all the past, to forget what Humboldt and Varnhagen von Ense wrote, what Jacobi and Waldeck spoke, what King William did in 1848, and what he said in 1861; and unless we forget all this and a great deal more to the same effect, we can hardly help acknowledging that but for the fortunate conditions which allowed him to prove himself the best friend of German unity, he would probably have proved himself the worst enemy of German liberty.

VICTOR EMANUEL, KING OF ITALY.

I have before me just now a little silver coin picked up in Savoy very soon after Italy had become a kingdom, and Savoy had ceased to be part of it. That was in truth the only thing that made the coin in any way specially interesting—the fact that it happened to be in chance circulation through Savoy when Savoy had no longer any claim to it. So, for that little scrap of melancholy interest I have since kept the coin in my purse, and it has made many journeys with me in Europe and America; and I suppose I can never be utterly destitute while it remains in my possession. Now, the head which is displayed upon that coin is not of kingly mould. The mint has flattered its royal master much less than is usual with such portrait painters. An English silver or gold coin of this year's mintage will still represent Her Majesty Queen Victoria as a beautiful young woman of twenty, with features worthy of a Greek statue and a bust shapely enough for Dryden's Iphigenia. But the coin of King Victor Emanuel has little flattery in it. There is the coarse, bulldog cast of face; there are the heavy eye-brows, the unshapely nose, the hideous moustache, the receding forehead, and all the other beauties and graces of the "bloat King's" countenance. Certainly the face on the coin is not bloated enough, and there is too little animalism displayed in the back of the head, to do justice to the first King of Italy. Moreover, the coin gives somehow the idea of a small man, and the King of Italy finds it not easy to get a horse strong enough to bear the load of Antony. But for a coin it is a wonderfully honest and truthful piece of work, quite a model to other mints, and it gave when it was issued as fair an idea as a little piece of silver could well give of the head and face of Europe's most ill-favored sovereign.

What a chance Victor Emanuel had of being a hero of romance! No king perhaps ever had such a chance before, and missed it so persistently. Europe seemed at one time determined, whether he would or no, to make a hero, a knight, a preux chevalier, out of the son of Charles Albert. Not Charles Edward, the brilliant, unfortunate Stuart himself, not Gustavus Adolphus even seemed to have been surrounded by such a romantic rainbow of romance and of hope. When, after the crowning disaster of Novara, Victor Emanuel's weak, vacillating, unlucky, and not very trustworthy father abdicated the crown of Sardinia in favor of his son, the latter seemed in the eyes of liberal Europe to represent not merely the hopes of all true Italians, but the best hopes of liberty and progress all over the world. There was even then a vague idea afloat through Europe—although Europe did not know how Cavour had already accepted the idea as a principle of action—that with her tremendous defeats Piedmont had won the right to hoist the standard of one Italy. This then was the cause which the young King was taken to represent. He had been baptized in blood to that cause. He represented Italy united and free—free from Austrian and Pope, from political and religious despotism. He was at all events no carpet knight. He had fought bravely on more than one fearful field of battle; he had looked on death closely and undismayed; he had been wounded in fighting for Italy against the Austrian. It was said of the young sovereign—who was only Duke of Savoy then—that on the night of Novara, when all was over save retreat and humiliation, he shook his dripping sword at the ranks of the conquering Austrians and exclaimed, "Italy shall make herself for all that!" Probably the story is substantially true, although Victor Emanuel may perhaps have used stronger expressions if he spoke at all; for no one ever doubted his courage and coolness in the hour of danger. But true or not, the anecdote exactly illustrated the light in which the world was prepared to regard the young sovereign of Sardinia—as the hope of Italy and of freedom, the representative of a defeat which he was determined and destined to convert into a victory.

Not many years after this, and while the lustre of his misfortunes and the brilliancy of his hopes still surrounded him, King Victor Emanuel visited England. He was welcomed everywhere with a cordiality of personal interest and admiration not often accorded by any people to a foreign king. Decidedly it was a hard thing to look at him and yet retain the thought of a hero of romance. He was not then nearly so bloated and burly as he is now; and he was at least some dozen or fourteen years younger. But even then how marvellously ill-favored he was; how rough and coarse-looking; how unattractive in manner; how brusque and uncouth in gesture and bearing; how liable to fits of an apparently stolid silence; how utterly devoid of grace and dignity! His huge straw-colored moustache, projecting about half a foot on each side of his face, was as unsightly a piece of manly decoration as ever royal countenance displayed. Yet the public tried to forget all those external defects and still regard him as a hero of romance somehow, anyhow. So fully was he believed to be a representative of civil and religious freedom in Italy, that one English religious society of some kind—I forget which it was—actually went the length of presenting an address to him, in which they flourished about the errors of Popery as freely as if they were appealing to an Oliver Cromwell or Frederick the Great. Cavour gave them very neatly and tersely the snub that their ignorance and presumption so well deserved; and their address did not obtain an honored place among Victor Emanuel's memorials of his visit to England.

He was very hospitably entertained by Queen Victoria, who is said to have suffered agonies of martyrdom from her guest's everlasting cigar—the good soul detests tobacco as much as King James himself did—and even more from his occasional outbursts of roystering compliment and canteen love-making toward the ladies of her staid and modest court. One of the household edicts, I think, of Queen Elizabeth's court was that no gallant must "toy with the maids, under pain of fourpence." Poor Victor Emanuel's slender purse would have had to bear a good many deductions of fourpence, people used to hint, if this penal decree had prevailed in his time at Windsor or Osborne. But Queen Victoria was very patient and friendly. Cavour has left some pleasant descriptions of her easy, unaffected friendliness toward himself. Guizot, it will be remembered, has described her as the stiffest of the stiff, freezing into petrifaction a whole silent circle by her invincible coldness and formality. I cannot pretend to reconcile the conflicting accounts of these two eminent visitors, but certainly Cavour has drawn some animated and very attractive pictures of Queen Victoria's almost girlish good-humor and winning familiarity. However that may be, the whole heart of free England warmed to Victor Emanuel, and was ready to dub him in advance the chosen knight of liberty, the St. George of Italy, before whose resistless sword every dragon of despotism and superstition was to grovel in the dust.

So the King went his way, and the next thing the world heard of him was that he was in league with Louis Napoleon against the Austrian, and that the child his daughter was to be married to the obese and elderly Prince Napoleon, whose eccentric genius, varied accomplishments, and thrilling eloquence were then unrecognized and unknown. Then came the triumphs of Magenta and Solferino, and it was made plain once more to the world that Victor Emanuel had the courage of a true soldier. He actually took a personal share of the fighting when the Italians were in action. He did not sit on his horse, far away from the bullets, like his imperial ally, and direct the movements of the army by muttering "C'est bien," when an aide-de-camp galloped up to announce to him as a piece of solemn farce that this or that general had already accomplished this or that operation. No; Victor Emanuel took his share of the fighting like a king. In the affair of San Martino he led an attack himself, and encouraged his soldiers by bellowing in stentorian voice quite a clever joke for a king, just as he was about to charge. A crack regiment of French Zouaves (the French Zouaves were soldiers in those days) was so delighted with the Sardinian King that it elected him a corporal of the regiment on the field of battle—a quite wonderful piece of compliment from a Zouave regiment to a foreign sovereign. Not so long before had Lamoricière declared that "Italians don't fight," and here was a crack Zouave regiment enthusiastic about the fighting capacity of an Italian King. The irony of fate, it will be remembered, decreed soon after that Lamoricière should himself lay down his arms before an Italian general and Italian soldiers.

Out of that war, then, Victor Emanuel emerged still a hero. But the world soon began to think that he was only a hero in the field. The sale of Savoy and Nice much shocked the public sentiment of Europe. The house of Savoy, as an English orator observed, had sprung from the womb of the mountains which the unworthy heir of Savoy sold to a stranger. As the world had given to Victor Emanuel the credit of virtues which he never possessed, it was now ready to lay on him all the burden of deeds which were not his. Whether the cession of Savoy was right or wrong, Victor Emanuel was not to blame, under the hard circumstances, for withdrawing, according to the first Napoleon's phrase, "sous les draps d'un roi constitutionnel," and allowing his ministers to do the best they could. In fact, the thing was a necessity of the situation. Napoleon the Third had to make the demand to satisfy his own people, who never quite "seemed to see" the war for Italy. The Sardinian ministers had to yield to the demand to satisfy Napoleon the Third. Had Prussia been a raw, weak power in September, 1866, she must have ceded some territory to France. Sardinia or Italy was raw and weak in 1860, and had no choice but to submit. There were two things to be said for the bargain. First, Italy got good value for it. Next, the Savoyards and Nizzards never were good Italians. They rather piqued themselves on not being Italians. The Savoy delegates would not speak Italian in the old Turin Parliament. The ministers had to answer their French "interpellations" in French.

Still all this business did an immense harm to the reputation of King Victor Emanuel. He had acted like a quiet, sensible man—not in any way like a hero of romance, and Europe desired to see in him a hero of romance. Then he did not show himself, people said, very grateful to Garibaldi when the latter opened the way for the expulsion of the Bourbons from Naples, and did so much to crown Victor Emanuel King of Italy. Now I am a warm admirer of Garibaldi. I think his very weaknesses are noble and heroic. There is carefully preserved among the best household treasures of my family a vine leaf which Garibaldi once plucked and gave me as a souvenir for my wife. But I confess I should not like to be king of a new monarchy partly made by Garibaldi and with Garibaldi for a subject. The whole policy of Garibaldi proceeded on the gallant and generous assumption that Italy alone ought to be able to conquer all her enemies. We have since seen how little Italy availed against a mere fragment of the military power of Austria—that power which Prussia crushed like a nutshell. Events, I think, have vindicated the slower and less assuming policy of Victor Emanuel, or, I should say, the policy which Victor Emanuel consented to adopt at the bidding of Cavour.

But all the same the prestige of Victor Emanuel was gone. Then Europe began to look at the man coolly, and estimate him without glamour and without romance. Then it began to listen to the very many stories against him which his enemies could tell. Alas! these stories were not all untrue. Of course there were grotesque and hideous exaggerations. There are in Europe some three or four personages of the highest rank whom scandal delights to assail, and of whom it tells stories which common sense and common feeling alike compel us to reject. It would be wholly impossible even to hint at some of the charges which scandal in Europe persistently heaped on Victor Emanuel, the Emperor Napoleon III., Prince Napoleon, and the reigning King of the Netherlands. If one-half the stories told of these four men were true, then Europe would hold at present four personages of the highest rank who might have tutored Caligula in the arts of recondite debauchery, and have looked down on Alexander the Sixth as a prudish milksop. But I think no reasonable person will have much difficulty in sifting the probable truth out of the monstrous exaggerations. No one can doubt that Victor Emanuel is a man of gross habits and tastes, and is, or was, addicted to coarse and ignoble immoralities. "The manners of a mosstrooper and the morality of a he goat," was the description which my friend John Francis Maguire, the distinguished Roman Catholic member of the House of Commons, gave, in one of his Parliamentary speeches, of King Victor Emanuel. This was strong language, and it was the language of a prejudiced though honest political and religious partisan; but it was not, all things considered, a very bad description. Moreover, it was mildness, it was compliment—nay, it was base flattery—when compared with the hideous accusations publicly and distinctly made against Victor Emanuel by one of Garibaldi's sons, not to speak of other accusers, and privately whispered by slanderous gossip all over Europe. One peculiarity about Victor Emanuel worthy of notice is that he has no luxury in his tastes. He is, I believe, abstemious in eating and drinking, caring only for the homeliest fare. He has sat many times at the head of a grand state banquet, where the rarest viands, the most superb wines were abundant, and never removed the napkin from his plate, never tasted a morsel or emptied a glass. He had had his plain fare at an earlier hour, and cared nothing for the triumphs of cookery or the choicest products of the vine. He has thus sat, in good-humored silence, his hand leaning on the hilt of his sword, through a long, long banquet of seemingly endless courses, which to him was a pageant, a ceremonial duty, and nothing more. He delights in chamois-hunting—in hunting of almost any kind—in horses, in dogs, and in women of a certain coarse and gross description. There is nothing of the Richelieu or Lauzun, or even the Francis the First, about the dull, I had almost said harmless, immoralities of the King of Italy. Men in private and public station have done far greater harm, caused far more misery than ever he did, and yet escaped almost unwhipt of justice. The man has (or had, for people say he is reformed now) the coarse, easily-gratified tastes of a sailor turned ashore after a long cruise—and such tastes are not kingly; and that is about all that one feels fairly warranted in saying either to condemn or to palliate the vices of Victor Emanuel. He absolutely wants all element of greatness. He is not even a great soldier. He has boisterous animal courage, and finds the same excitement in leading a charge as in hunting the chamois. But he has nothing even of the very moderate degree of military capacity possessed by a dashing sabreur like Murat. It seems beyond doubt that it was the infatuation he displayed in attempting the personal direction of affairs which led to the breakdown at Custozza. The man is, in fact, like one of the rough jagers described in Schiller's "Wallenstein's Camp"—just this, and nothing more. When Garibaldi was in the zenith of his fortunes and fame in 1860, Victor Emanuel declared privately to a friend that the height of his ambition would be to follow the gallant guerilla leader as a mere soldier in the field. Certainly, when the two men entered Naples together, every one must have felt that their places ought to have been reversed. How like a king, an ideal king—a king of poetry and painting and romance—looked Garibaldi in the superb serenity of his untaught grace and sweetness and majesty. How rude, uncouth, clownish, even vulgar, looked the big, brawny, ungainly trooper whom people had to salute as King. When Garibaldi went to visit the hospitals where the wounded of the short struggle were lying, how womanlike he was in his sympathetic tenderness; how light and noiseless was his step; how gentle his every gesture; what a sweet word of genial compassion or encouragement he had for every sufferer. The burly King strode and clattered along like a dragoon swaggering through the crowd at a country fair. Not that Victor Emanuel wanted good nature, but that his rude physique had so little in it of the sympathetic or the tender.

Was there ever known such a whimsical, harmless, odd saturnalia as Naples presented during those extraordinary days? I am thinking now chiefly of the men who, mostly uncalled-for, "rallied round" the Revolution, and came from all manner of holes and corners to offer their services to Garibaldi, and to exhibit themselves in the capacity of freedom's friends, soldiers, and scholars. Hardly a hero, or crackbrain, or rantipole in Europe, one would think, but must have been then on exhibition somewhere in Naples. Father Gavazzi harangued from one position; Alexandre Dumas, accompanied by his faithful "Admiral Emile," directed affairs from another. Edwin James, then a British criminal lawyer and popular member of Parliament, was to be seen tearing round in a sort of semi-military costume, with pistols stuck in his belt. The worn, thoughtful, melancholy face of Mazzini was, for a short time at least, to be seen in juxtaposition with the cockney visage of an ambitious and restless common councilman from the city of London, who has lived all his life since on the glorious memories and honors of that good time. The House of Lords, the House of Commons, and the Guildhall of London were lavishly represented there. Men like Türr, the dashing Hungarian and Mieroslawski, the "Red" leader of Polish revolution—men to whom battle and danger were as the breath of their nostrils—were buttonholed and advised by heavy British vestrymen and pert Parisian journalists. Hardly any man or woman entered Naples from a foreign country at that astonishing time who did not believe that he or she had some special counsel to give, which Victor Emanuel or Garibaldi or some one of their immediate staff was bound to listen to and accept. Woman's Rights were pretty well represented in that pellmell. There was a Countess something or other—French, they said—who wore short petticoats and trousers, had silver-mounted pistols in her belt and silver spurs on her heels, and was generally believed to have done wonders in "the field"—what field no one would stop to ask. There was Jessie Mario White, modest, pleasant, fair-haired woman, wife of a gallant gentleman and soldier—Jessie White, who made no exhibition of herself, but did then and since faithful and valuable work for Italian wounded, such as Italy ought not soon to forget. There was Mrs. Chambers—Mrs. Colonel Chambers—the Mrs. "Putney Giles" of Disraeli's "Lothair"—very prominent everywhere, sounding the special eulogies of Garibaldi with tireless tongue, and utterly overshadowing her quiet husband, who (the husband I mean) afterwards stood by Garibaldi's side at Aspromonte. Exeter Hall had sent out powerful delegations, in the firm faith apparently that Garibaldi would at their request order Naples forthwith to break up its shrines and images of saints and become Protestant; and that Naples would at once obey. Never was such a time of dreams and madness and fussiness, of splendid aspirations and silly self-seeking vanity, of chivalry and daring, and true wisdom and nonsense. It was a time naturally of many disappointments; and one disappointment to almost everybody was His Majesty King Victor Emanuel. His Majesty seemed at least not much to care about the whole affair from the beginning. He went through it as if he didn't quite understand what it was all about, and didn't think it worth the trouble of trying. People who saw him at that splendid moment when, the forces of Garibaldi joining with the regular Sardinian troops after all had been won, Garibaldi and the King met for the first time in that crisis, and the soldier hailed the sovereign as "King of Italy!"—people who saw and studied that picturesque historic meeting have told me that there was no more emotion of any kind on Victor Emanuel's face than if he were receiving a formal address from the mayor of a country town. "I thank you," were his only words of reply; and I am assured that it was not "I thank you," with emphasis on the last word to indicate that the King acknowledged how much he owed to his great soldier; but simply "I thank you," as he might have thanked a groom who opened a stable door for him. Perhaps the very depth and grandeur of the King's emotions rendered him incapable of finding any expression for them. Let us hope so. But I have had the positive assurances of some who saw the scene, that if any such emotions were felt the royal countenance concealed them as completely as though they never had been.

In truth, I presume that the whole thing really was a terrible bore to the royal Rawdon Crawley, who found himself compelled by cursed spite to play the part of a patriot king. The Pope, the ultramontane bishops, and the ultramontane press have always been ringing fierce changes on the inordinate and wicked ambition of Victor Emanuel. I am convinced the poor man has no more ambition than his horse. If he could have chalked out his own career for himself, he would probably have asked nothing better than to be allowed to devote his life to chamois-hunting, with a hunter's homely fare, and the companionship of a few friends (some fat ladies among the number) with whom he could talk and make jokes in the patois of Piedmont. This, and perhaps a battle-field and a dashing charge every now and then, would probably have realized his dreams of the summum bonum. But some implacable destiny, embodied in the form of a Cavour or a Garibaldi, was always driving on the stout King and bidding him get up and attempt great things—be a patriot and a hero. Fancy Rawdon Crawley impelled, or rather compelled by the inexorable command of Becky his wife, to go forth in quest of the Holy Grail, and one may perhaps be able to guess what Victor Emanuel's perplexity and reluctance were when he was bidden to set out for the accomplishment of the regeneration of Italy. "Honor to those to whom honor is due; honor to old Mother Baubo," says some one in "Faust." Honor on that principle, then, to King Victor Emanuel. He did get up and go forth and undertake to bear his part in the adventure. And here seriously let me speak of the one high merit of Victor Emanuel's career. He is not a hero; he is not a statesman or even a politician; he is not a patriot in any grand, exalted sense. He would like to be idle, and perhaps to be despotic. But he has proved that he understands the true responsibilities and duties of a constitutional King better than many sovereigns of higher intellect and better character. He always did go, or at least endeavor to go, where the promptings of his ministers, the commands of his one imperious minister, or the voice of the country directed. There must be a great struggle in the mind of Victor Emanuel between his duty as a king and his duty as a Roman Catholic, when he enters into antagonism with the Pope. Beyond doubt Victor Emanuel is a superstitious Catholic. Of late years his constitution has once or twice threatened to give way, and he is probably all the more anxious to be reconciled with the Church. Perhaps he would be glad enough to lay down the load of royalty altogether and become again an accepted and devoted Catholic, and hunt his chamois with a quieted conscience. But still, impelled by what must be some sort of patriotism and sense of duty, he accepts his uncongenial part of constitutional King, and strives to do all that the voice of his people demands. It is probable that at no time was the King personally much attached to his illustrious minister Cavour. The genius and soul of Cavour were too oppressively imperial, high-reaching, and energetic for the homely, plodding King. With all his external levity Count Cavour was terribly in earnest, and he must often have seemed a dreadful bore to his sovereign. Cavour knew himself the master, and did not always take pains to conceal his knowledge. He would sometimes adopt the most direct and vigorous language in remonstrating with the King if the latter did not act on valuable advice at the right moment. Sometimes, when things went decidedly against Cavour's wishes, the minister would take the monarch to task more roundly than even the most good-natured monarchs are likely to approve. When Napoleon the Third disappointed Cavour and all Italy by the sudden peace of Villafranca, I have heard that Cavour literally denounced Victor Emanuel for consenting to the arrangement. Count Arrivabene, an able writer, has given a very vivid and interesting description of Cavour's demeanor when he reached the Sardinian headquarters on his way to an interview with the King and learned what had been done. He was literally in a "tearing rage." He tore off his hat and dashed it down, he clenched his hands, he stamped wildly, gesticulated furiously, became red and purple, foamed at the mouth, and grew inarticulate for very passion. He believed that he and Italy were sold—as indeed they were; and it was while this temper was yet on him that he went to see the King, and denounced him, as I have said. Now this sort of thing certainly could not have been agreeable to Victor Emanuel; and yet he patiently accepted Cavour as a kind of glorious necessity. He never sought, as many another king in such duresse would have done, to weaken his minister's influence and authority by showing open sullenness and dissatisfaction. Ratazzi, with his pliable ways and his entire freedom from any wearisome earnestness or devotion to any particular cause, was naturally a far more companionable and agreeable minister for the King than the untiring and imperious Cavour. Accordingly, it was well known that Ratazzi was more of a personal favorite; but the King never seems to have acted otherwise than loyally and honestly toward Cavour. Ricasoli was all but intolerable to the King. Ricasoli was proud and stern; and he was, moreover, a somewhat rigid moralist, which Cavour hardly professed to be. The King writhed under the government of Ricasoli, and yet, despite all that was at the time whispered, he cannot, I think, be fairly accused of having done anything personally to rid himself of an obnoxious minister. Indeed, the single merit of Victor Emanuel's character, if we put aside the element of personal courage, is its rough integrity. He is a galantuomo, an honest man—in that sense, a man of his word. He gave his word to constitutional government and to Italy, and he appears to have kept the word in each case according to his lights.

But his popularity among his subjects, the interest felt in him by the world, have long been steadily on the wane. Years and years ago he ceased to retain the faintest gleam of the halo of romance that once was, despite of himself, thrown around him. His people care little or nothing for him. Why, indeed, should they care anything? The military prestige which he had won, such as it was, vanished at Custozza, and it was his evil destiny, hardly his fault, to be almost always placed in a position of antagonism to the one only Italian who since Cavour's death had an enthusiastic following in Italy. Aspromonte was a calamity for Victor Emanuel. One can hardly blame him; one can hardly see how he could have done otherwise. The greatest citizen or soldier in America or England, if he attempted to levy an army of his own, and make war from American or English territory upon a neighboring State, would surely have seen his bands dispersed and found himself arrested by order of his government; and it would never have occurred to any one to think that the government was doing a harsh, ungrateful, or improper thing. It would be the necessary, rightful execution of a disagreeable duty, and that is all. But the conditions of Garibaldi's case, like the one splendid service he had rendered, were so entirely abnormal and without precedent, the whole thing was from first to last so much more a matter of national sentiment than of political law, that national sentiment insisted on judging Garibaldi and the King in this case too, and at least a powerful, passionate minority declared Victor Emanuel an ingrate and a traitor. Mentana was almost as bad for the King as Custozza. The voice of the country, so far as one could understand its import, seemed to declare that when the King had once ordered the Italian troops to cross the frontier, he should have ordered them to go on; that if they had actually occupied Rome, France would have recognized accomplished facts; that as it was, Italy offended France and the Pope by stepping over the barrier of the convention of September, only to humiliate herself by stepping back again without having accomplished anything. Certainly the policy of the Italian Government at such a crisis was weak, miserable, even contemptible. Then indeed Italy might well have exclaimed, "Oh for one hour of Cavour!" One hour of the man of genius and courage, who, if he had moved forward, would not have darted back again! Perhaps it was unfair to hold the King responsible for the mistakes of his ministers. But when a once popular King has to be pleaded for on that sole ground, it is pretty clear that there is an end to his popularity. So with Victor Emanuel. The world began to forget him; his subjects began to despise him. Even the thrilling events that have lately taken place in Italy, the sudden crowning of the national edifice—the realization of that hope which so long appeared but a dream—which Cavour himself declared would be the most slow and difficult to realize of all Italy's hopes—even the possession of Rome hardly seems to have brought back one ray of the old popularity on the heavy head of King Victor Emanuel. Again the wonderful combination of good luck and bad—the good fortune which brought to the very door of the house of Savoy the sudden realization of its highest dreams—the misfortune which allowed that house no share in the true credit of having accomplished its destiny. What had Victor Emanuel to do with the sudden juncture of events which enabled Italy to take possession of her capital? Nothing whatever. His people have no more reason to thank him for Rome than they have to thank him for the rain or the sunshine, the olive and the vine. The King seems to have felt all this. His short visit to Rome, and the formal act of taking possession, may perhaps have been made so short because Victor Emanuel knew that he had little right to claim any honors or expect any popular enthusiasm. He entered Rome one day and went away the next. I confess, however, that I should not wonder if the visit was made so short merely because the whole thing was a bore to the honest King, and he could only make up his mind to endure a very few hours of it.

Victor Emanuel, King of United Italy, and welcomed by popular acclamation in Rome—his second son almost at the same moment proclaimed King of the Spaniards—his second daughter Queen of Portugal. How fortune seems to have delighted in honoring this house of Savoy. I only say "seems to have." I do not venture yet to regard the accession of King Amadeus to the crown of Spain as necessarily an honorable or a fortunate thing. Every one must wish the poor young prince well in such a situation; perhaps we should rather wish him well out of it. Never king assumed a crown with such ghastly omens to welcome him. Here is the King putting on his diadem; and yonder, lying dead by the hand of an assassin, is the man who gave him the diadem and made him King! But for Juan Prim there would be no Amadeus, King of the Spaniards; and for that reason Juan Prim lies dead. The young King must have needed all his hereditary courage to enable him to face calmly and bravely, as he seems to have done, so terrible a situation. Macaulay justly says that no danger is so trying to the nerves of a brave man as the danger of assassination. Men utterly reckless in battle—like "bonny Dundee" for example—have owned that the knowledge of the assassin's purpose and haunting presence was more than they could endure. The young Italian prince seems to have shown no sign of flinching. So far as anything indeed is known of him, he is favorably known to the world. He bore himself like a brave soldier at Custozza, and obtained the special commendation of the Austrian victor, the gallant old Archduke Albrecht. He married for love a lady of station decidedly inferior to that of a royal prince; the lady had the honor of being sneered at even in her honeymoon for the modest, inexpensive simplicity of her toilet, as she appeared with her young husband at one of the watering-places; he had not made himself before marriage the subject of as much scandal as used to follow and float around the bachelor reputation of his elder brother Humbert. He is believed to be honestly and manfully liberal in his views. He ought to make a good King as kings go—if the murderers of General Prim only give him the chance.

As I have mentioned the name of the man whose varied, brilliant, daring, and turbulent career has been so suddenly cut short, I may perhaps be excused for wandering a little out of the path of my subject to say that I think many of the American newspapers have hardly done justice to Prim. Some of them have written of him, even in announcing his death, as if it were not possible for a man to be honest and yet not to be a republican. In more than one instance the murder of Prim was treated as a sort of thing which, however painful to read of, was yet quite natural and even excusable in the case of a man who endeavored to give his country a King. There was a good deal too much of the "Sic semper tyrannis" tone and temper about some of the journals. Now, I do not believe that Prim was a patriot of that unselfish and lofty group to which William the Silent, and George Washington, and Daniel Manin belong. His was a very mixed character, and ambition had a large place in it. But I believe that he sincerely loved and tried to serve Spain; and I believe that in giving her a King he honestly thought he was doing for her the thing most suited to her tendencies and her interests. If Prim could have made Spain a republic, he could have made himself her President, even perhaps for life; while he could not venture, she being a kingdom, to constitute himself her King. Many times did Prim himself say to me, before the outbreak of his successful revolt, that he believed the republican to be the ultimate form of government everywhere, and that he would gladly see it in Spain; but that he did not believe Spain was yet suited for it, or numbered republicans enough. "To have a republic you must first have republicans," was a common saying of his. New England is a very different sort of place from Old Castile. At all events, Prim is not to be condemned as a traitor to his country and to liberty, even if it were true that he could have created a Spanish republic. We have to show first that he knew the thing was possible and refused to do it, for selfish or ignoble motives. This I am satisfied is not true. I think Prim believed a republic impossible in the Spain of to-day, and simply acted in accordance with his convictions. He came very near to being a great man; he wanted not much of being a great patriot. He was, I think, better than his fame. As Spain has decreed, he "deserved well of his country." It seems hardly reasonable or just to decry him or condemn him because he did not deserve better. Such as he was, he proved himself original. "He walked," as Carlyle says, "his own wild road, whither that led him." In an age very prolific of great political men, he made a distinct name and place for himself. "Name thou the best of German singers," exclaims Heine with pardonable pride, "and my name must be spoken among them." Name the half-dozen really great, originating characters in European politics during our time, and the name of Prim must come in among them.

But I was speaking of Victor Emanuel and his children. All I have heard then of the Duke of Aosta leads me to believe that he is qualified to make a respectable and loyal constitutional sovereign. High intellectual capacity no one expects from the house of Savoy, but there will probably be good sense, manly feeling, and no small share of political discretion. In the Duke of Aosta, too, Spain will have a King who can have no possible sympathy with slave systems and their products of whatever kind, and who can hardly have much inclination for the coercing and dragooning of reluctant populations. If Spain in his day and through his influence can get decently and honorably rid of Cuba, she will have entered upon a new chapter of her national existence, as important for her as that grand new volume which opens upon France when defeat has purged her of her thrice-accursed "militaryism." The dependencies have been a miserable misfortune to Spain. They have entangled her in all manner of complications; they have filled her with false principles; they have created whole corrupt classes among her soldiers and politicians. General Prim himself once assured me that the real revenues of Spain were in no wise the richer for her colonial possessions. Proconsuls made fortunes and spread corruption round them, and that was all. If her new King could only contrive to relieve Spain of this source of corruption and danger, he would be worth all the cost and labor of the revolution which gives him now a Spanish throne.

Why did fate decree that the very best of all the children of Victor Emanuel should have apparently the worst fortune? The Princess Clotilde is an exile from the country and the palace of her husband; and if the sweetness and virtue of one woman might have saved a court, the court of the Tuileries might have been saved by Victor Emanuel's eldest daughter. I have heard the Princess Clotilde talked of by Ultramontanes, Legitimists, Orleanists, Republicans, Red Republicans (by some among the latter who firmly believed that the poor Empress Eugénie was wickeder than Messalina), and I never heard a word spoken of her that was not in her praise. Every one admitted that she was a pure and noble woman, a patient wife, a devoted mother; full of that unpretending simplicity which, let us own it frankly, is one of the graces which very high birth and old blood do sometimes bring. The Princess must in her secret soul have looked down on some of the odd coteries who were brought around her at the court of the Tuileries. She comes of a house in whose genealogy, to quote Disraeli's humorous words, "Chaos was a novel," and she found herself forced into companionship with ladies and gentlemen whose fathers and mothers, good lack! sometimes seemed to have omitted any baptismal registration whatever. I presume she was not ignorant of the parentage of De Morny, or Walewski, or Walewski's son, or the Jerome David class of people. I presume she heard what every one said of the Countess this and the Marchioness that, and so on. Of course the Princess Clotilde did not like these people—how could any decent woman like them?—but she accepted the necessities of her position with a self-possession and dignity which, offending no one, marked the line distinctly and honorably between her and them. Her joy was in her children. She loved to show them to friends, and to visitors even whom she felt that she could treat as friends. Perhaps she is not less happy now that the ill-omened, fateful splendors of the Palais Royal no longer help to make a gilded cage for the darlings of her nursery. Of the whole family, hers may be called the only career which has been doomed to what the world describes and pities as failure. It may well be that she is now happiest of all the children of the house of Savoy.

Meanwhile, Victor Emanuel has been welcomed at the Quirinal, and is indeed, at last, King of Italy. We may well say to him, as Banquo says of Macbeth, "Thou hast it all!" Lombardy, Tuscany, Parma, Modena, the Two Sicilies, Venetia, and Rome—what gathering within less than a fifth of an ordinary lifetime! And on the Quirinal Victor Emanuel may be said to have stood alone. Of all the men who mainly wrought to bring about that grand consummation, not one stood by his side. Daniel Manin, the pure, patient, fearless, patriot hero; Cavour, the consummate statesman; Massimo d'Azeglio, the Bayard or Lafayette of Italy's later days, the soldier, scholar, and lover of his country—these are dead, and rest with Dante. Mazzini is still a sort of exile—homeless, unshaken, seeing his prophecies fulfil themselves and his ideas come to light, while he abides in the gloom and shadow, and the world calls him a dreamer. Garibaldi is lending the aid of his restless sword to a cause which he cannot serve, and a people who never understood him; and he is getting sadly mixed up somehow in ordinary minds with General Cluseret and George Francis Train. Louis Napoleon, who, whatever his crimes, did something for the unity of Italy, is a broken man in captivity. Only Victor Emanuel, least gifted of all, utterly unworthy almost to be named in the same breath with any of them (save Louis Napoleon alone)—only he comes forward to receive the glories and stand up as the representative of one Italy! Let us do him the justice to acknowledge that he never sought the position or the glory. He accepted both as a necessity of his birth and his place, a formal duty and a bore. His was not the character which goes in quest of greatness. As Falstaff says of rebellion and the revolted English lord, greatness "lay in his way, and he found it."

LOUIS ADOLPHE THIERS.

Guizot quietly at work in the preparation of a history of France for the instruction of children—Thiers taking his place in a balloon to fly from one seat of government in France to another! Such were the occupations, at a given time in last November, of the two distinguished men whose rivalries and contentions disturbed the politics of France for so many years.

An ill-natured person might feel inclined to say that the adventures in the balloon were a proper crowning of the edifice of M. Thiers's fitful career. Was not his whole political life (non meus hic sermo, please to understand—it is the ill-natured person who says this) an enterprise in a balloon, high out of all the regions where common sense, consistency, and statesmanship are ruling elements? Did he not overleap with aëronautic flight when it so suited him, from liberalism to conservatism, from advocating freedom of thought to enforcing the harshest repression? Was not his literary reputation floated into high air by that most inflated and gaseous of all balloons, the "History of the Consulate and the Empire"? Thiers in a balloon is just where he ought to be, and where he ever has been. Condense into one meagre little person all the egotism, all the self-conceit, all the vainglory, all the incapacity for looking at anything whatever from the right point of view, which belong to the typical Frenchman of fiction and satire, and you have a pretty portrait of M. Thiers.

Doubtless, the ill-natured person who should say all this would be able to urge a good many plausible reasons in justification of his assertions. Still, one may be allowed to admire—one cannot help admiring—the astonishing energy and buoyancy which made M. Thiers, despite his seventy-three years, the most active emissary of the French Republic during the past autumn, the aëronautic rival of the vigorous young Corsican Gambetta, who was probably hardly grown enough for a merry-go-round in the Champs Elysées when Thiers was beginning to be regarded as an old fogy by the ardent revolutionists of 1848. About the middle of last September, a few days after the sudden creation of the French Republic, M. Thiers precipitated himself on London. An account in the newspapers described him as "accompanied by five ladies." Thus gracefully escorted, he marched on the English capital. He had interviews with Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville, the French Ambassador, and divers other great personages. He was always rushing from diplomatic office to office. He "interviewed" everybody in London who could by any possibility be supposed capable of influencing in the slightest degree the fortunes of France. He never for a moment stopped talking. Great men excel each other in various qualities; but there never was a great man who could talk against M. Thiers. He could have shut up the late Lord Macaulay in no time; and I doubt whether Mr. Seward could have contrived to edge in a word while Thiers was in the same room. M. Thiers stayed in London little more than two days. He arrived, I think, on a Wednesday night, and left on the following Saturday. During that time he managed to do all the interviewing, and was likewise able to take his family to see the paintings in the National Gallery, where he was to be observed keenly eyeing the pictures, and eloquently laying down critical law and gospel on their merits, as if he had come over on a little autumnal holiday from a settled and peaceful country, which no longer needed looking after. Then he started from London in a steam-yacht, cruised about the North Sea and the Baltic, dropped in upon the King of Denmark, sounded the views of Sweden, collected the general opinion of Finland, visited the Emperor of Russia and talked him into semi-bewilderment, and then travelled down by land to Vienna, where he used all his powers of persuasion on the Emperor Francis Joseph, and to Florence, where by the sheer force of argument and fluency he drove Victor Emanuel nearly out of his senses. Since that time, he all but concluded an armistice with Bismarck, and when last I heard of him (previous to this writing) he was, as I have said, going on a mission somewhere in a balloon.

During his recent diplomatic flights, M. Thiers constantly offered to encounter much greater fatigues and responsibilities if needful. He was ready to go anywhere and talk to anybody. He would have hunted up the Emperor of China or the Mikado of Japan, if either sovereign seemed in the remotest degree likely to intervene on the side of France. I believe I can say with confidence, that at the outset of his expedition he had no official authority or mission whatever from the Provisional Government. He told Jules Favre and the rest that he was about to start on a tour of inspection round the European cabinets, and that they had better let him try what he could do; and they did not refuse to let him try, and it would not have mattered in the least whether they refused or not. He came, in the first instance, altogether "on his own hook." Perhaps, at first, the Republican Government was not very anxious to accept the services of M. Thiers as a messenger of peace. No living Frenchman had done half so much to bring about the state of national feeling which enabled Louis Napoleon to precipitate the nation into a war against Prussia. Perhaps they thought the man whose bitterest complaint against the Emperor was that he failed to take advantage of the chance of crushing Prussia in 1866, was not the most likely emissary to conciliate victorious Prussia in 1870. But Thiers was determined to make himself useful, and the Republican Government had to give in at last, and concede some sort of official authority to him. Like the young lady who said she married the importunate suitor to get rid of him, Jules Favre and his colleagues probably accepted M. Thiers for their spokesman as the only way of escaping from his eloquence. His mission was heroic and patriotic, or egotistical and fussy, just as you are pleased to regard it. In certain lights Cardinal Richelieu looks wonderfully like Bottom the weaver. But it is impossible not to admire the energy and courage of the irrepressible, inexhaustible, fragile-looking, shabby old Orleanist. Thiers does not seem a personage capable of enduring fatigue. He appears a sapless, withered, wasted old creature. But the restless, fiery, exuberant, egotistical energy which carried him along so far and so fast in life, has apparently gained rather than lost in strength and resource during the forty years which have elapsed since the subject of this sketch, then editor of the "National," drew up in Paris the famous protest against the five infamous ordonnances of Charles the Tenth, and thus sounded the prelude to the Revolution of July.

It must have been no common stock of self-possession and self-complacency which enabled M. Thiers to present himself before the great Prussian Chancellor as a messenger of peace. Bismarck, who has a happy knack of apt Shakespearian quotation, might have accosted him in the words of Beatrice and said, "This is a man's office, but not yours." For M. Thiers, throughout his whole career, devoted his brilliant gifts to the promotion of that spirit of narrow national vainglory which of late years has made France dreaded and detested in Germany. M. Thiers is like Æsop's trumpeter—guilty not of making war himself, but of blowing the blasts which set other men fighting. The very speech in which he protested last summer against the war initiated by the Imperial Government, was inspired by a principle more immoral, and more calculated to inflame Germany with resentment, than the very declaration of war itself. For Thiers only condemned the war on the ground that France was not properly prepared to crush Germany; that she had lost her opportunity by not falling on Prussia while the latter was in the death-grapple with Austria in 1866; and that as France had not done the thing at the right time, she had better not run the risk of doing it incompletely, by making the effort at an inopportune moment.

These considerations, however, did not trouble M. Thiers. He advanced to meet Count von Bismarck with the easy confidence of one who feels that he has a right to be treated as the best of friends and most appropriate of envoys. If, immediately after the conclusion of the American war, John Bright had been sent to Washington by England to endeavor to settle the Alabama dispute, he probably would not have approached the President with anything like the confident assurance of a genial welcome which inspired M. Thiers when he offered himself as a messenger to the Prussian statesman. This very sublimity of egotism is, and always was, one of the sources of the success of M. Thiers. No man could with more perfect composure and self-satisfaction dare to be inconsistent. His was the very audacity and Quixotism of inconsistency. In office to-day, he could advocate and enforce the very measures of repression which yesterday, out of office, he was the foremost to denounce—nay, which he obtained office by opposing and denouncing. He whose energetic action in protesting against the celebrated five ordonnances of Charles the Tenth did so much to bring about the Revolution of July, was himself the chief official author of the equally celebrated "laws of September," introduced in Louis Philippe's reign, which might have suited the administration of a Peter the Great, or any other uncompromising despot. In practical politics, of course, almost every minister is occasionally compelled by the force of circumstances to do things which bear a considerable resemblance to acts warmly condemned by him while he sat in opposition. But M. Thiers invariably, when in power, exhibited himself as the author and champion of principles and policy which he had denounced with all the force of his eloquent tongue when he was the opponent of the Government. He seemed in fact to be two men rather than one, so entirely did Thiers in office contrast with Thiers in opposition. But Thiers himself never appeared conscious of inconsistency. Indeed, he was always consistent with his one grand essential principle and creed—faith in the inspiration and the destiny of M. Thiers.

To one other principle too let it be said in justice that this brilliant politician has always been faithful—the principle which maintains the right of France to throw her sword into the scale where every or any foreign question is to be weighed. When, after a long absence from the parliamentary arena, he entered the Imperial Corps Législatif as one of the deputies for Paris, he soon proved himself to be "old Cassius still." Age, study, experience, retirement, reflection, had in no wise dimmed the fire of his ardent nationalism. Eagerly as ever he contended for the sacred right of France to dragoon all Europe into obedience, to chop up the Continent into such symmetrical sections as might seem suitable to the taste and the convenience of French statesmen. Undoubtedly he was a sharp, tormenting thorn in the side of the Imperial Government when he returned to active political life. Louis Napoleon had no minister who could pretend to compare with Thiers in debate. He was an aggravating and exasperating enemy, against whom fluent and shallow men like Billault and Baroche, or even speakers of heavier calibre like Rouher, had no chance whatever. But there were times when to any impartial mind the invectives of Thiers made the Imperial policy look noble and enlightened in comparison with the canons of detestable egotism which he propounded as the true principles of government. I remember thinking more than once that if Louis Napoleon's Ministers could only have risen to the real height of the situation and appealed to whatever there was of lofty unselfish feeling in France, they might have overwhelmed their remorseless and envenomed critic. In 1866 and 1867, for example, Thiers made it a cardinal point of complaint and invective against the French Government that it had not prevented by force of arms the progress of Germany's unity. Nothing could be more pungent, brilliant, bitter, than the eloquence with which he proclaimed and advocated his doctrines of ignoble and unscrupulous selfishness. Why did not the Imperial spokesmen assume a virtue if they had it not, and boldly declare that the Government of France scorned the shallow and envious policy which sees calamity and danger in the union and growing strength of a neighboring people? Such a chord bravely struck would have awakened an echo in every true and generous heart. But the Imperial Ministers feebly tried to fight M. Thiers upon his own ground, to accept his principles as the conditions of contest. They endeavored in a paltering and limping way to show that the French Government had been selfish and only selfish, and had taken every care to keep Germany properly weak and divided. It was during one of these debates, thus provoked by M. Thiers, that occasion was given to Count von Bismarck for one of his most striking coups de théâtre. The French Minister (if I remember rightly, it was M. Rouher), tortured and baited by M. Thiers, stood at bay at last, and boldly declared that the Government of France had taken measures to render impossible any political cohesion of North and South Germany. A day or two after, Count von Bismarck effectively and contemptuously replied to this declaration by unfolding in the Prussian Chamber the treaties of alliance already concluded between his Government and the South German States.

It has always been a matter of surprise to me that Thiers did not prove a success at the bar, to which at first he applied his abilities. He seems to have the very gifts which would naturally have made a great pleader. All through his political career he displayed a wonderful capacity for making the worse appear the better cause. The adroitness which contends skilfully that black is white to-day, having argued with equal force and fluency that white was green yesterday, would have been highly appropriate and respectable in a legal advocate. But M. Thiers did not somehow get on at the bar, and having no influential friends (he was, I think, the son of a locksmith), but plenty of ambition, courage, and confidence, he strove to enter political life by the avenue of journalism. Much of Thiers's subsequent success as a debater was probably due to that skill which a practised journalist naturally acquires—the dexterity of arraying facts and arguments so as not to bear too long on any one part of the subject, and not to offer to the mind of the reader more than his patience and interest are willing to accept. Most of the events of his political career, up to his reappearance in public life in 1863, belong wholly to history and the past. His long rivalry with Guizot, his intrigues out of office, and his conduct as a Minister of Louis Philippe, have hardly a more direct and vital connection with the affairs of to-day than the statecraft of Mazarin or the political vicissitudes of Bolingbroke. One indeed of the projects of M. Thiers has now come rather unexpectedly into active operation. The fortifications of Paris were the offspring of the apprehension M. Thiers entertained, thirty years ago, that the Eastern question of that day might provoke another great European war. Since that time many critics sneered and laughed a good deal at M. Thiers's system of fortifications; but the whirligig of time has brought the statesman his revenge. No one could mistake the meaning of the smile of self-satisfaction which used last autumn to light up the unattractive features of the veteran Orleanist, as he made tour after tour of inspection around the defences of Paris. This chain of fortifications alone, one might almost say, connects the Thiers of the present generation with the Thiers of the past. There were malignant persons who did not scruple to say that the author of the scheme of defences was not altogether sorry for the national calamity which had brought them into use, and apparently justified their construction. It is very hard to be altogether sorry for even a domestic misfortune which gives one who is especially proud of his foresight and sagacity an opportunity of pointing out that the precautions which he recommended, and other members of the family scorned, are now eagerly adopted by unanimous concurrence. There certainly was something of the pardonable pride of the author of a long misprized invention visible in the face of M. Thiers as he used to gaze upon his beloved system of fortifications any time in last September. Little did even he himself think when, after Sadowa, he accused the Emperor's Government of having left itself no blunder more to commit, that it had yet to perpetrate one crowning and gigantic mistake, and that one effect at least of this stupendous error would be to compel Paris to treat au sérieux, and as a supreme necessity, that system of defences so long regarded as good for little else than to remind the present generation that Louis Adolphe Thiers was once Prime Minister of France.

Thiers was not far short of seventy years old when, in 1863, he entered upon a new chapter of his public life as one of the deputies for Paris in the Imperial Corps Législatif. A new generation had meantime arisen. Men were growing into fame as orators and politicians who were boys when Thiers was last heard as a parliamentary debater. He returned to political life at an eventful time and accompanied by some notable compeers. The elections which sent Thiers to represent the department of the Seine made the venerable and illustrious Berryer one of the delegates from Marseilles. I doubt whether the political life of any country has ever produced a purer, grander figure than that of Berryer; I am sure that an obsolete and hopeless cause never had a nobler advocate. The genius and the virtues of Berryer are indeed the loftiest claims modern French legitimacy can offer to the respect of posterity. I look back with a feeling of something like veneration to that grand and kingly form, to the sweet, serene, unaffected dignity of that august nature. Berryer belonged to a totally different political order from that of Thiers. As John Bright is to Disraeli, as John Henry Newman is to Monsignore Capel, as Montalembert was to Louis Veuillot, as Charles Sumner is to Seward, so was Berryer to Thiers. Of the oratorical merits of the two men I shall speak hereafter; now I refer to the relative value of their political characters. With Thiers and Berryer there came back to political life some men of mark and worth. Garnier-Pagès was one, the impulsive, true-hearted, not very strong-headed Republican; a man who might be a great leader if fine phrases and good intentions could rule the world. Carnot was another, not much perhaps in himself, but great as the son of the illustrious organizer of victory (oh, if France had lately had one hour of Carnot!), and personally very popular just then because of his scornful rejection of Louis Napoleon's offer to bring back the ashes of his father from Magdeburg in Prussia to France. Eugène Pelletan, who had been suffering savage persecution because of his fierce attack on the Empire in his book, "The New Babylon"; Jules Simon, a superior sort of French Tom Hughes—Tom Hughes with republican convictions and strong backbone—and several other men of name and fibre, were now companions in the Corps Législatif. All these, differing widely in personal opinions, and indeed representing every kind of political view, from the chivalrous and romantic legitimacy of Berryer to the republican religion or fetichism of Garnier-Pagès, combined to make up an opposition to the Imperial Government. Up to that time the opposition had consisted simply of five men. For years those five had fought a persevering and apparently hopeless fight against the strength of Imperial arms, Imperial gold, and the lungs of Imperial hirelings. Of the five the leader was Jules Favre. The second in command was Emile Ollivier, whose treason to liberty, truth, and peace has since been so sternly avenged by destiny. The other three were Picard, a member of the Republican Government of September, and MM. Darimon and Henon. Numerically the opposition, now strengthened by the new accessions, became quite respectable; morally and politically it wholly changed the situation. It was no longer a Leonidas or Horatius Cocles desperately holding a pass; it was an army encountering an army. The Imperialists of course still far outnumbered their opponents; but there were no men among the devotees of Imperialism who could even pretend to compare as orators with Berryer, Thiers, or Favre. Of these three men, it seems to me that Berryer was by far the greatest orator, but Thiers left him nowhere as a partisan leader. Thiers undoubtedly pushed Jules Favre aside and made him quite a secondary figure. Thiers delighted in worrying a ministry. He never needed, as Berryer did, the impulse of a great principle and a great purpose. He felt all the joy of the strife which distinguishes the born gladiator. He soon proved that his years had in no degree impaired his oratorical capacity. It became one of the grand events of Paris when Thiers was to speak. Owing to the peculiar regulations of the French Chamber, which required that those who meant to take part in a debate should inscribe their names beforehand in the book, and speak according to their turn—an odious usage, fatal to all genuine debate—it was always known in advance through Paris that to-morrow or the day after Thiers was to speak. Then came a struggle for places in what an Englishman would call the strangers' gallery. The Palais Bourbon, where the Corps Législatif held its sittings, opposite the Place de la Concorde, has the noble distinction of providing the least and worst accommodation for the public of any House of Assembly in the civilized world. The English House of Commons is miserably defective and niggardly in this respect, but it is liberal and lavish when compared with the French Corps Législatif. Therefore, when M. Thiers was about to speak, there was as much intriguing, clamoring, beseeching, wrangling, storming for seats in the public tribunes as would have sufficed to carry an English county election. The trouble had its reward. Nobody could be disappointed in M. Thiers who merely desired an intellectual exercise and treat. Thiers never was heavy or dull. He is, I think, the most interesting of all the great European debaters. I do not know whether I convey exactly the meaning I wish to express when I used the word "interesting." What I mean is that there is in M. Thiers an inexhaustible vivacity, freshness, and variety which never allows the attention to wander or flag. He never dwells too long on any one part of his subject; or if he has to dwell long anywhere, he enlivens the theme by a lavish copiousness of novel argument, application, and illustration, which is irresistibly piquant and fascinating. Reëntering public life in his old age, M. Thiers had physically something like the advantage which I have known to be possessed by certain mature actresses, who, never having had any claim to personal beauty in their youth, were visited with hardly any penalty of time when they began to descend into age. Thiers always had an insignificant presence, a dreadfully bad voice, and an unpleasant delivery. Time added nothing, and probably could add nothing, to these disadvantages. Already John Bright has lost, already Gladstone is losing, those magnificent qualities of voice and intonation which till lately distinguished both from all other living English orators. One of the only fine passages in Disraeli's "Life of Lord George Bentinck" is that in which he describes the melancholy sensation created in the House of Commons when Daniel O'Connell, feeble and broken down, tried vainly to raise above a mumbling murmur those accents which once could thrill and vibrate to the furthest corner of the most capacious hall. But the voice and delivery of Thiers at seventy were no whit worse than those of Thiers at forty; and in energy, vivacity, and variety, I think the opposition leader of 1866 had rather gained upon the Minister of 1836. In everything that makes a great orator he was far beneath Berryer. The latter had as commanding a presence as he had a superb voice, and a manner at once graceful and dignified. Berryer, too, had the sustaining strength of a profound conviction, pure and lofty as a faith. If Berryer was a political Don Quixote, Thiers was a political Gil Blas. Thiers was all sparkle, antithesis, audacity, sophistry. His tours de force were perfect masterpieces of fearless adroitness. He darted from point to point, from paradox to paradox, with the bewildering agility of a squirrel. He flashed through the heavy atmosphere of a dull debate with the scintillating radiancy of a firefly. He propounded sentiments of freedom which would positively have captivated you if you had not known a little of the antecedents of the orator. He threw off concise and luminous maxims of government which would have been precious guides if human politics could only be ruled by epigram. His long experience as a partisan leader, in and out of office, had made him master of a vast array of facts and dates, which he was expert to marshal in such a manner as often to bewilder his opponents. His knowledge of the mechanism and regulations of diplomatic and parliamentary practice was consummate. He was singularly clear and attractive in statement; his mode of putting a case had something in it that was positively fascinating. He was sharp and severe in retort, and there was a cold, self-complacent hauteur in his way of putting down an adversary, which occasionally reminded one of a peculiarity of Earl Russell's style when the latter was still a good parliamentary debater. M. Thiers had the great merit of never talking over the heads, above the understandings of his audience. His style of language was of the same character perhaps as that of Mr. Wendell Phillips. Of course no two men could possibly be more unlike in the manner of speaking, but the rhetorical vernacular of both has a considerable resemblance. The diction in each case is clear, incisive, penetrating—never, or hardly ever, rising to anything of exalted oratorical grandeur, never involved in mist or haze of any kind, and with the same habitual acidity and sharpness in it. I presume M. Thiers wrote the greater part of his speeches beforehand, but he evidently had the happy faculty, rare even among accomplished orators, which enables a speaker to blend the elaborately prepared portions of his discourse with the extemporaneous passages originated by the impulses and the incidents of the debate. Some of the cleverest arguments, and especially some of the cleverest sarcastic hits in M. Thiers's recent speeches, were provoked by questions and interruptions which must have been quite unexpected. But a strange peculiarity about the whole body of the speeches, the written parts as well as the extemporaneous, was that they bore no resemblance whatever to the glittering and gorgeous style which is so common and so objectionable in the pages of the author's history of the French Revolution, and of the Consulate and the Empire. I must say that I think M. Thiers's historical works are decidedly heavy reading. I think his speeches are more interesting and attractive to read than those of any political speaker of our day. As an orator I set him below Berryer, below Gladstone and Bright, below Wendell Phillips, and not above Disraeli. But as an interesting speaker—I can think of no better qualification for him—I place M. Thiers above any of those masters of the art of eloquence.

I have not compared M. Thiers with Jules Favre. Any juxtaposition of the two ought rather perhaps to be in the way of contrast than of comparison. Jules Favre is probably the most exquisite and perfect rhetorician practising in the public debates of our time. No one else can lend so brilliant an effect, so delightful an emphasis to words and phrases by the mere modulations of his tone. I once heard a French workingman say that Jules Favre parlait comme un ange—talked like an angel; and there was a simple appropriateness in the expression. An angel, if he had to address so unsympathetic and uncongenial an audience as the Imperial Corps Législatif, could hardly lend more musical effect to the meaning of his words than was given by Jules Favre's consummate rhetorical skill. But I must acknowledge that to me at least there never seemed to be much in what Jules Favre said. It seemed to me too often to want marrow and backbone. It was an eloquence of fine phrases and splendid vague generalities. "Flow on, thou shining river," one felt sometimes inclined to say as the bright, broad, shallow stream glided away. If Thiers spoke for half a day, and the discourse covered a dozen columns of the closely-printed "Moniteur," yet the listener or reader came away with the impression that the orator had crammed quite a surprising quantity of matter into his speech, and could have found ever so much more to say on the same subject. The impression produced on me at least by the speeches of Jules Favre was always of the very opposite character. They seemed to be all rhetoric and modulation; they were without depth and without fibre. The essentially declamatory character of Jules Favre's eloquence received its most complete illustration in that remarkable document—so painful and pathetic because of its obvious earnestness, so ludicrous and almost contemptible because of its turgid and extravagant outbursts—the report of his recent interviews with Count von Bismarck at the Prussian headquarters near Versailles. One must keep constantly in mind the awful seriousness of the situation, and the genuine suffering which it must have imposed upon Jules Favre, not to laugh outright or feel disgusted at the inflated, hyperbolical, and melodramatic style in which the Republican Minister describes his interview with the Prussian Chancellor. Now, whatever faults of style M. Thiers might commit, he never could thus make himself ridiculous. He never allows himself to be out of tune with the occasion and the audience. You may differ utterly from him, you may distrust and dislike him; but Thiers, the parliamentary orator, will not permit you to laugh at him.

Thiers was always very happy in his replies and retorts, and he never allowed if he could an interruption to one of his speeches in the Corps Législatif to pass without seizing its meaning and at once dissecting and demolishing it. He rejoiced in the light sword-play of such exercises. He would never have been contented with the superb quietness of contempt by which Berryer in one of his latest speeches crushed Granier de Cassagnac, the abject serf and hireling of Imperialism. While Berryer was speaking, Granier de Cassagnac suddenly expressed his coarse dissent from one of the orator's statements by crying out, "That is not true." Berryer was not certain as to the source of this insolent interruption. He gazed all round the assembly, and demanded in accents of subdued and noble indignation who had dared thus to challenge the truth of his statement. There was a dead pause. Even enemies looked up with reverence to the grand old orator, and were ashamed of the rude insult flung at him. De Cassagnac quailed, but every eye was on him, and he was compelled to declare himself. "It was I who spoke," said the Imperial servant. Berryer looked at him for a moment, and then said, "Oh, it was you!—then it is of no consequence," and calmly resumed the thread of his discourse. Nothing could have been finer, nothing more demolishing than the cold, grand contempt which branded De Cassagnac as a creature incapable of meriting, even by insult, the notice of a man of honor. But Thiers would never have been satisfied with such a mode of crushing an adversary; and indeed it needed all the majesty of Berryer's presence and the moral grandeur of his character to give it full force and emphasis. Thiers would have showered upon the head of the Imperial lacquey a whole fiery cornucopia of sarcasm and sharp invective, and De Cassagnac would have gone home rather proud of having drawn down upon his head the angry eloquence of the great Orleanist orator.

Thiers threw his whole soul into his speeches—not merely as to their preparation, but as to their revision and publication. According to the Imperial system, no independent reports of speeches in the Chambers were allowed to appear in print. The official stenographers noted down in full each day's debate, and the whole was published next day in the "Moniteur Universel." These reports professed to give every word and syllable of the speeches—every whisper of interruption. Sometimes, therefore, the "Moniteur" came out with twenty of its columns filled up with the dull maunderings of some provincial blockhead, for whom servility and money had secured an official candidature. Besides these stupendous reports, the Government furnished a somewhat condensed version, in which the twenty-column speech was reduced say to a dozen columns. Either of these reports the public journals might take, but none other; and no journal must alter or condense by the omission of a line or the substitution of a word the text thus officially furnished. When Thiers had spent the whole day in delivering a speech, he was accustomed to spend the whole night in reading over and correcting the proof-sheets of the official report. The venerable orator would hurry home when the sitting was over, change his clothes, get into his arm-chair before his desk, and set to work at the proof-sheets according as they came. Over these he would toil with the minute and patient inspection of a watchmaker or a lapidary, reading this or that passage many times, until he had satisfied himself that no error remained and that no turn of expression could well be improved. Before this task was done, the night had probably long faded and the early sun was already lighting Paris; but when the Corps Législatif came to assemble at noon, the inexhaustible septuagenarian was at his post again. That evening he would be found, the central figure of a group, in some salon, scattering his brilliant sayings and acrid sarcasms around him, and in all probability exercising his humor at the expense of the Imperial Ministers, the Empire, and even the Emperor himself. After 1866 he was exuberant in his bons mots about the humiliation of the Imperial Cabinet by Prussia. "Bismarck," he once declared, "is the best supporter of the French Government. He keeps it always in its place by first boxing it on one ear and then maintaining the equilibrium by boxing it on the other."

If one could have been present at the recent interviews between Count Bismarck and M. Thiers, he would doubtless have enjoyed a curious and edifying intellectual treat. Bismarck is a man of imperturbable good humor; Thiers a man of imperturbable self-conceit. Thiers has a tongue which never lacks a word, and that the most expressive word. Bismarck has a rare gift of shrewd satirical humor, and of phrases that stick to public memory. Each man would have regarded the other as a worthy antagonist in a duel of words. Neither would care to waste much time in lofty sentiment and grandiose appeals. Each would thoroughly understand that his best motto would be, "A corsaire, corsaire et demi." Bismarck would find in Thiers no feather-headed Benedetti; assuredly, Thiers would favor Bismarck with none of Jules Favre's sighs and tears, and bravado and choking emotions. Thiers would have the greater part of the talk, that is certain; but Bismarck would probably contrive to compress a good deal of meaning and significance into his curt interjected sentences. Thiers assuredly must have long since worn out any freshness of surprise or thrilling emotion of any kind at the political convulsions of France. To him even the spectacle of the standard of Prussia hoisted on the pinnacles of Versailles could hardly have been an overpowering wonder. He had seen the soldiers of Prussia picketed in Paris; he could remember when a fickle Parisian populace, weary of war, had thronged into the streets to applaud the entrance of the conquering Czar of Russia. He had seen the Bourbon restored, and had helped to overthrow him. He had been twice the chief Minister of that Louis Philippe of Orleans, who in his youth had had to save the Princess his sister by carrying her off in her night-gown, without time to throw a shawl around her, and whose long years of exile had led him, in fulfilment of the prophecy of Danton, to the throne of France at last. He had helped towards the downfall of that same King his master, and had striven vainly at the end to stand between him and his fate. He had seen a second Republic rise and sink; he had now become the envoy of a third Republic. He had refused to serve an Imperial Napoleon, although his own teaching and preaching had been among the most effective agencies in debauching the mind and heart of the nation, and thus rendering a second Empire possible. People say M. Thiers has no feelings, and I shall not venture to contradict them—I have often heard the statement from those who know better than I can pretend to do. It would have been personally unfortunate for him in his interview with Count von Bismarck if he had been burthened with feelings. For he must surely in such a case have felt bitterly the consciousness that the misfortunes which had fallen on his country were in great measure the fruit of his own doctrines and his own labors. If the public conscience of France had not been seared and hardened against all sentiment of obligation to international principle, where French glory and French aggrandizement were concerned; if France had not learned to believe that no foreign nation had any rights which she was bound to respect; if she had not been saturated with the conviction that every benefit to a neighbor was an injury to herself; if she had not accepted these views as articles of national faith, and followed them out wherever she could to their uttermost consequences, then M. Thiers might be said to have written and spoken and lived in vain.

It is probable that a new career presents itself as a possibility to the indomitable energy, and, as many would say, the insatiable ambition of M. Thiers. Certainly, there seems not the faintest indication that the veteran believes himself to lag superfluous on the stage. It is likely that he rushed into the recent peace negotiations with the hope of playing over again the part so skilfully played by Talleyrand at the time of the Congress of Vienna, by virtue of which France obtained so much advantage which might hardly have been expected, and Germany got so little of what she might naturally have looked for. I certainly shall not venture to say whether M. Thiers may not even yet have an important official career before him. His recent enterprises and expeditions give evidence enough that he has nerve and physique for any undertaking likely to attract him, and I see no reason to doubt that his intellect is as fresh and active as it was thirty years ago. Thiers deserves nothing but honor for the unconquerable energy and courage which refuse to yield to years, and will not acknowledge the triumph of time. He would deserve far greater honor still if we could regard him as a disinterested patriot; highest honor of all if his principles were as wise and just as his ambition was unselfish. But charity itself could hardly hope to reconcile the facts of M. Thiers's long and varied career with any theory ascribing to the man himself a pure and disinterested purpose. That a statesman has changed his opinions is often his highest glory, if, as in the case of Mr. Gladstone, he has thereby grown into the light and the right. Nor is a change of views necessarily a reproach to a politician, even though he may have retrograded or gone wrong. But the man who is invariably a passionate liberal when out of office, and a severe conservative when in power; who makes it a regular practice to have one set of opinions while he leads the opposition, and another when he has succeeded in mounting to the lead of a ministry; such a man cannot possibly hope to obtain for such systematic alternations the credit of even a capricious and fantastic sincerity. No one who knows anything of M. Thiers would consent thus to exalt his heart at the expense of his head. When the late Lord Cardigan was, rightly or wrongly, accused of having returned rather too quickly from the famous charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, his lordship, among other things, alleged that his horse had run away with him. A bitter critic thereupon declared that Lord Cardigan could not be allowed thus unfairly to depreciate his consummate horsemanship, I am afraid we cannot allow M. Thiers's intelligence and shrewdness to be unjustly depreciated by the assumption that his political tergiversations were the result of meaningless caprice.

M. Thiers is one of the most gifted men of his day. But he is not, in my judgment, a great man. He wants altogether the grand and stable qualities of principle and judgment which are needed to constitute political greatness. His statesmanship is a sort of policy belonging apparently to the school of the Lower Empire; a Byzantine blending of intrigue and impudence. He has never had the faculty of reading the signs of the times, or of understanding that to-day is not necessarily like yesterday. But for the wonderful gifts of the man, there would seem to be something positively childish in the egotism which could believe that it lay in the power of France to maintain, despite of destiny, the petty princes of Germany and Italy, to arrange the political conditions of England, and prescribe to the United States how far their principle of internal cohesion should reach. Victor Hugo is undoubtedly an egotistic Frenchman. Some of his recent utterances have been foolish and ridiculous. But the folly has been that of a great soul; the folly has consisted in appealing, out of all time and place, to sublime and impracticable sentiments of human brotherhood and love which ought to influence all human souls, but do not and probably never will. Far different is the egotism of Thiers. It is the egotism of selfishness, arrogance, and craft. In a sublime world, Victor Hugo's appeals would cease to be ridiculous; but the nobler the world, the more ignoble would seem the doctrines and the policy of Thiers. My own admiration of Thiers extends only to his skill as a debater and his marvellous intellectual vitality. The man who, despite the most disheartening disadvantages of presence, voice, and manner, is yet the most fascinating political debater of his time, the man who at seventy-three years of age can go up in a balloon in quest of a new career, must surely command some interest and admiration, let critical wisdom preach to us never so wisely. But the best days will have arisen for France when such a political character and such a literary career as those of M. Thiers shall have become an anachronism and an impossibility.

PRINCE NAPOLEON.

Some few years ago, seven or eight perhaps, a certain sensation was created among artists, and journalists, and literary men, and connoisseurs, and critics, by one of Flandrin's best portraits. Undoubtedly, the portrait was an admirable likeness; no one who had ever seen the original could deny or question that; but yet there was an air, a character, a certain depth of idealized expression about it which seemed to present the subject in a new light, and threw one into a kind of doubt as to whether he had ever truly understood the original before. Either the painter had unduly glorified his sitter, or the sitter had impressed upon the artist a true idea of his character and intellect which had never before been revealed to the public at large. The portrait was that of a man of middle age, with a smooth, broad, thoughtful brow, a character of command about the finely-formed, somewhat sensuous lips; chin and nose beautifully moulded, in fact what ladies who write novels would call "chiselled;" a face degenerating a little into mere flesh, but still dignified and imposing. Everywhere over the face there was a tone of dissatisfaction, of disappointment, of sullenness mingling strangely with the sensuous characteristics, and conveying somehow the idea of great power and daring ambition unduly repressed by outward conditions, or rendered barren by inward defects, or actually frustrated by failure and fate. "A Cæsar out of employment!" exclaimed a celebrated French author and critic. So much there was of the Cæsar in the face that no school-boy, no Miss in her teens could have even glanced at it without saying, "That is the face of a Bonaparte!" Were not the features a little too massive, it might have passed for an admirable likeness of the victor of Austerlitz; or, at all events, of the Napoleon of Leipzig or the Hundred Days. Probably any ordinary observer would at once have set it down as a portrait of the great Napoleon, and never thought there could be any doubt about the matter. It was, in fact, the likeness of Napoleon-Jerome, son of the rattle-pate King of Westphalia—Prince Napoleon, as he is ordinarily called, the Plon-plon whom soldiers jeer at, the "Red Prince" whom priests and Legitimists denounce, the cousin of the Emperor of the French, the son-in-law of the King of Italy.

It was only somewhere about, or a little before the time of the Flandrin portrait, that Prince Napoleon had the honor of becoming a mystery in the eyes of the public. Up to 1860, his character was quite settled in public estimation, just as that of Louis Napoleon had been up to the time of the coup d'etat. Public opinion generally settles the characters of conspicuous men at first by the intuitive process—the most delightful and easy method possible, dispensing, as it does, with any necessity for studying the subject, or even knowing anything at all about it. When the intuitive process has once adjusted a man's character, it is not easy to get people to believe in any other adjustment. Still, there are some remarkable instances of a change in popular opinion. The case of Louis Napoleon, the Emperor, is one illustration; that of Prince Napoleon, his cousin, is another, not so remarkable, certainly, but still quite worthy of some attention.

Prince Napoleon had been before the world more or less since he appeared as representative of Corsica, in the Constituent Assembly of 1848. He was made conspicuous, in a negative sort of way, by having had no hand in the coup d'etat, or having even opposed it, although he did not scruple to profit by its success and enjoy its golden advantages. He had a command in the Crimean war; he was sent into Tuscany during the Italian campaign. All that time public opinion in Europe was unanimous about him. He was a sensualist, a coward, an imbecile, and a blockhead. He was a fat, stupid, muddle-headed Heliogabalus. Dulness, cowardice, and profligacy were his principal, perhaps his only characteristics. When the young Clotilde, of Savoy, was given to him for a wife, a positive cry of wonder and disgust went up from every country of Europe. In good truth, it was a scandalous thing to marry a young and innocent girl to a man nearly as old as her father; and who, undoubtedly, had been a mauvais sujet, and had led a life of dissipation so far. But Europe cried aloud as if three out of every four princely alliances were not made on the same principle and endowed with the same character. Had the Princess Clotilde been affianced to a hog or a gorilla, there could hardly have been greater wonder and horror expressed, so clear was the public mind about the stupidity and brutality of Prince Napoleon.

Certainly, if one looked a little deeper than mere public opinion, he would have found, even then, that here and there some men, not quite incapable of judging, did not accept the popular estimate of the Emperor's cousin. All through the memorable progress of the Congress of Paris—out of which sprang Italy—we find, by the documents subsequently made public, that Cavour was in close and frequent consultation with Prince Napoleon. Once we find Cavour saying that Prince Napoleon complains of his slowness, his too great moderation, and thinks he could serve the cause better by a little more boldness. "Perhaps he is right," says Cavour, in words to that effect; "but I fear I lack his force of character, his daringness of purpose." Richard Cobden makes the acquaintance of Prince Napoleon, and is surprised and delighted with his advanced opinions on the subject of free trade; and deliberately describes him (I heard Cobden use the words) as "one of the best informed, if not the very best informed, of all the public men of Europe." Kinglake observes the Prince during the Crimean campaign—where Napoleon-Jerome got his reputation for cowardice and his nick-name of Plon-plon—and finds in him a genius very like that of his uncle, the great Napoleon, especially a wonderful power of distinguishing at a glance between the essentials and the accidentals of any question or situation—and any one who has ever studied politics and public men will know how rare a faculty that is—and finally declares that he sees no reason to believe him inferior in courage to the conqueror of Marengo! Edmond About, not a very dull personage, and not quite given up to panegyric, bursts into a strain of almost lyrical enthusiasm about the wit, the brilliancy, the culture, the daring ambition of Prince Napoleon, and declares that the Prince is kept as much out of the way as possible, because a man endowed with a soul of such unresting energy, and the face of the great Emperor, is too formidable a personage to be seen hanging about the steps of a throne. To close this string of illustrations, Prince Napoleon is in somewhat frequent and confidential intercourse with Michel Chevalier, a man not likely to cultivate the society of heavy blockheads and dullards, even though these might happen to wear princely coronets. Clearly, public opinion here was even more directly at odds than it often is with the opinion of some whom we may call experts; and the difference was so great that there seemed no possible way of reconciling the two. A man may be a profligate and yet a man of genius, and even a patriot; but one cannot be a profligate blockhead and a man of genius, a Cloten and an Alcibiades, a Cæsar and a Pyrgopolinices at once.

It was in the early part of 1861 that Prince Napoleon contributed something of his own spontaneous motion to help in the solution of the enigma. That was the year when the Emperor removed the restriction which prevented both Chambers of the Legislature from freely debating the address, and the press from fully reporting the discussions. There was a remarkable debate in the Senate, ranging over a great variety of domestic and foreign questions, and one most memorable event of the debate was the brilliant, powerful and exhaustive oration delivered, with splendid energy and rhetorical effect, by Prince Napoleon. Mon âne parle et même il parle bien, declares the astonished Joan, in Voltaire's scandalous poem, "La Pucelle." Perhaps there was something of a similar wonder mingled with the burst of genuine admiration which went up first from Paris, then from France, and finally from Europe and America, when that magnificent democratic manifesto came to be read. Certainly, I remember no single speech which, during my time, created anything like the same sensation in Europe. For it took the outer world wholly by surprise. It was not a case like that of the sensation lately created by the florid and fervid eloquence of the young Spanish orator, Castellar. In this latter case the public were surprised and delighted to find that there was a master of thrilling rhetoric alive, and arrayed on the side of democratic freedom, of whose very existence most persons had been previously ignorant. But, in the case of Prince Napoleon, the surprise was, that a man whom the public had long known, and always set down as a stupid sensualist, should suddenly, and without any previous warning, turn out a great orator, whose eloquence had in it something so fresh, and genuine, and forcible that it recalled the memory of the most glorious days of the French Tribune. I write of this celebrated oration now only from recollection; and, of course, I did not hear it spoken. I say "of course," because the rules of the French Senate, unlike those of the Corps Legislatif, forbid the presence of any strangers during the debates. But those who heard it spoke enthusiastically of the force and freedom with which it was delivered; the sudden, impulsive fervor of occasional outbursts; and the wonderful readiness with which the speaker, when interrupted, as he was very frequently, passed from one topic to another in order to dispose of the interruption, and replied to sudden challenge with even prompter repartee. No one could read the speech without admiring the extent and variety of the political knowledge it displayed; the prodigality of illustration it flung over every argument; the thrilling power of some of its rhetorical "phrases;" the tone of sustained and passionate eloquence which made itself heard all throughout; and, perhaps above all, that flexible, spontaneous readiness of language and resource to which every interruption, every interjected question only acted like a spur to a generous horse, calling forth new and greater, and wholly unexpected efforts. In the French Senate I need, perhaps, hardly tell my readers, it is the habit to allow the utmost license of interruption, and Prince Napoleon's audacious onslaught on the reactionists and the parti prêtre called out even an unusual amount of impatient utterance. Those who interrupted took little by their motion. The energetic Prince tossed off his assailants as a bull flings the dogs away on the points of his horns. "Our principles are not yours," scornfully exclaims a Legitimist nobleman—the late Marquis de la Rochejaquelein, if I remember rightly. "Your principles are not ours!" vehemently replies the orator. "No, nor are your antecedents ours. Our pride is that our fathers fell on the battle-field resisting the foreign invaders whom your fathers brought in for the subjugation of France!" The speech is studded with sudden replies equally fervid and telling. Indeed, the whole material of the oration is rich, strong, and genuine. There seems to be in the eloquence of the French Chambers, of late, a certain want of freshness and natural power. I do not speak of Berryer—he had no such want. But Thiers—by far the ablest living debater who speaks only from preparation—with all his wonderful science and skill as an artist in debate, appears to be always somewhat artificial and elaborate. Jules Favre, with his exquisitely modulated tones, and his unrivalled choice of words, hardly ever appears to me to rise to that height where the orator, lost in his subject, compels his hearers to lose themselves also in it. Now, I cannot help thinking that the two or three really great speeches made by Prince Napoleon had in them more of the native fibre, force and passion of oratory than those of almost any Frenchman since the days of Mirabeau.

However that may be, the effect wrought on the public mind was unmistakable. Plon-plon had startled Europe. He entered the palace of the Luxembourg on that memorable day without any repute but that of a dullard and a sensualist; he came out of it a recognized orator. I have been told that he lay back in his open carriage and smoked his cigar, as he drove home from the Senate, to all appearance the same indolent, sullen, heavy apathetic personage whom all Paris had previously known and despised.

One notable effect of this famous speech was the reply which a certain passage in it drew from Louis Philippe's son, the Duc d'Aumale. Prince Napoleon had indulged in a bitter sneer or two against former dynasties, and the Duc d'Aumale, a man of great culture and ability, took up the quarrel fiercely. The Duke assailed Prince Napoleon in one of the keenest, most biting pamphlets which the political controversy of our day has produced. Among other things, the Duke replied to a supposed imputation on the weakness of Louis Philippe by admitting, frankly, that the bourgeois King had not dealt with enemies, when in his power, as a Bonaparte would have done. "Et tenez, Prince," wrote the Duke, "the only time when the word of a Bonaparte may be believed is when he avows that he will never spare a defenceless enemy." The pamphlet bristled with points equally sharp and envenomed. But the Duc d'Aumale was not content with written rejoinder. He sent a challenge to the Prince, and in serious earnest. The Prince, it need hardly be said, did not accept the challenge.

Yes, like enough, high-battled Cæsar will

Unstate his greatness, and be staged to the show

Against a sworder!

Our Cæsar, though not "high-battled," was by no means likely to consent to be "staged against a sworder." The Emperor hastened to prevent any disastrous consequences, by insisting that the Prince must not accept the challenge—and there was no duel. People winked and sneered a good deal. It is said that the martial King Victor Emmanuel grumbled and chafed at his son-in-law; but there was no fight. Let me say, for my own part, that I think Prince Napoleon was quite right in not accepting the challenge, and that I do not believe him to be wanting in personal courage.

From that moment, Prince Napoleon became a conspicuous figure in European politics, and when any great question arose, men turned anxiously toward him, curious to know what he would do or say. In three or four successive sessions he spoke in the Senate, and even with the impression of the first surprise still strong on the public mind, the speeches preserved abundantly the reputation which the earliest of them had so suddenly created. He might be the enfant terrible of the Bonaparte family; he might be utterly wanting in statesmanship; he might be insincere; he might be physically a coward; but all the world now admitted him to be an orator, and, in his way, a man of genius.

Then it became known to the public, all at once, that the Prince, whatever his failings, had some rare gifts besides that of eloquence. He was undoubtedly a man of exquisite taste in all things artistic; he had an intelligent and liberal knowledge of practical science; he had a great faculty of organization; he was a keen humorist and wit. He loved the society of artists, and journalists, and literary men; he associated with them en bon camarade, and he could talk with each upon his own subject; his bon mots soon began to circulate far and wide. He was a patron of Revolution. In the innermost privacy of the Palais Royal men like Mieroslawski, the Polish Red Revolutionist, men like General Türr, unfolded and discussed their plans. Prince Gortschakoff, in his despatches at the time of the Polish Rebellion, distinctly pointed to the palace of Prince Napoleon as the headquarters of the insurrection. The "Red Prince" grew to be one of the mysterious figures in European policy. Was he in league with his cousin, the Emperor—or was he his cousin's enemy? Did he hope, on the strength of that Bonaparte face, and his secret league with Democracy, to mount one day from the steps of the throne to the throne itself? Between him and the succession to that throne intervened only the life of one frail boy. Was Prince Napoleon preparing for the day when he might play the part of a Gloster (without the smothering), and, pushing the boy aside, succeed to the crown of the great Emperor whom in face he so strikingly resembled?

At last came the celebrated Ajaccio speech. The Emperor had gone to visit Algeria; the Prince went to deliver an oration at the inauguration of a monument to Napoleon I., at Ajaccio. The speech was, in brief, a powerful, passionate denunciation of Austria, and the principles which Austria represented before Sadowa taught her a lesson of tardy wisdom. Viewed as the exposition of a professor of history, one might fairly acknowledge the Prince's speech to have illustrated eloquently some solid and stern truths, which Europe would have done well even then to consider deeply. Subsequent events have justified and illuminated many of what then seemed the most startling utterances of the orator. Austria, for example, practically admits, by her present policy, the justice of much that Prince Napoleon pleaded against her. But as the speech of the Emperor's cousin; of one who stood in near order of succession to the throne; of one who had only just been raised to an office in the State so high that in the absence of the sovereign it made him seem the sovereign's proper representative, it was undoubtedly a piece of marvellous indiscretion. Europe stood amazed at its outspoken audacity. The Emperor could not overlook it; and he publicly repudiated it. Prince Napoleon resigned his public offices—including that of President of the Commissioners of the International Exhibition, which undertaking suffered sadly from lack of his organizing capacity and his admirable taste and judgment—and the Imperial orator of Democracy disappeared from the public stage as suddenly, and amid as much tumult, as he had entered upon it.

Prince Napoleon has, indeed, been taken into favor since by his Imperial cousin, and has been sent on one or two missions, more or less important or mysterious; but he has never, from the date of the Ajaccio speech up to the present moment, played any important part as a public man. He is not, however, "played out." His energy, his ambition, his ability, will assuredly bring him prominently before the public again. Let us, meanwhile, endeavor to set before the readers of The Galaxy a fair and true picture of the man, free alike from the exaggerated proportions which wondering quid nuncs or parasites attribute to him, and from the distortions of unfriendly painters. Exaggeration of both kinds apart, Prince Napoleon is really one of the most remarkable figures on the present stage of French history. He is, at least, a man of great possibilities. Let us try to ascertain fairly what he is, and what are his chances for the future.

Born of a hair-brained, eccentric, adventure-seeking, negligent, selfish father, Prince Napoleon had little of the advantages of a home education. His boyhood, his youth, were passed in a vagrant kind of way, ranging from country to country, from court to court. He started in life with great natural talents, a strong tendency to something not very unlike rowdyism, an immense ambition, an almost equally vast indolence, a deep and genuine love of arts, letters, and luxury, an eccentric, fitful temper, and a predominant pride in that relationship to the great Emperor which is so plainly stamped upon his face. Without entering into any questions of current scandal, everybody must know that Napoleon III. has nothing of the Bonaparte in his face, a fact on which Prince Napoleon, in his earlier and wilder days, was not always very slow to comment. Indolence, love of luxury, and a capricious temper have, perhaps, been the chief enemies which have hitherto prevented the latter from fulfilling any high ambition. It would be affectation to ignore the fact that Prince Napoleon flung many years away in mere dissipation. Stories are told in Paris which would represent him almost as a Vitellius or an Egalité in profligacy—stories some of which simply transcend belief by their very monstrosity. Even to this day, to this hour, it is the firm conviction of the general public that the Emperor's cousin is steeped to the lips in sensuality. Now, rejecting, of course, a huge mass of this scandal, it is certain that Prince Napoleon was, for a long time, a downright mauvais sujet; it is by no means certain that he has, even at his present mature age, discarded all his evil habits. His temper is much against him. People habitually contrast the unvarying courtesy and self-control of the Emperor with the occasional brusqueness, and even rudeness, of the Prince. True that Prince Napoleon can be frankly and warmly familiar with his intimates, and even that, like Prince Hal, he sometimes encourages a degree of familiarity which hardly tends to mutual respect. But the outer world cannot always rely on him. He can be undiplomatically rough and hot, and he has a gift of biting jest which is perhaps one of the most dangerous qualities a statesman can cultivate. Then there is a personal restlessness about him which even princes cannot afford safely to indulge. He has hardly ever had any official position assigned to him which he did not sometime or other scornfully abandon on the spur of some sudden impulse. The Madrid embassy in former days, the Algerian administration, the Crimean command—these and other offices he only accepted to resign. He has wandered more widely over the face of the earth than any other living prince—probably than any other prince that ever lived. It used to be humorously said of him that he was qualifying to become a teacher of geography, in the event of fortune once more driving the race of Bonaparte into exile and obscurity. What port is there that has not sheltered his wandering yacht? He has pleasant dwellings enough to induce a man to stay at home. His Palais Royal is one of the most elegant and tasteful abodes belonging to a European prince. The stranger in Paris who is fortunate enough to obtain admission to it—and, indeed, admission is easy to procure—must be sadly wanting in taste if he does not admire the treasures of art and vertu which are laid up there, and the easy, graceful manner of their arrangement. Nothing of the air of the show-place is breathed there; no rules, no conditions, no watchful, dogging lacqueys or sentinels make the visitor uncomfortable. Once admitted, the stranger goes where he will, and admires and examines what he pleases. He finds there curiosities and relics, medals and statues, bronzes and stones from every land in which history or romance takes any interest; he gazes on the latest artistic successes—Doré's magnificent lights and shadows, Gérome's audacious nudities; he observes autograph collections of value inestimable; he notices that on the tables, here and there, lie the newest triumphs or sensations of literature—the poem that every one is just talking of, the play that fills the theatres, George Sand's last novel, Rénan's new volume, Taine's freshest criticism: he is impressed everywhere with the conviction that he is in the house of a man of high culture and active intellect, who keeps up with the progress of the world in arts, and letters, and politics. Then there was, until lately, the famous Pompeiian Palace, in one of the avenues of the Champs Elysées, which ranked among the curiosities of Paris, but which Prince Napoleon has at last chosen, or been compelled, to sell. On the Swiss shore of the lake of Geneva, one of the most remarkable objects that attract the eye of the tourist who steams from Geneva to Lausanne, is La Bergerie, the palace of Prince Napoleon. But the owner of these palaces spends little of his time in them. His wife, the Princess Clotilde, stays at home and delights in her children, and shows them with pride to her visitors, while her restless husband is steaming in and out of the ports of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, or the Baltic. Prince Napoleon has not found his place yet, say Edmond About and other admirers—when he does he will settle firmly to it. He is a restless, unmanageable idler and scamp, say his enemies—unstable as water, he shall not excel. Meanwhile years go by, and Prince Napoleon has long left even the latest verge of youth behind him; and he is only a possibility as yet, and is popular with no political party in France.

Strange that this avowed and ostentatious Democrat, this eloquent, powerful spokesman of French Radicalism, is not popular even with Democrats and Red Republicans. They do not trust him. They cannot understand how he can honestly extend one hand to Democracy, while in the other he receives the magnificent revenues assigned to him by Despotism. One might have thought that nothing would be more easy than for this man, with his daring, his ambition, his brilliant talents, his commanding eloquence, his democratic principles, and his Napoleon face, to make himself the idol of French Democracy. Yet he has utterly failed to do so. As a politician, he has almost invariably upheld the rightful cause, and accurately foretold the course of events. He believed in the possibility of Italy's resurrection long before there was any idea of his becoming son-in-law to a King of Italy; he has been one of the most earnest friends of the cause of Poland; he saw long ago what every one sees now, that the fall of the Austrian system was an absolute necessity to the progress of Europe; he was a steady supporter of the American Union, and when it was the fashion in France, as in England, to regard the independence of the Southern Confederacy as all but an accomplished fact, he remained firm in the conviction that the North was destined to triumph. With all his characteristic recklessness and impetuosity, he has many times shown a cool and penetrating judgment, hardly surpassed by that of any other European statesman. Yet the undeniable fact remains, that his opinion carries with it comparatively little weight, and that no party recognizes him as a leader.

Is he insincere? Most people say he is. They say that, with all his professions of democratic faith, he delights in his princely rank and his princely revenues; that he is selfish, grasping, luxurious, arrogant and deceitful. The army despises him; the populace do not trust him. Now, for myself, I do not accept this view of the character of Prince Napoleon. I think he is a sincere Democrat, a genuine lover of liberty and progress. But I think, at the same time, that he is cursed with some of the vices of Alcibiades, and some of the vices of Mirabeau; that he has the habitual indolence almost of a Vendôme, with Vendôme's occasional outbursts of sudden energy; that a love of luxury, and a restlessness of character, and fretfulness of temper stand in his way, and are his enemies. I doubt whether he will ever play a great historical part, whether he ever will do much more than he has done. His character wants that backbone of earnest, strong simplicity and faith, without which even the most brilliant talents can hardly achieve political greatness. He will probably rank in history among the Might-Have-Beens. Assuredly, he has in him the capacity to play a great part. In knowledge and culture, he is far, indeed, superior to his uncle, Napoleon I.; in justice of political conviction, he is a long way in advance of his cousin, Napoleon III. Taken for all in all, he is the most lavishly gifted of the race of the Bonapartes—and what a part in the cause of civilization and liberty might not be played by a Bonaparte endowed with genius and culture, and faithful to high and true convictions! But the time seems going by, if not gone by, when even admirers could expect to see Prince Napoleon play such a part. Probably the disturbing, distracting vein of unconquerable levity so conspicuous in the character of his father, is the marplot of the son's career, too. After all, Prince Napoleon is perhaps more of an Antony than a Cæsar—was not Antony, too, an orator, a wit, a lover of art and letters, a lover of luxury and free companionship, and woman? Doubtless Prince Napoleon will emerge again, some time and somehow, from his present condition of comparative obscurity. Any day, any crisis, any sudden impulse may bring him up to the front again. But I doubt whether the dynasty of the Bonapartes, the cause of democratic freedom, the destinies of France, will be influenced much for good or evil, by this man of rare and varied gifts—of almost measureless possibilities—the restless, reckless, eloquent, brilliant Imperial Democrat of the Palais Royal, and Red Republican of the Empire—the long misunderstood and yet scarcely comprehended Prince Napoleon.

THE DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE.

There used to be a story current in London, which I dare say is not true, to the effect that her gracious Majesty Queen Victoria once demurred to the Prince and Princess of Wales showing themselves too freely in society, and asked them angrily whether they meant to make themselves "as common as the Cambridges."

Certainly the Duke of Cambridge and his sister the Princess Mary, now Princess of Teck, were for a long time, if not exactly "common," if not precisely popular, the most social, the most easily approached, and the most often seen in public pageantry of all members of the royal family. The Princess Mary might perhaps fairly be called popular. The people liked her fine, winsome face, her plump and buxom form. If she has not a kindly, warm, and generous heart, then surely physiognomy is no index of character. But the Duke of Cambridge, although very commonly seen in public, and ready to give his presence and his support to almost any philanthropic meeting and institution which can claim to be fashionable, never seems to have attained any degree of popularity. Like his father, who enjoyed the repute of being the worst after-dinner speaker who ever opened his mouth, the Duke of Cambridge is to be found acting as chairman of some public banquet once a week on an average during the London season. He is president or patron of no end of public charities and other institutions. Yet the people do not seem to care anything about him, or even to like him. His appearance is not in his favor. He is handsome in a certain sense, but he is heavy, stolid, sensual-looking, and even gross in form and face. He has indeed nearly all the peculiarities of physiognomy which specially belong to the most typical members of the Guelph family, and there is, moreover, despite the obesity which usually suggests careless good-humor, something sinister or secret in his expression not pleasant to look upon. He seems to be a man of respectable average abilities. He is not a remarkably bad speaker. I think when he addresses the House of Lords, which he does rarely, or a public meeting or dinner-party, which he does often, he acquits himself rather better than the ordinary county member of Parliament. Judging by his apparent mental capacity and his style as a speaker, he ought to be rather popular than otherwise in England, for the English people like respectable mediocrity and not talent in their princes. "He is so respectable and such an ass," says Thackeray speaking of somebody, "that I positively wonder he didn't get on in England." The Duke of Cambridge is so respectable (in intellectual capacity) and so dull that I positively wonder he has not been popular in England. But popular he never has been. No such clamorous detestation follows him as used to pursue the late Duke of Cumberland, subsequently King of Hanover. No such accusations have been made against him as were familiarly pressed against the Duke of York. Even against the living Prince of Wales there are charges made by common scandal more serious than any that are usually talked of in regard to the Duke of Cambridge. But the English public likes the Duke as little as it could like any royal personage. England has lately been growing very jealous of the manner in which valuable appointments are heaped on members of the Queen's family. The Duke of Cambridge has long enjoyed some sinecure places of liberal revenue, and he holds one office of inestimable influence, for which he has never proved himself qualified, and for which common report declares him to be utterly disqualified. He is Commander-in-Chief of the British army; and that I believe to be his grand offence in the eyes of the British public. Many offences incident to his position are indeed charged upon him. It is said that he makes an unfair use, for purposes of favoritism, of the immense patronage which his office places at his disposal. Some years ago scandal used to charge him with advancing men out of the same motive which induced the Marquis of Steyne to obtain an appointment for Colonel Rawdon Crawley. The private life of the Duke is said to have been immoral, and unluckily for him it so happened that some of his closest friends and favorites became now and then involved in scandals of which the law courts had to take cognizance. But had none of these things been so, or been said, I think the Duke of Cambridge would have lacked popularity just as much as he does. The English people are silently angry with him, mainly because he is an anachronism—a man raised to the most influential public appointment the sovereign can bestow, for no other reason than because he is a member of the royal family. The Duke of Cambridge in the office of Commander-in-Chief is an anachronism at the head of an anomaly. The system is unfit for the army or the country; the man is incompetent to manage any military system, good or bad. As the question of army reorganization, now under debate in England, has a grand political importance, transcending by far its utmost possible military import, and as the position of the Duke of Cambridge is one of the peculiar and typical anomalies about to be abolished, it may surely interest American readers if I occupy a few pages in describing the man and the system. Altering slightly the words of Bugeaud to Louis Philippe in 1848, this reorganization of the army in England is not a reform, but a revolution. It strikes out the keystone from the arch of the fabric of English aristocracy.

The Duke of Cambridge is, as everybody knows, the first cousin of the Queen of England. He is about the same age as the Queen. When both were young it used to be said that he cherished hopes of becoming her husband. He is now himself one of the victims of the odious royal marriage act, which in England acknowledges as valid no marriage with a subject contracted by a member of the royal family without the consent of the sovereign. The Duke of Cambridge, it is well known, is privately married to a lady of respectable position and of character which has never been reproached, but whom, nevertheless, he cannot present to the world as his wife because the royal consent has not ratified the marriage. Many readers of The Galaxy may perhaps remember that only four or five years ago there was some little commotion created in England by the report, never contradicted, that a princess of the royal house had set her heart upon marrying a young English nobleman who loved her, and that the Queen utterly refused to give her consent. Much sympathy was felt for the princess, because, as she was not a daughter of the Queen and was not young enough to be reasonably expected to acknowledge the control of any relative, this rigorous exercise of a merely technical power seemed particularly unjust and odious. It will be seen, therefore, that the objections raised against the Duke and his position in England are not founded on the belief that he is himself as an individual inordinately favored by the sovereign; but on the obvious fact that place and power are given to him because he is a member of the reigning family. The Duke of Cambridge has never shown the slightest military talent, the faintest capacity for the business of war. In his only campaign he proved worse than useless, and more than once made a humiliating exhibition, not of cowardice, but of utter incapacity and flaccid nervelessness. His warmest admirer never ventured to pretend that the Duke was personally the best man to take the place of Commander-in-Chief. While he was constantly accused by rumor and sometimes by public insinuation of blundering, of obstinacy, of ignorance, of gross favoritism, no defence ever made for him, no eulogy ever pronounced upon him, went the length of describing him as a well-qualified head of the military organization. His upholders and panegyrists were content with pleading virtually that he was by no means a bad sort of Commander-in-Chief; that he was not fairly responsible for this or that blunder or malversation; that on the whole there might have been men worse fitted than he for the place. The social vindication of the appointment was that which proved very naturally its worst offence in the eyes of the public—the fact that the sovereign and her family desired that the place should be given to the Duke of Cambridge, and that the ministers then in power either had not the courage or did not think it worth their while to resist the royal inclination.

The Duke, if he never proved himself much of a soldier, had at least opportunity enough to learn all the ordinary business of his profession. He actually is, and always has been, a professional soldier—not nominally an officer, as the late Prince Albert was, or as the Prince of Wales is, or as the Princess Victoria (Crown Princess of Prussia) may be said for that matter to be, the lady holding, I believe, an appointment as colonel of some regiment, and being doubtless just as well acquainted with her regimental duties as her fat and heavy brother. The Duke of Cambridge was made a colonel at the age of eighteen, and he did the ordinary barrack and garrison duties of his place. He used when young to be rather popular in garrison towns. In Dublin, for example, I think Prince George of Cambridge, as he was then called, was followed with glances of admiration by many hundred pairs of bright eyes. On the death of his father (whose after-dinner eloquence used to afford "Punch" a constant subject for mirth) Prince George became in 1850 Duke of Cambridge. He holds some appointments which I presume are sinecures to him; among the rest he is keeper of some of the royal parks (I don't know the precise title of his office), and the name of "George" may be seen appended to edicts inscribed on various placards on the trees and gates near Buckingham Palace. Nothing in particular was known about him as a soldier until the Crimean war. Indeed, up to that time there had been for many years as little chance for an English officer to prove his capacity as there was for a West Point man to show what he was worth in the period between the Mexican war and the attack on Fort Sumter. When the Crimean war broke out the Duke was appointed to the command of the first division of the army sent against the Russians. I believe it is beyond all doubt that he proved himself unfit for the business of war. He "lost his head," people say; he could not stand the sights and sounds of the battle-field. It required on one occasion—at Inkerman, I believe—the prompt and sharp interference of the late Lord Clyde, then Sir Colin Campbell, to prevent his Royal Highness from making a sad mess of his command. It is not likely that he wanted personal courage—few princes do; but his nerves gave way, and as he could be of no further use to anybody he was induced to return home. France and England each sent a fat prince, cousin of the reigning sovereign, to the Crimean war, and each prince rather suddenly came home again with the invidious whispers of the malign unpleasantly criticising his retreat from the field. After the Duke's return the corporation of Liverpool gave him (why, no man could well say) a grand triumphal entry, and I remember that an irreverent and cynical member of one of the local boards suggested that among the devices exhibited in honor of the illustrious visitor, a white feather would be an appropriate emblem. There the Duke's active military career began and ended. He had not distinguished himself. Perhaps he had not disgraced himself; perhaps it was really only ill-health which prevented him from proving himself as genuine a warrior as his relative, the Crown Prince of Prussia. But the English people only saw that the Duke went out to the war and very quickly came back again. Julius Cæsar or the First Napoleon or General Sherman might have had to do the same thing under the same circumstances; but then these more lucky soldiers did not have to do it, and therefore were able to prove their military capacity. One thing very certain is, that without such good fortune and such proof of capacity neither Cæsar, Napoleon, nor Sherman would ever have been made commander-in-chief, and therein again they were unlike the Duke of Cambridge. For it was not long after the Duke's return home that on the death or resignation (I don't now quite remember which) of Viscount Hardinge, our heavy "George" was made Commander-in-Chief of the British army. I venture to think that, taking all the conditions of the time and the appointment into consideration, no more unreasonable, no more unjustifiable instance of military promotion was ever seen in England.

For observe, that the worst thing about the appointment of the Duke of Cambridge is not that an incompetent person obtains by virtue of his rank the highest military position in the State. If this were all, there might be just the same thing said of almost every other European country—indeed, of almost every other country. The King of Prussia was Commander-in-Chief of the armies of North Germany, but no one supposed that he was really competent to discharge all the duties of such a position. Abraham Lincoln was Commander-in-Chief of the Federal army, by virtue of his office of President; but no one supposed that his military knowledge and capacity would ever have recommended him to such a post. The appointment in each case was only nominal, and as a matter of political convenience and propriety. It did not seem wise or even safe that the supreme military authority should be formally intrusted to any one but the ruler or the President. It was thoroughly understood that the duties of the office were discharged by some professional expert, for whose work the King or the President was responsible to the nation. But the office of Commander-in-Chief of the English army is something quite different from this. It is understood to be a genuine office, the occupant actually doing the work and having the authority. In the lifetime of the Duke of Wellington the country had the services of the very best Commander-in-Chief England could have selected. The sound and wise principle which dictated that appointment is really the principle on which the office is based in England. The Commander-in-Chief is not regarded, as on the Continent, in the light of an ornamental president of a great bureau whose duties are done by others, but as the most efficient military officer, the man best qualified to do the work. Marlborough was Commander-in-Chief, and so was Schomberg, and so was General Seymour Conway. When in 1828 the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister, and therefore resigned the command of the army, Lord Hill was placed at the head of military affairs. The Duke of Wellington resumed the command in 1842 and held it to his death, when it was given to Viscount Hardinge, a capable man. The title of the office was not, I believe, actually "Commander-in-Chief," but "General Commanding-in-Chief." It was, if I remember rightly, owing to the disasters arising out of military mismanagement in the Crimea, that the changes were made which created a distinct Secretary of War and gave to the office of Commander-in-Chief its present title. Therefore it will be seen that the intrusting the command of the army to the Duke of Cambridge is not even justifiable on the ground that it follows an old established custom. It is, on the contrary, an innovation, and one which illustrates the worst possible principle. There is nothing to be said for it. No necessity justified or even excused it. When Viscount Hardinge died, if the principle adopted in his case—that of appointing the best man to the place—had been still in favor, there were many military generals in England, any one of whom would have filled the office with efficiency and credit. But the superstition of rank prevailed. The Duke of Wellington is believed to have once recommended that on his death Prince Albert, the Queen's husband, should be created Commander-in-Chief. Ridiculous as the suggestion may seem, it would probably have been a far better arrangement than that which was more recently adopted. Prince Albert could hardly have been called a professional soldier at all; and this would have been greatly in his favor. For he would have filled the place merely as the King of Prussia does; he would have intrusted the actual duties to some qualified man, and being endowed with remarkable judgment, temper, and discretion, he would doubtless have found the right man for the work. But the Duke of Cambridge, as a professional soldier, although a very indifferent one, is expected to perform and does perform the duties of his office, after his own fashion. He is too high in rank to be openly rebuked, contradicted, or called to account; he is not high enough to be accepted as a mere official ornament or figurehead. He is too much of a professional general to become willingly the pupil and instrument of a more skilled subordinate; too little of a professional general to render his authority of any real value, or to be properly qualified for any high military position. So the Duke of Cambridge did actually direct the affairs of the army, interfered in everything, was supreme in everything, and I think it is not too much to say mismanaged everything. He stood in the way of all useful reforms; he sheltered old abuses; he was as dictatorial as though he had the military genius of a Wellington or a Von Moltke; he was as independent of public opinion as the Mikado of Japan. The kind of mistakes which were made and abuses which were committed under his administration were not such as to attract much of the attention or interest of the newspapers. In England the press, moreover, is not supposed to be at liberty to criticise princes. Of late some little efforts at daring innovation are made in this direction; but as a rule, unless a prince does something very wrong indeed, he is secure from any censure or even criticism on the part of the newspapers. There was, besides, one great practical difficulty in the way of any one inclined to criticise the military administration of the Duke of Cambridge. The War Department in England had grown to be a kind of anomalous two-headed institution. There is a Secretary of War, who sits in the House of Lords or the House of Commons, as the case may be, and whom every one can challenge, criticise, and censure as he pleases. There is the Commander-in-Chief. Which of these two functionaries is the superior? The theory of course is that the Secretary of War is supreme; that he is responsible to Parliament, and that every official in the department is responsible to him. But everybody in England knows that this is not the actual case. There stands in Pall Mall, not far from the residence of the Prince of Wales, a plain business-like structure, with a statue of the late Lord Herbert of Lea (the Sidney Herbert of Crimean days) in front of it; and this is the War Office, where the Secretary of War is in power. But there is in Whitehall another building far better known to Londoners and strangers alike; an old-fashioned, unlovely, shabby-looking sort of barrack, with a clock in its shapeless cupola and two small arches in its front, in each of which enclosures sits all day a gigantic horseman in steel cuirass and high jack-boots. The country visitor comes here to wonder at the size and the accoutrements of the splendid soldiers; the nursery-maid loves the spot, and gazes with open mouth and sparkling eyes at the athletic cavaliers, and too often, like Hylas sent with his urn to the fountain, "proposito florem prætulit officio," prefers looking at the gorgeous military carnation blazing before her to the duty of watching her infantile charge in the perambulator. This building is the famous "Horse Guards," where the Commander-in-Chief is enthroned. I suppose the theory of the thing was, that while the army system was to be shaped out and directed in the War Office, the actual details of practical administration were to be managed at the Horse Guards. But of late years the relations of the two departments appear to have got into an almost inextricable and hopeless muddle, so that no one can pretend to say where the responsibility of the War Office ends or the authority of the Horse Guards begins. The Duke of Cambridge, it is said, habitually acts upon his own authority and ignores the War Office altogether. Things are done by him of which the Secretary for War knows nothing until they are done. The late Sidney Herbert, a man devoted to the duties of the War Department, over which he presided for some years, once emphatically refused during a debate in the House of Commons to evade the responsibility of some step taken at the Horse Guards, by pleading that it was made without the knowledge of the War Office. He declared that he considered himself, as War Secretary, responsible to Parliament for everything done in any office of the War Department. But it was quite evident from the tone of his speech that the thing had been done without his knowledge or consent, and that if anybody but the Queen's cousin had done it there would have been a "row in the building." Now Sidney Herbert was an aristocrat of high rank, of splendid fortune, of unsurpassed social dignity and influence, of great political talents and reputation. If he then could not attempt to control and rebuke the Queen's cousin, how could such an attempt be expected from a man like Mr. Cardwell, the present War Secretary? Mr. Cardwell is a dull, steady-going, respectable man, who has no pretension to anything like the rank, social influence, or even popularity of Sidney Herbert. In fact, the War Secretaries stand sometimes in much the same relation toward the Duke of Cambridge that a New York judge occasionally holds toward one of the great leaders of the bar who pleads before him and is formally supposed to acknowledge his superior authority. The person holding the position nominally superior feels himself in reality quite "over-crowed," to use a Spenserian expression, by the influence, importance, and dignity of the other. Let any stranger in London who happens to be in the gallery of the House of Lords, observe the astonishing deference with which even a pure-blooded marquis or earl of antique title will receive the greeting of the Duke of Cambridge; and then say what chance there is of a War Secretary, who probably belongs to the middle or manufacturing classes, venturing to dictate to or rebuke so tremendous a magnifico. Lately an audacious critic of the Duke has started up in the person of a clever, vivacious young member of Parliament, George Otto Trevelyan, son of one of the ablest Indian administrators and nephew of Lord Macaulay. Trevelyan once held, I think, some subordinate place in the War Department, and he has lately been horrifying the conservatism and veneration of English society by boldly making speeches in which he attacks the Queen's cousin, declares that the latter is an injury and nuisance to the army system, that he stands in the way of all improvement, and that he ought to be abolished. But although most people do profoundly and potently believe what this saucy Trevelyan says, yet his words find little echo in public debate, and his direct motions in the House of Commons have been unsuccessful. The Duke, I perceive, has lately, however, descended so far from his position of supreme dignity as to defend himself in a public speech, and to claim the merit of having always been a progressive and indeed rather daring army reformer. But I do not believe the English Government or Parliament would ever have ventured to take one step to lessen the Duke of Cambridge's power of doing harm to the military service, were it not for the pressure of events with which England had nothing directly to do, and which nevertheless have proved too strong for the resistance even of princes and of vested interests. The practical dethronement of the Duke of Cambridge I hold to be as certain as any mortal event still in the future can well be declared. The anomaly, the inconvenience, the degradation which English Governments and Parliaments would have endured forever if left to themselves, may be regarded as destined to be swept away by the same flood which overwhelmed the military organization of France, and washed the Bonapartes off the throne of the Tuileries. The Duke of Cambridge too had to surrender at Sedan.

For with the overwhelming successes of Prussia and the unparalleled collapse of France, there arose in England so loud and general a cry for the reorganization of the decaying old army system that no Government could possibly attempt to disregard it. Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet had the sense and spirit to see that no middle course of reform would be worth anything. In medio tutissimus ibis would never apply to this case. Any reform must count on the obstinate opposition of vested interests—a tremendous power in English affairs; and the only way to bear down that opposition would be by introducing a reform so thorough and grand as to carry with it the enthusiasm of popular support. Therefore the Government have undertaken a new work of revolution, certainly not less bold than that which overthrew the Irish Church, and destined perhaps to have a still more decisive influence on the political organization of English society. One of the many changes this measure will introduce—and it is certain to be carried, first or last—will be the extinction of the anomaly now represented by the position of the Duke of Cambridge. I shall not inflict any of the details of the measure upon my readers in The Galaxy, and shall even give but slight attention to such of its main features as are of purely military character and import. But I shall endeavor briefly to make it clear that some of the changes it proposes to introduce will have a profound influence on the political and social condition of England, and are in fact steps in that great English revolution which is steadily marching on under our very eyes.

First comes the abolition of the purchase system as regards the commissions held by military officers. Except in certain regiments, and certain branches of the service outside England itself, the rule is that an officer obtains his commission by purchase. Promotion can be bought in the same way. A commission is a vested interest. The owner has paid so much for it, and expects to sell it for an equal sum. The regulation price recognized by law and the Horse Guards is by no means the actual price of the article. It is worth ever so much more to the holder, and he must of course have its real, not its regulation value. The pay in the English army is, for the officers, ridiculously small. The habits of the army, among officers, are ridiculously expensive. An officer is not expected to live upon his pay. Whether expected to do so or not, he could hardly accomplish the feat under any conditions; under the common conditions of an officers' mess-room the thing would be utterly impossible. Now let any reader ask himself what becomes of a department of the public service where you obtain admission by payment, and where when admitted you receive practically no remuneration? Of course it becomes a mere club and association for the wealthy and aristocratic; a brotherhood into which admission is sought for the sake of social distinction. Every man of rank in England will, as a matter of course, have one of his sons in the army. It is the right sort of thing to do, like hunting or going into the House of Commons. Then, on the other hand, every person who has made money sends one of his sons into the army, because thereby he acquires a stamp of gentility. Poverty and merit have no chance and no business there. It certainly is not true, as is commonly believed here, that promotion from the ranks never takes place; but speaking of the system as a whole, one may fairly say that promotion from the ranks is opposed to the ordinary regulation, and occurs so rarely that it need hardly be taken into our consideration here. Therefore the English army became an essentially aristocratic service. To be an officer was the right of the aristocratic, the luxury, ambition, and ornament of the wealthy. One is almost afraid now to venture on saying anything in praise of the French military system; but it had, if I do not greatly mistake, one regulation among others which honorably distinguished it from the English. I believe it was not permitted to a wealthy officer to distinguish himself from his fellows while in barracks by extravagance of expenditure. He had to live as the others lived. But the English system allowed full scope to wealth, and the result was that certain regiments prided themselves on luxury and ostentation, and a poor man, or even a man of moderate means, could not live in them. Add to all this that while the expenses were great and the pay next to nothing, there were certain valuable prizes, sinecures, and monopolies to be had in the army, which favoritism and family influence could procure, and which therefore rendered it additionally desirable that the control of the military organization should be retained in the hands of the aristocracy. John Bright described the military and diplomatic services of England as "a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the broken-down members of the British aristocracy." This was especially true of the military service, which had a large number of rich and pleasant prizes to be awarded at the uncontrolled discretion of the authorities. It might be fairly said that every aristocratic family had at least one scion in the army. Every aristocratic family had likewise one in the House of Commons; sometimes two, or three, or four sons and nephews. The mere numerical strength of the military officers who had seats in the House of Commons was enough to hold up a tremendous barrier in the way of army reform or political reform. It was as clear as light that a popular Parliament would among its very first works of reformation proceed to throw open the army to the competition of merit, independently of either aristocratic rank or moneyed influence. So the military men in the House of Commons were, with some few and remarkable exceptions, steady Tories and firm opponents of all reform either in the army or the political system. Year after year did gallant old De Lacy Evans bring forward his motion for the abolition of the purchase system in vain. He was always met by the supposed practical authority of the great bulk of the military members and by the dead weight of aristocratic influence and vested interests. The army, as then organized, was at once the fortress and the trophy of the English aristocracy. At last the effort at reform seemed to be given up altogether. Though humane reformers did at last succeed in getting rid of the detestable system of flogging in the army, the practice of trafficking in commissions seemed safer than ever. One difficulty in the way of its abolition was always pressed with special emphasis by persons who otherwise were prodigal enough of the public money—the cost such a measure would entail on the people of England. It would be impossible, of course, to abolish such a system without compensating those who had paid money for the commissions which thenceforward could be sold no more. The amount of money required for such compensation would be some forty millions of dollars. Moreover, when commissions are given away among all classes according to merit, the pay of officers will have to be raised. It would indeed be a cruel mockery to give poor Claude Melnotte an officer's rank if he does not at the same time get pay enough to enable him to live. Therefore for once the English aristocrats and Tories were heard to raise their voices in favor of the saving of public money; but they were only assuming the attitude of economists for the sake of upholding their own privileges and defending their vested interests. There will, of course, be a fierce and long fight made even still against the change, but the change, I take it, will be accomplished. The English army will cease to be an army officered exclusively from among the ranks of the aristocracy and the wealthy. Our time has seen no step attempted in English political affairs more distinctly democratic than this. I can hardly realize to my mind what England will be like when commissions and promotions in its military service are the recognized prizes of merit in whatever rank of life, and are won by open competition.

Next, the English Government, approaching rather delicately the difficulty about the Commander-in-Chief, propose to unite the two departments of the service under one roof. The Commander-in-Chief and his staff and offices will be transferred from the Horse Guards in Whitehall to the War Office in Pall Mall, and placed more directly under the control of the Secretary of War. This change must inevitably bring about the end at which it aims—the abolition of the embarrassing and injurious dualism of system now prevailing. It must indeed reduce the General commanding-in-chief to his proper position as the executive officer of the War Secretary, who is himself the servant of Parliament. Such a position would entail no restriction whatever on the military capacity or genius of the Commander-in-Chief were he another Marlborough; but it would make him responsible to somebody who is himself responsible to the House of Commons. I think it may be taken for granted that this will come to mean, sooner or later, the shelving of the Duke of Cambridge. It may be hoped that he will not consider it consistent with his dignity as a member of the royal family to remain in a position thus made virtually that of a subordinate. Some other place perhaps will be found for the cousin of the Queen. I have already heard some talk about the possibility and propriety of sending his Royal Highness as Lord Lieutenant to govern Ireland. Why not? There is a vile corpus convenient and ready to hand for any experiment. It would be quite in keeping with all the traditions of English rule, with the practice which was illustrated only a few years ago when the noisy and brainless scamp Sir Robert Peel, whom "Punch" christened "The Mountebank Member," was made Irish Secretary, if the Duke of Cambridge were allowed to soothe his offended dignity by practising his skilful hand on the government of Ireland.

Finally, the Government propose to introduce measures calculated to weld together as far as possible the regular and irregular forces of the country. There are in England three classes of soldiery—the regular army, the militia, and the volunteers. The militia constitute a force as nearly as possible corresponding with that in whose companionship Sir John Falstaff declined to march through Coventry. Bombastes Furioso or the Grande Duchesse hardly ever marshalled such a body of men as may be seen when a British militia regiment is turned out for exercise. Awkward country bumpkins and beer-swilling rowdies of the poacher class make up the bulk of the privates. They are a terror to any small town where they may happen to be exercising, and where not infrequently they finish up a day's drill by a general smashing of windows, sacking of shops, and plundering of inhabitants. The volunteers are a force composed of a much better class of men, and are capable, I think, of great military efficiency and service if properly organized. Of late the volunteer force has, I believe, been growing somewhat demoralized. The Government never gave it very cordial encouragement, its position was hardly defined, and the national enthusiasm out of which it sprang naturally began to languish. We in England have always owed our volunteer force to some sudden menace or dread of French invasion. It was so in the time of William Pitt. We all remember the famous sarcasm with which that statesman replied to the request of some volunteer regiments not to be sent out on foreign service. Pitt gravely assured them that they never should be sent out of the country unless in case of England's invasion. Erskine was a volunteer, and I think it was as an officer of volunteers that Gibbon said he acquired a practical knowledge of military affairs, which proved useful to him in describing the decline and fall of the Roman empire. Our present volunteer service originated in the last of the "three panics" described by Cobden—the fear of invasion by Louis Napoleon, the panic which Tennyson endeavored to foment by his weak and foolish "Form, form! Riflemen, form!" The volunteer force, however, continued to grow stronger and stronger long after the alarm had died away; and even though recently the progress of improvement seems to have been somewhat checked, and the volunteer body to have become lax in its organization, it appears to me that in its intelligence, its earnestness, and its physical capacity there exists the material out of which might be moulded a very valuable arm of the military service. The War Minister now proposes to take steps which shall render the militia a decent body, commanded by really qualified and responsible officers, which shall give better officers to the volunteers, and place these latter under more effective discipline, and which shall bring militia and volunteers into closer relationship with the regular army. How far these objects may be attained by the measures now under consideration I do not pretend to judge; but I cannot regard the present War Minister as a man highly qualified for the place he holds. Mr. Cardwell is an admirable clerk—patient, plodding, untiring; but I doubt whether he has any of the higher qualities of an administrator or much force of character. He is perhaps the very dullest speaker holding a marked position in the House of Commons. He is fluent, not as Gladstone and a river are fluent, but as the sand in an hour-glass is fluent. That sand itself is not more dull, colorless, monotonous, and dry, than is the eloquence of the War Minister. Mr. Cardwell is not always fortunate in his military prophecies. On the memorable night in last July when the news reached London that France had declared war against Prussia, Mr. Cardwell affirmed that that meant the occupation of Berlin by the French within a month. It must be remembered, however, as an excuse for the War Minister's unlucky prediction, that an English military commission sent to examine the two systems had shortly before reported wholly in favor of the French army organization and dead against that of Prussia.

The English Government, wisely, I think, decline to attempt the introduction of any measure for general and compulsory service, except as a last resource in desperate exigencies. The England of the future is not likely, I trust, to embroil herself much in Continental quarrels; and she may be quite expected to hold her own in the improbable event of any of her neighbors attempting to invade her. For myself, I can recollect no instance recorded by history of any foreign war wherein England took part, from which good temper, discretion, judgment, and justice would not alike have counselled her to hold aloof.

Such then are in substance the changes which are proposed for the reconstruction of the English army. The one grand reform or revolution is the abolition of the purchase system. This change will inevitably convert the army into a practical and regular profession, to which all classes will look as a possible means of providing for some of their children. It will have one advantage over the bar, that admission to the ranks of the officers will not necessarily involve the preliminary payment of any sum of money, however small. The profession will cease to be ornamental and aristocratic. It will no longer constitute one of the great props, one of the grand privileges, of the system of aristocracy. Its reorganization will be another and a bold step toward the establishment of that principle of equality which is of late years beginning to exercise so powerful a fascination over the popular mind of England. Caste had in Great Britain no such illustration and no such bulwark as the army system presented. I should be slow to undertake to limit the possible depth and extent of the influence which the impulse given by this reform may exercise over the political condition of England. I can hardly realize to myself by any effort of imagination the effect which such a change will work in what is called society in England, and in the literature, especially the romantic and satirical literature, of the country. Are we then no longer to have Rawdon Crawley, and Sir Derby Oaks, and "Captain Gandaw of the Pinks"? Was Black-Bottle Cardigan really the last of a race? Will people a generation hence fail to understand what was meant by the intimation that "the Tenth don't dance"? Is Guy Livingstone to become as utter a tradition and myth as Guy of Warwick? Is the English military officer to be henceforward simply a hard-working, well-qualified public servant, who obtains his place in open competition by virtue of his merits? Appreciate the full meaning of the change who can, it is too much for me; I can only wonder, admire, and hope. But it is surely not possible that the Duke of Cambridge, cousin of the Queen, can continue to preside over a service wherein the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker have as good a chance of obtaining commissions for their sons as the marquis or the earl or the great millionaire. Only think of the flood of light which will be poured in upon all the details of the military organization, when once it becomes the direct interest of each of us to see that the profession is properly managed in which his own son, however poor in purse and humble in rank, has a chance of obtaining a commission! I believe the Duke of Cambridge had and has an honest hatred and contempt for the coarse and noisy interference of public and unprofessional criticism where the business of the sacred Horse Guards is concerned. Once, when goaded on to sheer desperation by comments in the papers, his Royal Highness actually wrote or dictated a letter of explanation to the "Times," signed with the monosyllabic grandeur of his name "George," we all held up the hands and eyes of wonder that such things had come to pass, that royal princes condescended to write to newspapers, and yet the world rolled on. I cannot think the Duke will abide the awful changes that are coming. He will probably pass into the twilight and repose of some dignified office, where blundering has no occupation and obstinacy can do no harm. Everything considered, I think we may say of him that he might have been a great deal worse than he was. My own impression is that he is rather better than his reputation. If the popular voice of England were to ask in the words of Shakespeare's "Lucio," "And was the Duke a fleshmonger, a fool, and a coward, as you then reported him to be?" I might answer, in the language of the pretended friar, "You must change persons with me ere you make that my report. You indeed spoke so of him, and much more, much worse."

BRIGHAM YOUNG.

Those among us who are not too young to have had "Evenings at Home" for a schoolday companion and instructor will remember the story called "Eyes and No Eyes" and its moral. They will remember that, of the two little boys who accomplished precisely the same walk at the same time, one saw all manner of delightful and wonderful things, while the other saw nothing whatever that was worth recollection or description. The former had eyes prepared to see, and the other had not; and that made all the difference. I have to confess that, during a recent visit to Salt Lake City—a visit lasting nearly as many days as that out of which my friend, Hepworth Dixon, made the better part of a volume—I must have been in the condition of the dull little reprobate who had no eyes to see the wonders which delighted his companion. For, so far as the city itself, its streets and its structures, are concerned, I really saw nothing in particular. A muddy little country town, with one or two tolerably decent streets, wherein a few handsome stores are mixed up with old shanties, is not much to see in any part of the civilized world. Other travellers have seen a wondrous sight on the very same spot. They have seen a large and beautiful city, with spacious, splendid streets, shaded by majestic trees and watered by silvery currents flowing in marble channels; they have seen a city combining the cleanliness and activity of young America with the picturesqueness and dignity of the Orient; a city which would be beautiful and wonderful anywhere, but which, raised up here on the bare bosom of the desert, is a phenomenon of apparently almost magical creation. Naturally, therefore, they have gone into raptures over the energy, and industry, and æstheticism of the Mormons; and, even while condemning sternly the doctrine and practice of polygamy, they have nevertheless been haunted by an uneasy doubt as to whether, after all, there is not some peculiar virtue in the having half a dozen wives together which endows a man with super-human gifts as a builder of cities. Otherwise how comes this beautiful and perfect city, here on the unfriendly and unsheltering waste?

Well, I saw no beautiful and wonderful city, although I spent several days in the Mormon capital, and tramped every one of its streets, and lanes, and roads, scores of times over. Where others beheld the glorious virgin, Dulcinea del Toboso, radiant in beauty and bedight with queenly apparel, I saw only the homely milkmaid, with her red elbows and her russet gown. In plain words, the Mormon city appeared to me just a commonplace little country town, and no more. I saw in it no evidences of preternatural energy or skill. It has one decent street, wherein may be found, at most, half a dozen well-built and attractive-looking shops. It has a good many comfortable residences in the environs. It has two or three decentish hotels, like the hotels of any other fiftieth-class country town. It has the huge Tabernacle, a gigantic barn merely, a simple covering in and over of so much space—a thing in shape "very like a land turtle," as President George L. Smith, First Councillor of Brigham Young, observed to me. Salt Lake City has no lighting and no draining, except such draining as is done by the little runnels of water to be found in every street, and which remind one faintly and sadly of dear, quaint old Berne in Switzerland. At night you have to trudge along in the darkness and the mud, or slush, or dust, and it is a perilous quest the seeking of your way home, for at every crossing you must look or feel for the plank which bridges over the artificial brooklets already described, or you plunge helpless and hopeless into the little torrent. Decidedly, a "one-horse" place, in my estimation; I don't see how men endowed with average heads and arms could for twenty years have been occupied in the building of a city, and produced anything less creditable than this. I do not wonder at the complacency and self-conceit with which all the Mormon residents talk of the beauty of their city and the wonderful things they have accomplished, when Gentile travellers of credit and distinction have glorified this shabby, swampy, ricketty, common-place, vulgar, little hamlet into a town of sweetness and light, of symmetry and beauty. For my part, and for those who were with me, I can only say that we spent the first day or so in perpetual wonder as to whether this really could be the Mormon city of which we had read so many bewildering and glorious descriptions. And the theatre—oh, Hepworth Dixon, I like you much, and I think you are often abused and assailed most unjustly; but how could you write so about that theatre? Or was the beautiful temple of the drama which you saw here deliberately taken down, and did they raise in its place the big, gaunt, ugly, dirty, dismal structure which I saw, and in which I and my companions made part of a dreary dozen or two of audience, and blinked in the dim, depressing light of mediæval oil-lamps? I observe that, when driven to bay by sceptical inquiry, complacent Mormons generally fall back on the abundance of shade-trees in the streets. Let them have the full credit of this plantation. They have put trees in the streets, and the trees have grown; and, when we observe to a Mormon that we have seen rows of trees similarly growing in even smaller towns of the benighted European continent, he evidently thinks it is our monogamic perversity and prejudice which force us to deny the wondrous works of Mormonism. Making due allowance for every natural difficulty, remembering how nearly every implement, and utensil, and scrap of raw material had to be brought from across yonder rampart of mountains, and from hundreds of miles away, I yet fail to see anything very remarkable about this little Mormon town. Perhaps no other set of people could have made much more of the place; I cannot help thinking that no other set of people who were not Digger Indians could have made much less.

In fact, to retain the proper and picturesque ideas of Salt Lake City, one never ought to have entered the town at all. We ought to have remained on this hillside, from which you can look across that most lovely of all valleys on earth, cinctured as it is by a perfect girdle of mountains, the outlines of which are peerless and ineffable in their symmetry and beauty. The air is as clear, the skies are as blue, the grass as green as the dream of a poet or painter could show him. There below, fringed and mantled in the clustering green of its trees, you see the city, with the long, low, rounded dome or back of the Tabernacle rising broad and conspicuous. Looking down, you may well believe that the city thus exquisitely placed, thus deliciously shaded and surrounded, is itself a wonder of picturesqueness and symmetry. Why go down into the two or three dirty, irregular, shabby little streets, with their dust or mud for road pavement, their nozzling pigs trotting along the sidewalks, their dung-heaps and masses of decaying vegetable matter, their utterly commonplace, mean and disheartening aspect everywhere? But then we did go down—and where others had seen a fair and goodly, aye, and queenly city, we saw a muddy, uninteresting, straggling little village, disfiguring the lovely plain on which it stood.

Profound disappointment, then, is my first sensation in Salt Lake City. The place is so like any other place! Certainly, one receives a bracing little shock every now and then, which admonishes him that, despite the small, shabby stores and the pigs, and the dunghills, he is not in the regions of merely commonplace dirt. For instance, we learn that the proprietor of the hotel where we are staying has four wives; and it is something odd to talk with a civil, respectable, burgess-like man, dressed in ordinary coat and pantaloons, and wearing mutton-chop whiskers—a sort of man who in England would probably be a church-warden—and who has more consorts than an average Turk. Then again it is startling to be asked, "Do you know Mr. ——?" and when I say "No, I don't," to be told, "Oh, you ought to know him. He came from England, and he has lately married two such nice English girls!" One morning, too, we have another kind of shock. There is a pretty little chambermaid in our hotel, a new-comer apparently, and she happens to find out that my wife and I had lived for many years in that part of the North of England from which she comes herself, whereupon she bursts into a perfect passion and tempest of tears, declares that she would rather be in her grave than in Salt Lake City, that she was deceived into coming, that the Mormonism she heard preached by the Mormon propaganda in England was a quite different thing from the Mormonism practised here, and that her only longing was to get out of the place, anyhow, forever. The girl seemed to be perfectly, passionately sincere. What could be done for her? Apparently nothing. She had spent all her money in coming out; and she seemed to be strongly under the conviction that, even if she had money, she could not get away. An influence was evidently over her which she had not the courage or strength of mind to attempt to resist, or even to elude. Doubtless, as she was a very pretty girl, she would be very soon sealed to some ruling elder. She said her sister had come with her, but the sister was in another part of the city, and since their arrival—only a few days, however—they had not met. My wife endeavored to console or encourage her, but the girl could only sob and protest that she never could learn to endure the place, but that she could not get away, and that she would rather be in her grave. We spoke of this case to one of the civil officers of the United States stationed in the city, and he shook his head and thought nothing could be done. The influence which enslaved this poor girl was not wholly that of force, but a power which worked upon her senses and her superstitions. I should think an underground railway would be a valuable institution to establish in connection with the Mormon city.

I well remember that when I lived in Liverpool, some ten or a dozen years ago, the Mormon propaganda, very active there, always kept the polygamy institution modestly in the background. Proselytes were courted and won by descriptions of a new Happy Valley, of a City of the Blest, where eternal summer shone, where the fruits were always ripe, where the earth smiled with a perpetual harvest, where labor and reward were plenty for all, and where the outworn toilers of Western Europe could renew their youth like the eagles. I remember, too, the remarkable case of a Liverpool family having a large business establishment in the most fashionable street of the great town, who were actually beguiled into selling off all their goods and property and migrating, parents, sons, and daughters, to the land of promise beyond the American wilderness, and how, before people had ceased to wonder at their folly, they all came back, humiliated, disgusted, cured. They had money and something like education, and they were a whole family, and so they were able, when they found themselves deceived, to effect a rapid retreat at the cost of nothing worse than disappointment and pecuniary loss. But for the poor, pretty serving-lass from Lancashire I do not know that there is much hope. Poverty and timidity and superstitious weakness will help to lock the Mormon chains around her. Perhaps she will get used to the place in time. Ought one to wish that she may—or rather to echo her own prayer, and petition that she may find an early grave? The graveyards are densely planted with tombs here in this sacred city of Mormonism.

The place is unspeakably dreary. Hardly any women are ever seen in the streets, except on the Sunday, when all the families pour in to service in the huge Tabernacle. Most of the dwelling houses round the city are pent in behind walls. Most of the houses, too, have their dismal little sucursales, one or two or more, built on to the sides—and in each of these additions or wings to the original building a different wife and family are caged. There are no flower gardens anywhere. Children are bawling everywhere. Sometimes a wretched, slatternly, dispirited woman is seen lounging at the door or hanging over the gate of a house with a baby at her breast. More often, however, the house, or clump of houses, gives no external sign of life. It stands back gloomy in the sullen shade of its thick fruit trees, and might seem untenanted if one did not hear the incessant yelling of the children. We saw the women in hundreds, probably in thousands, at the Tabernacle on the Sunday—and what women they were! Such faces, so dispirited, depressed, shapeless, hopeless, soulless faces! No trace of woman's graceful pride and neatness in these slatternly, shabby, slouching, listless figures; no purple light of youth over these cheeks; no sparkle in these half-extinguished eyes. I protest that only in some of the cretin villages of the Swiss mountains have I seen creatures in female form so dull, miserable, moping, hopeless as the vast majority of these Mormon women. As we leave the Tabernacle, and walk slowly down the street amid the crowd, we see two prettily-dressed, lively-looking girls, who laugh with each other and are seemingly happy, and we thank Heaven that there are at least two merry, spirited girls in Salt Lake City. A few days after we meet our blithesome pair at Mintah station; and they are travelling with their father and mother on to San Francisco, whither we too are going—and we learn that they are not Mormons, but Gentiles—pleasant lasses from Philadelphia who had come with their parents to have a passing look at the externals of Mormonism.

My object, however, in writing this paper was to speak of the chief, Brigham Young himself, rather than of his city or his system. We saw Brigham Young, were admitted to prolonged speech of him, and received his parting benediction. The interview took place in the now famous house with the white walls and the gilded beehive on the top. We were received in a kind of office or parlor, hung round with oil paintings of the kind which in England we regard as "furniture," and which represented all the great captains and elders of Mormonism. Joseph Smith is there, and Brigham Young, and George L. Smith, now First Councillor; and various others whom to enumerate would be long, even if I knew or remembered their names. President Young was engaged just at the moment when we came, but his Secretary, a Scotchman, I think, and President George L. Smith, are very civil and cordial. George L. Smith is a huge, burly man, with a Friar Tuck joviality of paunch and visage, and a roll in his bright eye which, in some odd, undefined sort of way, suggests cakes and ale. He talks well, in a deep rolling voice, and with a dash of humor in his words and tone—he it is who irreverently but accurately likens the Tabernacle to a land-turtle. He speaks with immense admiration and reverence of Brigham Young, and specially commends his abstemiousness and hermit-like frugality in the matter of eating and drinking. Presently a door opens, and the oddest, most whimsical figure I have ever seen off the boards of an English country theatre stands in the room; and in a moment we are presented formally to Brigham Young.

There must be something of impressiveness and dignity about the man, for, odd as is his appearance and make up, one feels no inclination to laugh. But such a figure! Brigham Young wears a long-tailed, high-collared coat; the swallow-tails nearly touch the ground; the collar is about his ears. In shape the garment is like the swallow-tail coats which negro-melodists sometimes wear, or like the dandy English dress coat one can still see in prints in some of the shops of St. James street, London. But the material of Brigham's coat is some kind of rough, gray frieze, and the garment is adorned with huge brass buttons. The vest and trowsers are of the same material. Round the neck of the patriarch is some kind of bright crimson shawl, and on the patriarch's feet are natty little boots of the shiniest polished leather. I must say that the gray frieze coat of antique and wonderful construction, the gaudy crimson shawl, and the dandy boots make up an incongruous whole which irresistibly reminds one at first of the holiday get-up of some African King who adds to a great coat, preserved as an heirloom since Mungo Park's day, a pair of modern top-boots, and a lady's bonnet. The whole appearance of the patriarch, when one has got over the African monarch impression, is like that of a Suffolk farmer as presented on the boards of a Surrey theatre. But there is decidedly an amount of composure and even of dignity about Brigham Young which soon makes one forget the mere ludicrousness of the patriarch's external appearance. Young is a handsome man—much handsomer than his portrait on the wall would show him. Close upon seventy years of age, he has as clear an eye and as bright a complexion as if he were a hale English farmer of fifty-five. But there is something fox-like and cunning lurking under the superficial good-nature and kindliness of the face. He seems, when he speaks to you most effusively and plausibly, to be quietly studying your expression to see whether he is really talking you over or not. The expression of his face, especially of his eyes, strangely and provokingly reminds me of Kossuth. I think I have seen Kossuth thus watch the face of a listener to see whether or not the listener was conquered by his wonderful power of talk. Kossuth's face, apart from its intellectual qualities, appeared to me to express a strange blending of vanity, craft, and weakness; and Brigham Young's countenance now seems to show just such a mixture of qualities. Great force of character the man must surely have; great force of character Kossuth, too, had; but the face of neither man seemed to declare the possession of such a quality. Brigham Young decidedly does not impress me as a man of great ability; but rather as a man of great plausibility. I can at once understand how such a man, with such an eye and tongue, can easily exert an immense influence over women. Beyond doubt he is a man of genius; but his genius does not reveal itself, to me at least, in his face or his words. He speaks in a thin, clear, almost shrill tone, and with much apparent bonhomie. After a little commonplace conversation about the city, its improvements, approaches etc., the Prophet voluntarily goes on to speak of himself, his system, and his calumniators. His talk soon flows into a kind of monologue, and is indeed a curious rhapsody of religion, sentimentality, shrewdness and egotism. Sometimes several sentences succeed each other in which his hearers hardly seem to make out any meaning whatever, and Brigham Young appears a grotesque kind of Coleridge. Then again in a moment comes up a shrewd meaning very distinctly expressed, and with a dash of humor and sarcasm gleaming fantastically amid the scriptural allusions and the rhapsody of unctuous words. The purport of the whole is that Brigham Young has been misunderstood, misprized, and calumniated, even as Christ was; that were Christ to come up to-morrow in New York or London, He would be misunderstood, misprized, and caluminated, even as Brigham Young now is; and that Brigham Young is not to be dismayed though the stars in their courses should fight against him. He protests with especial emphasis and at the same time especial meekness, with eyes half closed and delicately-modulated voice, against the false reports that any manner of force or influence whatever is, or ever was, exercised to keep men or women in Salt Lake City against their will. He appeals to the evidence of our own eyes, and asks us whether we have not seen for ourselves that the city is free to all to come and go as they will. At this time we had not heard the story told by the poor little maid at the hotel; but in any case the evidence of our eyes could go no farther than to prove that travellers like ourselves were free to enter and depart. We have, however, little occasion to trouble ourselves about answering; for the Prophet keeps the talk pretty well all to himself. His manner is certainly not that of a man of culture, but it has a good deal of the quiet grace and self-possession of what we call a gentleman. There is nothing prononcé or vulgar about him. Even when he is most rhapsodical his speech never loses its ease and gentleness of tone. He is bland, benevolent, sometimes quietly pathetic in manner. He poses himself en victime, but with the air of one who does this regretfully and only from a disinterested sense of duty. I begin very soon to find that there is no need of my troubling myself much to keep up the conversation; that my business is that of a listener; that the Prophet conceives himself to be addressing some portion of the English or American press through my humble medium. So I listen and my companion listens; and Brigham Young talks on; and I do declare and acknowledge that we are fast drifting into a hazy mental condition by virtue of which we begin to regard the Mormon President as a victim of cruel persecution, a suffering martyr and an injured angel!

Time, surely, that the interview should come to a close. We tear ourselves away, and the Prophet dismisses us with a fervent and effusive blessing. "Good-bye—do well, mean well, pray always. Christ be with you, God be with you, God bless you." All this, and a great deal more to the same effect, was uttered with no vulgar, maw-worm demonstrativeness of tone or gesture, no nasal twang, no uplifted hands; but quietly, earnestly, as if it came unaffectedly from the heart of the speaker. We took leave of Brigham Young, and came away a little puzzled as to whether we had been conversing with an impostor or a fanatic, a Peter the Hermit or a Tartuffe. One thing, however, is clear to me. I do not say that Brigham Young is a Tartuffe; but I know now how Tartuffe ought to be played so as to render the part more effective and more apparently natural and lifelike than I have ever seen it on French or English stage.

No one can doubt the sincerity of the homage which the Mormons in general pay to Brigham Young. One man, of the working class, apparently, with whom I talked at the gate of the Tabernacle, spoke almost with tears in his eyes of the condescension the Prophet always manifested. My informant told me that he was at one time disabled by some hurt or ailment; and, the first day that he was able to come into the street again, President Young happened to be passing in his carriage, and caught sight of the convalescent. "He stopped his carriage, sir, called me over to him, addressed me by my name, shook hands with me, asked me how I was getting on, and said he was glad to see me out again." The poor man was as proud of this as a French soldier might have been if the Little Corporal had recognized him and called him by his name. There is no flattery which the great can offer to the humble like this way of addressing the man by his right name, and thus proving that the identity of the small creature has lived clearly in the memory of the great being. Many a renowned commander has endeared himself to the soldiers whom he regarded and treated only as the instruments of his business, by the mere fact that he took care to remember men's names. They would gladly die for one who could be so nobly gracious, and could thus prove that they were regarded by him as worthy to occupy each a distinct place in his busy mind. The niggardliness and selfishness of John, Duke of Marlborough, the savage recklessness of Claverhouse, were easily forgotten by the poor private soldiers whom each commander made it his business, when occasion required, to address correctly by their appropriate names of Tom, Dick, or Harry. Lord Palmerston governed the House of Commons and most of those outside it with whom he usually came into contact, by just such little arts or courtesies as this. In one of Messrs. Erckmann and Chatrian's novels we read of a soldier who declares himself ready to go to the death for Marshal Ney because the Marshal, who originally belonged to the same district as himself, had just recognized his fellow-countryman and called him by his name. But the hero of the novel is somewhat grim and sarcastic, and he thinks it was not so wonderful a condescension that Ney should have recognized an old comrade and called him by his name. Perhaps the hero of the tale had not himself received any such recognition from Ney—perhaps if it had been vouchsafed to him he, too, would have been ready to go to the death. Anyhow, this correct calling of names, and quick recognition has always been a great power in the governing of men and women. "Deal you in words," is the advice of Mephistophiles to the student, in Faust, "and you may leave others to do the best they can with things." I was able to appreciate the governing power of Brigham Young all the better when I had heard the expression of this poor Mormon's gratitude and homage to the great President who had shaken hands with him and addressed him promptly and correctly by his name.

This same Mormon was very communicative. Indeed, as a rule, I found most of the men in Salt Lake City ready and even eager to discuss their "peculiar institution," and to invite Gentile opinion on it. He showed us his two wives, and declared that they lived together in perfect harmony and happiness; never had a word of quarrel, but were contented and loving as two sisters. He delivered a panegyric on the moral condition of Salt Lake City, where, he declared, there was no dishonesty, no drunkenness, and no prostitution. I believe he was correct in his description of the place. From many quite impartial authorities I heard the same accounts of the honesty of the Mormons. There certainly is no drunkenness to be observed anywhere openly, and I believe (although I have heard others assert the contrary) that Salt Lake City is really and truly free from this vice; and I suppose it goes without saying that there is little or no prostitution in a place where a man is expected to keep as many wives as his means will allow him. Intelligent Mormons rely immensely on this absence of prostitution as a justification of their system. They seem to think that when they have said, "We have no prostitutes," all is said; and that the Gentile, with the shames of London, Paris and New York burning in his memory and his conscience, must be left without a word of reply. Brigham Young, in conversation with me, dwelt much on this absence of prostitution. Orson Pratt preached in the Tabernacle during our stay a sermon obviously "at" the Gentile visitors, who were just then specially numerous; and he drew an emphatic contrast between the hideous profligacy of the Eastern cities and the purity of the Salt Lake community. I must say, for myself, that I do not think the question can thus be settled; I do not think prostitution so great an evil as polygamy. If this blunt declaration should shock anybody's moral feelings I am sorry for it; but it is none the less the expression of my sincere conviction. Pray do not set me down as excusing prostitution. I think it the worst of all social evils—except polygamy. I think polygamy the worse evil, because I am convinced that, regarded from a physiological, moral, religious, and even merely poetical and sentimental point of view, the only true social bond to be sought and maintained and justified is the loving union of one man with one woman—at least until death shall part the two. Now, I regard the existence of prostitution as a proof that some men and women fail to keep to the right path. I look on polygamy as a proof that a whole community is going directly the wrong way. No man proposes to himself to lead a life of profligacy. He falls into it. He would get out of it if he only could—if the world and the flesh and the devil were not now and then too strong for him. But the polygamist deliberately sets up and justifies and glorifies a system which is as false to physiology as it is to morals. Observe that I do not say the polygamist is necessarily an immoral man. Doubtless he is often—in Utah I really believe he is commonly—a sincere, devoted, mistaken man, who honestly believes himself to be doing right. But when he attempts to vindicate his system on the ground that it banishes prostitution, I, for myself, declare that I believe a society which has to put up with prostitution is in better case and hope than one which deliberately adopts polygamy. I am emphatic in expressing this opinion because, as I am opposed to any stronghanded or legal movement whatever to put down Brigham Young and his system, I desire to have it clearly understood that my opinions on the subject of polygamy are quite decided, and that no one who has clamored, or may hereafter clamor, for the uprooting of Mormonism by fire and sword, can have less sympathy than I have with Mormonism's peculiar institution.

Let me return to Brigham Young. I saw the Prophet but twice—once in the street and once in his own house, where the interview took place which I have described. The day after that on which I last saw him he left Salt Lake City and went into the country—some people said to avoid the necessity of meeting Mr. Colfax, who was just then expected to arrive with his party from the West. My impressions, therefore, of Brigham Young and his personal character are necessarily hasty, and probably superficial. I can only say that he did not impress me either as a man of great genius, or as a mere charlatan. My impression is that he is a sincere man—that is to say, a man who sincerely believes in himself, accepts his own impulses, prejudices and passions as divine instincts and intuitions to be the law of life for himself and others, and who, therefore, has attained that supreme condition of utterly unsparing and pitiless selfishness when the voice of self is listened to as the voice of God. With such a sincerity is quite consistent the adoption of every craft and trick in the government of men and women. Nobody can doubt that Napoleon I. was perfectly sincere as regards his faith in himself, his destiny, and his duty; and yet there was no trick of lawyer, or play-actor, or priest, of which he would not condescend to avail himself if it served his purpose. This is not the sincerity of a Pascal, or a Garibaldi, or a Garrison; but it is just as genuine and infinitely more common. It is the kind of sincerity which we meet every day in ordinary life, when we see some dogmatic, obstinate father of a family or sense-carrier of a small circle trying to mould every will and conscience and life under his control according to his own pedantic standard, and firmly confident all the time that his own perverseness and egotism are a guiding inspiration from heaven. After all, the downright, conventional stage-hypocrite is the rarest of all beings in real life. I sometimes doubt whether there ever was in rerum naturâ any one such creature. I suppose Tartuffe had persuaded himself into self-worship, into the conviction that everything he said and did must be right. I look upon Brigham Young as a man of such a temperament and character. Cunning and crafty he undoubtedly is, unless all evidences of eye, and lip, and voice belie him; but we all know that many a fanatic who boldly and cheerfully mounted the funeral pile or the scaffold for his creed had over and over again availed himself of all the tricks of craft and cunning to maintain his ascendancy over his followers. The fanatic is often crafty just as the madman is: the presence of craft in neither case disproves the existence of sincerity.

I believe Brigham Young to be simply a crafty fanatic. That he professes and leads his creed of Mormonism merely to obtain lands and beeves and wives, I do not believe, although this seems to be the general impression among the Gentiles who visit his city. I am convinced that he regards himself as a prophet and a heaven-appointed leader, and that this belief prevents him from seeing how selfish he is in one sense and how ridiculous in another. Any man who can deliberately put on such a coat in combination with such a pair of boots, as Brigham Young displayed during my interview with him, must have a faith in himself which would sustain him in anything. No human creature capable of looking at any two sides of a question where he himself was concerned, ever did or could present himself in public and expect to be reverenced when arrayed in such uncouth and preposterous toggery.

I cannot pretend to have had any extraordinary revelations of the inner mysteries or miseries of Mormonism made to me during my stay at Salt Lake City. Other travellers, nearly all other travellers indeed, have apparently been more fortunate or more pushing and persevering. I fancy it is rather difficult just now to get to know much of the interior of Mormon households; and I confess that I never could quite understand how people, otherwise honorable and upright, can think themselves justified in worming their way into Mormon confidences, and then making profit one way or another by revelations to the public. But one naturally and unavoidably hears, in Salt Lake City, of things which are deeply significant and which he may without scruple put into print. For example—there was a terrible pathos to my mind in the history of a respectable and intelligent woman who, years and years ago, when her life, now fading, was in its prime, married a man now a shining light of Mormonism, whose photograph you may see anywhere in Salt Lake City. She has been superseded since by divers successive wives; she is now striving in a condition far worse than widowhood to bring up her seven or eight children, and she has not been favored with even a passing call for more than a year and a half by the husband of her youth, who lives with the newest of his wives a few hundred yards away. I am told that such things are perfectly common; that the result of the system is to plant in Utah a number of families which may be described practically as households without husbands and fathers. I believe the lady of whom I have just spoken accepts her destiny with sad and firm resignation. Her faith in the religion of Mormonism is unshaken, and she regards her forlorn and widowed life as the heaven-appointed cross, by the bearing of which she is to win her eternal crown. Of course the Indian widows regard their bed of flames, the Russian women-fanatics behold their mutilated and mangled breasts with a similar enthusiasm of hope and superstition. But none the less ghastly and appalling is the monstrous faith which exacts and glorifies such unnatural sacrifices. These dreary homes, widowed not by death, seem to be the saddest, most shocking birth of Mormonism. After all, this is not the polygamy of the East, bad as that may be. "Give us," exclaimed M. Thiers in the French Chamber, three or four years ago, when Imperialism had reached the zenith of its despotic power—"give us liberty as in Austria!" So I can well imagine one of these superseded and lonely wives in Salt Lake City, crying aloud in the bitterness of her heart, "Give us polygamy as in Turkey!"

That the thing is a religion, however hideously it may show, I do not doubt. I mean that I feel no doubt that the great majority of the Mormon men are drawn to and kept in Mormonism by a belief in its truth and vital force as a religion. I do not believe that conscious and hypocritical sensuality is the leading impulse in making them or keeping them members of the Mormon church. I never heard of any community where a sensual man found any difficulty in gratifying his sensuality; nor are the vast majority of the Mormons men belonging to a class on whom a severe public opinion would bear so directly that they must necessarily wander thousands of miles away across the desert in order to be able comfortably to gratify their immoral propensities. To me, therefore, the possibility which appears most dangerous of all is the chance of any sudden crusade, legal or otherwise, being set on foot against this perverted and unfortunate people. Left to itself, I firmly believe that Mormonism will never long bear the glare of daylight, the throng of witnesses, the intelligent rivalry, the earnest and active criticism, poured in and forced in upon it by the Pacific railroads. But if it can bear all this then it can bear anything whatever which human ingenuity or force can put in arms against it; and it will run its course and have its day, let the Federal Hercules himself do what he may. Meanwhile it would be well to bear in mind that Mormonism has thus far cumbered the earth for comparatively a very few years; that all its members there in Utah counted together would hardly equal the population of a respectable street in London; and that at this moment the whole concern is ricketty and shaky, and threatens to tumble to pieces. I know that some of the ruling elders are panting for persecution; that they are openly doing their very best to "draw fire;" that they are daily endeavoring to work on the fears or the passions of Federal officials resident at Salt Lake by threats of terrible deeds to be done in the event of any attempt being made to interfere with Mormonism. Many of these Mormon apostles, dull, vulgar and clownish as they seem, have foresight enough to see that their system sadly needs just now the stimulus of a little persecution, and have fanatical courage enough to put themselves gladly in the front of any danger for the sake of sowing by their martyrdom the seed of the church. "That man," said William the Third of England, speaking of an inveterate conspirator against him "is determined to be made a victim, and I am determined not to make him one." I hope the United States will deal with the Mormons in a similar spirit. At the same time, I would ask my brothers of the pen whether those of them who have visited Salt Lake City have not made the place seem a good deal more wonderful, more alluringly mysterious, more grandly paradoxical in its nature, than it really is? I feel convinced that if people in Lancashire and Wales and Sweden had all been made distinctly aware that Salt Lake City is only a dusty or muddy little commonplace country hamlet, where labor is not less hard and is not any better paid than in dozens or scores of small hamlets this side the Missouri, one vast temptation to emigrate thither, the temptation supplied by morbid curiosity and ignorant wonder, would never have had any conquering power, and Mormonism would have been deprived of many thousand votaries. For, regarded in an artistic point of view, the City of the Saints is a vulgar sham; a trumpery humbug; and I verily believe that it has swelled into importance not more through the fanatical energy of its governing elders and the ignorance of their followers, than through the extravagant exaggeration and silly wonder of most of its hostile visitors and critics.

THE LIBERAL TRIUMVIRATE OF ENGLAND.

A year ago I happened to be talking with some French friends at a dinner-table in Paris, about the Reform agitation then going on in England. "We admire your great orators and leaders," said an enthusiastic French gentleman; "your Bright, your Beales"—and he was warming to the subject when he saw that I was smiling, and he at once pulled up, and asked me earnestly whether he had said anything ridiculous. I endeavored to explain to him gently that in England we did not usually place our Bright and our Beales on exactly the same level—that the former was our greatest orator, our most powerful leader, and the latter a respectable, earnest gentleman of warm emotions and ordinary abilities whom chance had made the figure-head of a passing and vehement agitation, and who would probably be forgotten the day after to-morrow or thereabouts.

My French friend did not seem convinced. He had seen Mr. Beales's name in the London papers quite as often and as prominently for some months as Mr. Bright's; and, moreover, he had met Mr. Beales at dinner, and did not like to be told that he had not thereby made the acquaintance of a great tribune of the British people. So I dropped the subject and allowed our Bright and and our Beales to rank together without farther protest.

Here in New York, where English politics are understood infinitely better than in Paris, I have noticed not a little of this "Bright and Beales" classification when people talk of the leaders of English Liberalism. I have heard, with surprise, this or that respectable member of Parliament, who never for a moment dreamed of being classed among the chiefs of his party, exalted to a place of equality with Gladstone or Bright. In truth the English Liberal party (I mean now the advancing and popular party—not the old Whigs) has only three men who can be called leaders. After Gladstone, Bright, and Mill there comes a huge gap—and then follow the subalterns, of whom one might name half a dozen having about equal rank and influence, and of whom you may choose any favorite you like. Take, for example, Mr. W. E. Forster, Mr. Stansfeld, Mr. Thomas Hughes, the O'Donoghue, Mr. Coleridge (who, however, is marked out for the judicial bench, and therefore need hardly be counted), and one or two others, and you have the captains of the advanced Liberal party. The Liberals are not rich in rising talent; at least there seems no man of the younger political generation who gives any promise of commanding ability. They have many good debaters and clever politicians, but I see no "pony Gladstone" to succeed him who used to be called the "pony Peel;" and the man has yet to show himself in whom the House of Commons can hope for a future Bright. The great Liberals of our day have apparently not the gift of training disciples in order that the latter may become apostles in their time. Like Cavour, they are too earnest about the work and do too much of it themselves to have leisure or inclination for teaching and pushing others.

Officially Mr. Gladstone has been, of course, for several years the leader of the party. He is formally invested with all the insignia of command. He is indeed the only possible leader; for he is the only man who has the slightest chance just now of commanding the allegiance of the old Whigs with their dukes and earls, and the young Radicals with their philosophers, their Comtists, their Irish Nationalists, and their working men. But the true soul and voice and heart of the Liberal party pay silent allegiance to John Bright. He is, by universal acknowledgment, the maker of the Reform agitation and the Reform Bill.

Mr. Disraeli has over and over again flung in the face of Mr. Gladstone the fact that Bright, and not he, is the master spirit of Radicalism. Of late the Tories have taken to praising and courting Bright incessantly and ostentatiously, and contrasting his calm, consistent wisdom with Gladstone's impetuosity and fitfulness. Of course both Bright and Gladstone thoroughly understand the meaning of this, and smile at it and despise it. The obvious purpose is to try to set up a rivalry between the two. If Gladstone's authority could be damaged that would be quite enough; for it would be impossible at present to get the Whig dukes and earls to follow Bright, and the dethronement of Gladstone would be the break-up of the party. The trick is an utter failure. Bright is sincerely and generously loyal to Gladstone, and is a man as completely devoid of personal vanity or self-seeking as he is of fear. No personal question will ever divide these two men.

Gladstone is beyond doubt the most fluent and brilliant speaker in the English Parliament. No other man has anything like his inexhaustible flow and rush of varied and vivid expression. His memory is as surprising as his fluency. Grattan spoke of the eloquence of Fox as "rolling in resistless as the waves of the Atlantic." So far as this description conveys the idea of a vast volume of splendid words pouring unceasingly in, it may be applied to Gladstone. A listener new to the House is almost certain to prefer him to any other speaker there, and to regard him as the greatest English orator of the present generation. I was myself for a long time completely under the spell, and a little impatient of those who insisted on the superiority of Bright. But when one becomes accustomed to the speaking of the two men it is impossible not to find the fluency, the glitter, the impetuous volubility, the involved and complicated sentences, the Latinized, sesquipedalian words of Gladstone gradually losing their early charm and influence, just as the pure noble Saxon, the unforced energy, the exquisite simplicity, the perfect "fusion of reason and passion" which are the special characteristics of Bright's eloquence, grow more and more fascinating and commanding. Perhaps the same effect may be found to arise from a study or a contrast (if one must contrast them) between the political characters of the two men.

It is a somewhat singular fact that one English county has produced the three men who undoubtedly rank beyond all others in England as Parliamentary orators. The Earl of Derby, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Bright are all Lancashire men. But Gladstone is only Lancashire by birth. His shrewd old Scotch father came to Liverpool from across the Tweed, and made his money and founded his family in the great port of the Mersey. The Gladstones had, and have, large West Indian property; and when England emancipated her slaves by paying off the planters, the Gladstones came in for no small share of the national purchase-money. When the great Liberal orator came out so impetuously and unluckily with his celebrated panegyric on Jefferson Davis, a few years ago, some people shook their heads and remarked that the old planter spirit does not quite die out in the course of one generation; and I heard bitter allusion made to the celebrated declaration flung by Cooke, the great tragedian, in the face of an indignant theatre in Liverpool, that there was not a stone in the walls of that town which was not "cemented by the blood of Africans." But, indeed, Gladstone's outburst had no traditional, or hereditary, or other such source. It came straight from the impulsive heart and nature of the speaker. His strength and his weakness are alike illustrated by that sudden, indiscreet, unjustifiable, and repented outburst. Thus he every now and then disappoints his friends and shakes the confidence of his followers. A keen, intellectual, cynical member of the Liberal party, Mr. Grant Duff, not long since publicly reproached Mr. Gladstone with this trick of suddenly "turning round and firing his revolver in the face of his followers." Certain it is that there is little or no enthusiasm felt toward Gladstone personally, by his party. Admirers of Mr. Disraeli are usually devotees of the man himself. Young men, especially, delight in him and adore him. Mr. Gladstone is followed as a leader, admired as an orator; but I have heard very few of his followers ever express any personal affection or enthusiasm for him; but it is quite notorious in London that some of his adherents can hardly control their dislike of him. Mr. Bright, although a man of somewhat cold and reserved demeanor, and occasionally brusque in manner, is popular everywhere in the House. Mr. Gladstone is not personally popular even among his own followers. What is the reason? His enemies say that he has a bad temper and an unbending intellectual pride, which is as untrue as if they were to say he had a hoarse voice and a stammer. The obscurest man in the House of Commons is not more modest; and there is nothing ungenial in his manner or his temper. But the truth is that people cannot rely upon him, or think they cannot, which, so far as they are concerned, amounts to the same thing. His strongest passion in life—stronger than his love of figures, or of Homer, or even of liberty—is a love of argument. He is always ready to sacrifice his friend, or his party, or even his cause, to his argument. Add to this that he has a conscience so sensitive that it can hardly ever find any cause or deed smooth enough to be wholly satisfactory; add, moreover, that he has an eloquence so fluent as to flow literally away from him, or with him, and the wonder will be how such a man ever came to be the successful leader of a great party at all. He is always reconsidering what he has done, always penitent for something he has said, always turning up to-day the side of the question which everybody supposed was finally put away and done with yesterday.

You can read all this in his face. Furrowed with deep and rigid lines, it proclaims a certain self-torturing nature—the nature of the penitent, self-examining ascetic, whose heart is always vexed by doubts of his own worth and purity, and past and future. Decidedly, Gladstone wants force of character, and force of intellect as well. He is not a man of great thought. Every such man settles a question, so far as he is himself concerned, finally, one way or the other, before long; sees and accepts what the human limitations of thinking are; recognizes the necessity of being done with mere thinking about it, and so decides and is free to act. There is intellectual weakness in Gladstone's interminable consideration and reconsideration, qualification and requalification of every subject and branch of a subject. But there is also a strong, genuine, unmingled delight in mere argument—perhaps as barren a delight as human intellect can yield to.

Last year there were three Fenian prisoners lying under sentence of death in Manchester. Their crime was such as undoubtedly all civil governments are accustomed to punish by death. But there was considerable sympathy for them, partly because of their youth, partly because the deed they had done—the killing of a policeman in order to rescue a political conspirator—did not seem to be a mere base and malignant murder. Some eminent Liberals, Mr. Bright among the rest, endeavored to obtain a mitigation of the sentence. The Tory Government refused; then a point of law was raised on their behalf, and argued in the House of Commons. The point was new, the Tory law-officers, dull men at the best, were taken by surprise, and broke down in reply. Yet there was a reply, and legally, a sufficient one. Mr. Gladstone saw it; saw where the point raised was defective, and how it might be disposed of. He sprang to his feet, pulled the Tory law-officers out of their difficulty, and upset the case for the Fenians. Now this must have seemed to a conscientious man quite the right thing to do. To a lover of argument the temptation of upsetting a defective plea was irresistible. But most of Mr. Gladstone's Irish followers, on whom he must needs rely, were surprised and angry, and even some of his English friends thought he might have left the Tories unaided to hang their own political prisoners. Gladstone's conduct was eminently characteristic. No impartial man could honestly say that he had done a wrong thing; but no one acquainted with political life could feel surprised that a leader who habitually does such things, is almost always being grumbled at by one or other section of his followers.

There is an obvious lack of directness as well as of robustness in the whole intellectual and political character of the man. I think it was Nathaniel Hawthorne who said of General McClellan that if he could only have shut one eye he might have gone straight into Richmond almost at any time during his command of the Army of the Potomac. I am sure if Gladstone would only close one eye now and then he might lead his party much more easily to splendid victory. With all his great, varied, comprehensive faculties, he is not a man to make a deep mark on the history of his country. He has to be driven on. Somebody must stand behind him. He is not self-sufficing. His style of eloquence is not straightforward, cleaving its way like an arrow. It goes round and round a subject, turning it up, holding it to the light, now this way, now that, examining and re-examining it. Even his reform speeches are as Disraeli once said very happily of Lord Palmerston, rather speeches about Reform than orations on behalf of it. He is indeed the brilliant Halifax of his age—at least he is a complete embodiment of Lord Macaulay's Halifax. A leader with so many splendid gifts and merits, no English parliamentary party of modern times has ever had. Taking manner, voice, elocution and all into account, as is but right in judging of a speaker, I think he is the most splendid of all English orators. Burke's manner and accent were terribly against him; Fox was full of repetition, and often stammered and stuttered in the very rush and tumult of his thoughts; Sheridan's glitter was sometimes tawdriness; both the Pitts were given to pompousness and affectation; Bright has neither the silver voice nor the varied information of Gladstone; Disraeli I do not rank among orators at all. Gladstone has none of the special defects of any of these men, yet I am convinced that Fox was a greater orator than Gladstone; I know that Bright is; while Burke's speeches are, as intellectual studies, incomparably beyond anything that Gladstone will ever bequeath to posterity; and as instruments to an end, some of Disraeli's speeches have been more effective and triumphant than anything ever spoken by his present rival.

In brief, Gladstone is not, to my thinking, a great orator; and I do not believe he is a great statesman. A great statesman, I presume, is tested by a crisis, and is greatest at a crisis. Such was Chatham; such was Washington; such was Napoleon Bonaparte; such was Cavour; such is Bismarck. All I have seen of Gladstone compels me to believe that he is not such a man. He is just the man to lead the Liberal party at this time; but I should despair of the triumph of that party for the present generation, if there were not stronger and simpler minds behind his to keep him in the right way, to drive him on—and, above all, to prevent him from recoiling after he has made an effective stride forward.

One of the great questions likely to arise soon in English political discussion is that of national education. On educational questions I fancy Mr. Gladstone is rather narrow-minded and old-fashioned; taking too much the tone and view of a college Don. His recent severance from the political representation of Oxford may have done something to release his mind from tradition and pedantry; but I much doubt whether he will not be found sadly wanting when a serious attempt is made to revolutionize the principles and the system of the English universities, and to substitute there (I quote again the language of Grant Duff) "the studies of men for the studies of children." Gladstone is a devotee of classical study; and his whole nature is under the influence of æstheticism, or of what is commonly called "sentiment." The sweet and genial traditions of the past have immense influence over him. His love of Greek poetry and of Italian art follow him into politics. With the Teuton, his poetry and his politics he has little or no sympathy; and I think the question to be decided shortly as regards the university system in England maybe figuratively described as a question between Classic and Teuton. Gladstone is a profound Greek and Latin scholar—a master of Italian, a connoisseur of Italian art; he does not, I believe, know or care much about German literature. Accordingly, he was a devoted Philhellene and a passionate champion of Italian independence; while the outbreak of the recent struggle between the past and the present in Germany found him indifferent, and probably even ignorant. So it was in regard to the American crisis the other day. He knew little of American politics and national life; and the whole thing was a bewilderment and a surprise to him. If the Laocoon had been the work of a New England artist I think the North would have found at once a warm advocate in Mr. Gladstone.

Of a mould utterly different is John Bright, at the very root of whose character are found simplicity and straightforwardness. By simplicity I do not mean freedom from pretence or affectation; for no man can be more thoroughly unaffected and sincere than Gladstone. I mean that purely intellectual attribute which frees the judgment from the influence of complex emotions; which distinguishes at once essentials from non-essentials; which sees at a glance the true end and the real way to it, and can go directly onward. Men supremely gifted with this great practical quality are commonly set down as men of one idea. In this sense, undoubtedly, John Bright is a man of one idea; but the phrase does not justly describe him, or men like him, who are peculiar merely in having an accurate appreciation of what I may call political perspective, and thus knowing what proportion of public consideration certain objects ought, under certain circumstances, to obtain.

So far as ideas are the offspring of information, Mr. Bright has undoubtedly fewer ideas than some of his contemporaries. He is not a profound classical scholar like Gladstone; he has had nothing like the varied culture of Lowe; he makes, of course, no pretence to the attainments of Mill, who is at once a master of science, of classics, and of belles-lettres. But given a subject, almost any subject, coming at all within the domain of politics or economics, and time to think over it, and he is much more likely to be right in his judgment of it than any of the three men I have named. He is gifted beyond any Englishman now living with the rare and admirable faculty of seeing right into the heart of a subject, and discerning what it means and what it is worth. Nor is this ever a lucky jump at a conclusion. Bright never gives an opinion at random or off-hand. Some new policy is announced; some new subject is broached in the House of Commons; and Bright sits silent and listens. Friends and followers come round him and ask him what he thinks of it. "Wait until to-morrow and I will tell you," is almost invariably, in whatever form of words, the tenor of his reply—and to-morrow's judgment is certain to be right. I can remember no great public question coming up in England for the past dozen years in regard to which Mr. Bright's deliberate judgment did not prove itself to be just.

This quality of sagacious judgment, however valuable and uncommon, would not of itself make a man a great statesman or even a great party leader; but it is only one of many remarkable attributes which are found harmoniously illustrated in the character of Mr. Bright. I do not mean, however, to dwell at any length here on the place John Bright holds in English political life or the qualities which have won him that place. He has lately been the subject of an article in this magazine, and he is indeed better known to American readers than any other English political man now living. One or two observations are all that just now seem necessary to make.

Men who have not heard Bright speak, and who only know him by repute as a powerful tribune of the people, a demagogue ("John of Bromwicham," Carlyle calls him, classing him with John of Leyden), are naturally apt to think of him as an impetuous, passionate, stormy orator, shaking people's souls with sound and fury. Almost anybody who only knew the two men vaguely and by rumor, would be likely to assume that the style of the classical Gladstone was stately, calm, and regular; that of the popular orator and democrat, impetuous, rugged, and vehement. Now, the great characteristic of Gladstone, after his fluency, is his impetuosity; that of Bright is his magnificent composure and self-control. Intensity is his great peculiarity. He never foams or froths or bellows, or wildly gesticulates. The heat of his oratorical passion is a white heat which consumes without flash or smoke or sputter. Some of his greatest effects have been produced by passages of pathetic appeal, of irony, or of invective, which were delivered with a calm intensity that might almost have seemed coldness, if the fire of genius and of eloquence did not burn beneath it. Another remark I should make is that Mr. Bright is the greatest master of pure Saxon English now speaking the English language. As the blind commonly have their sense of sound and of touch intensified, so it may be that Mr. Bright's comparative indifference to classic and foreign literature has tended to concentrate all his attention upon the culture of pure English, and given him a supreme faculty of appreciating and employing it. Certain it is that his unvarying choice of the very best Saxon word in every case seems to come from an instinct which is in itself something like genius.

Finally, let me remark, that the extent of Mr. Bright's democratic tendencies would probably disappoint some Americans. I may say now what I should probably have been laughed at for saying two or three years ago, that there is a good deal of the conservative about John Bright; that he is by nature disposed to shrink from innovation; that change for the mere sake of change is quite abhorrent to him; and that he is about the last man in England who would care to make political war for an idea. He seems to me to be the only one Englishman I have lately spoken with who retains any genuine feeling of personal loyalty toward the sovereign of England. But for his eloquence and his power, I fancy Mr. Bright would seem rather a slow sort of politician to many of the younger Radicals. The "Times" lately attributed Mr. Bright's conservatism to his advancing years. This was merely absurd. Mr. Bright is little older now than O'Connell was when he began his Parliamentary career. He is considerably younger than Disraeli, or Gladstone, or Mill. What Bright now is he always was. A dozen years ago he was defending the Queen and Prince Albert against the attacks of Tories and of some Radicals. He never was a Democrat in the French or Italian sense. He has always been wanting even, in sympathy, with popular revolution abroad. He never showed the slightest interest in speculative politics. I doubt if he ever talked of the "brotherhood of peoples." He has been driven into political agitation only because, like Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, he saw positive, practical, and pressing grievances bearing down upon his neighbors, which he felt called by duty to make war against. I have many times heard Mr. Bright say that he detests the House of Commons, and would be glad if it were permitted him never to mount a platform again.

But if Mr. Bright had little natural inclination for a Parliamentary career, what is one to say of Mr. John Stuart Mill's natural disinclination for such a path of life?

Physical constitution, intellectual peculiarities, temperament, habits—all seemed to mark out Mr. Mill as a man destined to close his career, as he had so long conducted it—in almost absolute seclusion. He is a silent, shy, shrinking man, of feeble frame and lonely ways. Until the general election of three years back, Mr. Mill was to his countrymen but as an oracle—as a voice—almost as a myth. The influence of his writings was immense. Personally he was but a name. He never came into any public place; he knew nobody. When the promoters of the movement to return him to Parliament came to canvass the Westminster electors, the great difficulty they had to contend with was, that three out of every four of the honest traders and shopkeepers had never heard of him; and the few who knew anything of his books had a vague impression that the author was dead years before. The very men who formed the executive of his committee could not say that they knew him, even by sight. Half in jest, half for a serious purpose, some of the Tories sent abroad over Westminster an awful report that there was no such man in existence as John Stuart Mill. "Did you ever see him?" was the bewildering question constantly put to this or that earnest canvasser, and invariably answered with an apologetic negative. I believe the services of my friend Dr. Chapman, editor of the "Westminster Review," were brought into pressing requisition, because he was one of the very few who really could boast a personal acquaintance with Stuart Mill. The day when the latter first entered the House of Commons was the first time he and Bright ever saw each other. I believe Cobden and Mill never met. Mill had no university acquaintances—he had never been to any university. He had no school friends—he had never been to a school. Perhaps the best educated man of his time in England, he owes his education to the personal care and teaching of his distinguished father, James Mill, who would have been illustrious if his son had not overshadowed his fame. Assuredly, to know James Mill intimately was, if I may thus apply Leigh Hunt's saying, in itself a liberal education. Following his father's steps at the India House, John Mill worked there methodically and quietly, until he rose to the highest position his father had occupied; and then he resigned his office, declined an offer of a seat at the Indian Council Board, subsequently made by Lord Stanley, and lapsed wholly into private life. Of late he rarely met even his close and early friends. Some estrangement, not necessary to dwell on, had taken place, I believe, between him and his old friend Thomas Carlyle, and I suppose they ceased to meet. After the death of the wife whom he so loved and revered, Mill lived almost always at Avignon, in the south of France, where she died, and where he raised a monument over her remains, which he visits and tends with a romantic devotion and constancy worthy of a Roland.

Only a profound sense of duty could drag such a man from his scholarly and sacred seclusion into the stress and storm of a parliamentary life. But it was urged upon Mill that he could do good to the popular cause by going into Parliament; and he is not a man to think anything of his personal preference in such a case. He accepted the contest and won. Some of his warmest admirers regretted that he had ever given his consent. They feared not so much that he might damage his reputation as that he might weaken the influence of his authority, and with it the strength of every great popular cause. Certainly those who thought thus, and who met Mr. Mill for the first time during the progress of the Westminster contest, did not feel much inclined to take a more encouraging view of the prospect.

Mr. Mill seems cut out by nature not to be a parliamentary success. He has a thin, fragile, awkward frame; he has a nervous, incessant twitching of the lips and eyes; he has a weak voice and a sort of stammer; he is over sixty years of age; he had never, so far as I know, addressed a political meeting of any kind up to the time of the Westminster contest. Yet with all these disadvantages, Mill has, as a political leader and speaker, been an undoubted success with the country, and a sort of success in the House. An orator of any kind he never could be. One might call him a wretchedly bad speaker, if his speaking were not so utterly unlike anybody else's, as to refuse to be classified with any other speaking, good or bad. But, so far as the best selection of words, the clearest style, the most coherent and convincing argument can constitute eloquence, Mill's speeches are eloquent. They are, of course, only spoken essays. They differ in no wise from the speaker's writings; and I need hardly say that a speech, to be effective, must never be just what the speaker would have written if it were to be consigned at once to print as a letter or an essay. As speeches, therefore, Mr. Mill's utterances in the House have little or no effect. Indeed, they are only listened to by a very few men of real intelligence and judgment on both sides. Some of the more boisterous of the Tories made many attempts to cough and laugh Mill into silence; indeed, there was obviously a deliberate plan of this kind in operation at one time. But Mill is a man whom nothing can deter from saying or doing what he thinks right. A more absolutely fearless being does not exist. He is even free from that fear which has sometimes paralyzed the boldest spirits, the fear of becoming ridiculous. So the Tory trick failed. Mill went on with patient, imperturbable, proud good-humor, despite all interruption—now and then paying off his Tory enemies by some keen contemptuous epigram or sarcasm, made all the more pungent by the thin, bland tone in which it was uttered. So the Tories gave up shouting, groaning and laughing; the more quickly because one at least of their chiefs, the Marquis of Salisbury (then in the House of Commons as Lord Cranbourne) had the spirit and sense to express openly and loudly his anger and disgust at the vulgar and brutal behaviour of some of his followers. Therefore Mr. Mill ceased to be interrupted; but he is not much listened to. That supreme, irrefutable evidence that a man fails to interest the House—the fact that a hum and buzz of conversation may be heard all the time he is speaking—is always fatally manifest when Mr. Mill addresses the Commons. But the House, after all, is only a platform from which a man endeavors to speak to the country, and if Mill does not always get the ear of the House, he never fails to be heard by the nation. I have no doubt that even the Tory members of the House read Mill's speeches when they appear in print; assuredly all intelligent Tories do. These speeches, in any case, are never lost on the country. They form at once a part of the really successful literature of each session. They always excite controversy of some kind—not even the great orations of Bright and Gladstone are more talked of.

So far they are a success, and there is something in the personal character of Mr. Mill himself, which makes him specially popular with the working classes of England. I doubt if there is now any Englishman whose name would be received with a more cordial outburst of applause at a popular meeting. Working-men, in fact, are very proud of Mr. Mill's scholarship, culture, and profundity. They can perceive easily enough that he is remarkable for just those intellectual qualities which the conventional demagogue never has. Tory newspapers and the "Saturday Review" sometimes affect to regard Mr. Bright as a man of defective education, but it is impossible to pretend to think that Mill is ignorant of Greek or superficial in his knowledge of history. When such a man makes himself especially the champion of working-men, the working-men think of him very much as the Irish peasants of '98 and '48 did of Edward Fitzgerald and Smith O'Brien, the aristocrats of birth and rank, who stepped down from their high places and gave themselves up to the cause of the unlettered and the poor.

There is something fascinating, moreover, about the singular blending of the emotional, and even the romantic, with the keen, vigorous, logical intellect, which is to be observed in Mill. Even political economy, in Mill's mind, is strangely guided and governed by mere feeling. Somebody said he was a combination of Ricardo and Tom Hughes—somebody else said, rather more happily, I think, that he is Adam Smith and Fénélon revived and rolled into one. The "Pall Mall Gazette" found his picture well painted in Lord Macaulay's analysis of the motives which influenced Edmund Burke, when he flung his soul into the impeachment of Warren Hastings. The mere eccentricities, the very defects of such a nature have in them something captivating. The admirers of Mr. Mill are therefore not unusually somewhat given to exalting admiration into idolatry. The classes who most admire him are the scholarly and adventurous young Radicals, who have a dash of Positivism in them; the extreme Radicals, who are prepared to go any and all lengths for the mere sake of change; and the working-men.

This is the Triumvirate of the English Liberal Party. Combined they represent, guide, and govern every section and fraction of that party that is worth taking into any consideration. Mr. Gladstone represents official Liberalism; Mr. Bright speaks for and directs the old-fashioned, robust, popular Liberalism of which Manchester was the school; Mr. Mill is the exponent of the new Liberalism, the Liberalism of Idea and Logic. Bright's programme is a little ahead of Gladstone's, but Gladstone will probably be easily pulled up to it. Mill goes far beyond either, far beyond any point at which either is ever likely to arrive. Indeed, Mr. Mill may be fairly described by a phrase, which I believe is German, as a man in advance of every possible future—at least in England. But he is quite prepared to act loyally and steadily with his party and its leader on all momentous issues. On some minor questions he has lately gone widely away from them, and given thereby much offence; and indeed I am sure there are not a few of the old-fashioned Liberals and the Manchester men who would rather Mr. Mill had never come into Parliament and sat at their side. But on nearly all questions of Parliamentary Reform, and on that of the Irish Church, Mill and his Liberal colleagues will pull cordially together. So, too, on most economic questions, reduction of taxation, imposition of duties and the like. Where a sharp difference is likely to arise will only be in relation to some subject having an idea behind it—some question of foreign policy perhaps, something not at present imminent; and, let us hope, not destined in any case to be vital to the interests of the party. Only where an idea is involved will Mr. Mill refuse to allow his own judgment to bend to the general necessities of the party. It was his objection (a very unwise one, I think) to the idea behind the system of the ballot, which led him to separate himself sharply from Bright and other Liberals on that subject; it was the idea which lies at the bottom of a representation of minorities, which beguiled him into lending his advocacy to that most chimerical, awkward, and absurd piece of political mechanism which we know in England as the three-cornered constituency. The cohesion of Gladstone and Bright is decidedly more close and likely to endure than that between Bright and Mill. But on all immediate questions of great importance, these two men are sure to be found side by side. Mill has a deep and earnest admiration for Bright, who is sometimes, perhaps, a little impatient of the Politics of Idea.

During the session of 1868, I attended a meeting of a few representative Liberals of all classes, brought together to decide on some course of agitation with regard to Ireland. Mr. Mill was there, so were Professor Fawcett, Mr. Thomas Hughes, Lord Amberley, and other members of Parliament; Mr. Frederick Harrison, with some of his Positivist colleagues, and several representative working men. Mr. Bright was unable to attend. A certain course of action being recommended, Mr. Mill expressed his own approval of it, but emphatically declared that he considered Mr. Bright's judgment was entitled to be regarded as authoritative, and that should Mr. Bright recommend the meeting not to go on, the scheme had better be given up. Mr. Bright subsequently discouraged the scheme, and it was, on Mr. Mill's recommendation, at once abandoned. I mention this fact to illustrate the loyalty which Mr. Mill, with all his tendency to political eccentricity, usually displays toward the men whom he regards as the leaders of the party.

Mill and Bright are alike warm admirers of Gladstone and believers in him. Indeed one sometimes feels ashamed to doubt for a moment the steadfastness of a man in whom Bright and Mill put so full a faith.

Certainly the English Liberal has reason to congratulate himself, and feel proud when he remembers what sort of men his party's leaders used to be, and sees what men they are to-day. It will not do to study too closely the private characters of the chiefs of any political band in the House of Commons, from the days of Bolingbroke to those of Fox. The man who was not a sinecurist or a peculator was pretty sure to be a profligate or a gambler. Not a few eminent men were sinecurists, peculators, profligates, and gamblers. The political purity of the English Liberal leaders to-day is absolutely without the faintest shade of suspicion—it never even occurs to any one to suspect them, while their private lives, it may be said without indelicacy, are in pure and perfect accord with the noble principles they profess. Not often has there been a political triumvirate of greater men; of better men, never.

THE ENGLISH POSITIVISTS.

Some few months ago, a little bubble of interest was made on the surface of London life, by a course of Sunday lectures of a peculiar kind.

These lectures were given in a small room in Bouverie street, off Fleet street—Bouverie street, sacred to publishing and newspaper offices—and only a very small stream of persons was drawn to the place. There was something very peculiar, however, about the lectures, the lecturer, and the audience, which might well have repaid a stranger in London for the trouble of going there. I doubt whether such a proportion of intellectual faces could have been seen among the congregation of any London church on these Sunday mornings; and I know one, at least, who attended the lectures, less for the sake of what he heard than because such listeners as the authoress of "Romola" were among the audience. The lecturer was Mr. Richard Congreve, and the subject of his discourses was the creed of Positivism.

I do not know how familiar Mr. Congreve and his writings and his doctrines are to the American public. In London, Mr. Congreve is, in a quiet way, a sort of celebrity or peculiarity. He is the head of the small, compact band of English Positivists. It is understood that he goes as far in the direction of the creed which was the dream of Auguste Comte's later years as any sane human creature can well go. I have, however, very little to say here of Mr. Congreve, individually; and I take his recent course of Sunday lectures only as a convenient starting point from which to begin a few remarks on the political principles, character, and influence of that small, resolute, aggressive body of intellectual, highly-educated and able men who are beginning to be known in the politics and society of England as the London Positivists.

A discourse on the principles of Positivism would be quite out of place here; but even those who understand the whole subject will, perhaps, allow me, for the benefit of those who do not, to explain very briefly what an English Positivist is. Positivism, it is known to my readers, is the name given to the philosophy which Auguste Comte, more than any other man, helped to reduce to a system. Regarded as a philosophy of history and human society, its grand and fundamental doctrine merely is that human life evolves itself in obedience to certain fixed laws, of which we could obtain a knowledge if only we applied ourselves to this study as we do to all other studies in practical science, by the patient observation of phenomena. Auguste Comte's reduction of this philosophical theory to a scientific system is undoubtedly one of the grandest achievements of human intellect. The philosophy did not begin with him or his generation, or, indeed, any generation of which we have authentic record. Whenever there were men capable of thinking at all, there must have been some whose minds were instinct with this doctrine; but Comte made it a system at once simple, grand, and fascinating, and he will always remain identified with its development, in the memory of the modern world. Unfortunately, Comte, in his later years, set to founding a religion also—a religion which has, perhaps, called down upon its founder and its followers more ridicule, contempt, and discredit than any vagary of human imagination in our day. I speak of all this only to explain to my readers that there is some little difficulty in defining what is meant by a Positivist. If we mean merely a believer in the philosophical theory of history, then Positivists are, indeed, to be named as legion, and their captains are among the greatest intellects of the world to-day. In England, we regard Mr. John Stuart Mill as, in this sense, the greatest Positivist, and undoubtedly he is so regarded here. But Mill utterly rejects and ridicules the fantastic religion which Comte, in his days of declining mental power, sought to graft on his grand philosophy. In his treatise on Comte, Mr. Mill showed no mercy to the Positivist religion, and, indeed, bitterly offended many of its votaries by his contemptuous exposure of its follies. What is said of Mill may be said of nineteen out of every twenty, at least, of the English followers of Comte. They accept the philosophy as grand, scientific, inexorable truth; they reject the religion with pity or with scorn, as a fantastic and barren chimera. Mr. Congreve is, in London, the leader of the small school who go for taking all or nothing, and to whom Auguste Comte is the prophet of a new and final religion, as well as the teacher of a new philosophy. Now this little school is the nucleus of the body of Englishmen of whom I write.

When I speak, therefore, of English Positivists, I do not mean the men who go no farther than John Stuart Mill does. These men are to be found everywhere; they are of all schools, and all religions. I mean the much smaller body of votaries who go, or feel inclined to go, much farther, and accept Comte's religious teaching as a law of life. It is quite probable that, even among the men who are now identified more or less, in the public mind, with Mr. Congreve and his school, there may be some who do not adopt, or even concern themselves about the religion of Positivism. A community of sentiment on historical and political questions, the habit of meeting together, consulting together, writing for publication together, might naturally bring into the group men who may not go the length of adopting the Comte worship. It is quite possible, therefore, that, in mentioning the names of English Positivists, I may happen to speak of some who have no more to do with that worship than I have.

I mean, then, only the group of men, most of whom are young, most of whom are highly cultured, many of whom are endowed with remarkable ability, who are to be found in a literary and political phalanstery with Mr. Congreve, and of whom the majority are understood to be actual votaries of the religion of Comte. Of course I have nothing to do here with their faith or their practices. If they adopt the worship of woman I think they do a better thing after all than the increasing and popular class of writers, whose principal business in life is to persuade us that our wives and sisters are all Messalinas in heart and nearly all Messalinas in practice. If, when they pray, they touch certain cranial bumps at certain passages of the prayer, I do not see that they institute anything worse than the genuflections of the Ritualist or the breast-beating of the Roman Catholics. If, finally, one is sometimes a little puzzled when he receives a letter from a Positivist friend, and finds it dated "5th Marcus Aurelius," or "12th Auguste Comte," instead of July or December, as the case may be, one must remember that there never yet was a young sect which did not delight in puzzling outsiders by a new and peculiar nomenclature. I never heard anything worse charged against the Positivists than that they worship woman, touch their foreheads when they pray, and arrange the calendar according to a plan of their own invention; except, of course, the general charge of Atheism; but as that is made in England against anybody whom all his neighbors do not quite understand, I hardly think it worth discussing in this particular instance. We are all Atheists in England in the estimation of our neighbors, whose political opinions are different from our own.

The English Positivists, then, are beginning to stand out sharply against the common background of political life. They are a little school; as distinctly a school for their time and chances as the Girondists were, or the Manchester school, or the Massachusetts Abolitionists, or the Boston Transcendentalists. They are Radical, of course, but their Radicalism has a curious twist in it. On any given question of Radicalism they go as far as any practical politician does; but then they also go in most cases so very much farther that they often alarm the practical politician out of his ordinary composure. They are generally incisive of speech, aggressive of purpose, defiant of political prudery, and even of political prudence. Their politics are always politics of idea.

Some three or four years ago the Positivists published a large and ponderous volume of essays on subjects of international policy. Each man who contributed an essay signed his name, and although a general community of idea and principle pervaded the book, it was not understood that everybody who wrote necessarily adopted all the views of his associates. The book, in fact, was constructed on the model of the famous "Essays and Reviews" which had sent such a thrill through the religious world a few years before. The political essays naturally failed to create anything like the sensation which was produced by their theological predecessors; but they did excite considerable attention, and awoke the echoes. They astonished a good many Liberal politicians of the steady old school, and they set many men thinking. What surprised people at first was the singular combination of literary culture and ultra-Radical opinion. Literary young men in England, of late, are generally to be divided into two classes—the smart writers for periodicals, the minor novelists and dramatists, and so forth, who know no more and care no more about politics than ballet girls do, and the University men, the men of "culture," who affect Toryism as something fine and distinguished, and profess a patrician horror of democracy and the "mob." If at the time this volume was published one had taken aside some practical politician in London and said, "Here is a collection of practical essays written by a cluster of young men who all have University degrees after their names—will you read it?" the answer would certainly have been—"Not I, it's sure to be some contemptible sham Tory rubbish; some 'blood-and-culture' trash; some schoolboy impertinence about demagoguism and the mob." Therefore the surprise was not slight to such men when they read the book and found that its central idea, its connecting thread, was a Radicalism which might well be called thorough; a Radicalism which made Bright look like a steady old Conservative; invited Mill to push his ideas a little farther; and poured scorn upon the Radical press for its slowness and its timidity. A simple, startling foreign policy was prescribed to England. Its gospel, after all, was but an old one—so old that it had been forgotten in English politics. It was merely—Be just and fear not. Renounce all aggression; give back the spoils of conquest. Give Gibraltar back to the Spaniards who own it; prepare to cast loose your colonial dependencies; prepare even to quit your loved India; ask the Irish people fairly and clearly what they want, and if they desire to be free of your rule, bid them go and be free and Godspeed. All the old traditional policies seemed to these men only obsolete and odious superstitions. They would have England, the State, to stand up and act precisely as an Englishman of honor and conscience would do, and they treated with utter contempt any policy of expediency or any policy whatever that aimed at any end but that of finding out the right thing to do and then doing it at once. This seemed to me, studying the school quite as an outside observer, its one great central idea; and it would of course be impossible not to honor the body of writers who proposed to show how it was to be accomplished.

But no school lives on one grand idea; and this school had its chimeras and crotchets—almost its crazes. For example, the leader of the Positivist band took great trouble to argue that Europe ought to form herself into a noble federation of States, to the exclusion of Russia, which was to be regarded as an Oriental, barbarous, unmanageable, intolerable sort of thing, and pushed out of the European system altogether. Then a good many of the leading minds of the school are imbued with a passionate love for a sort of celestial despotism, an ideal imperialism which the people are first to create and then to obey—which is to teach them, house them, keep them in employment, keep them in health, and leave them nothing to do for themselves, while yet securing to them the most absolute freedom. To some of these men the condition of New York, where the State does hardly anything for the individual, would seem as distressing and objectionable as that of despotic Paris or even Constantinople. A distinguished member of the school declared that nothing was to him more odious than any manner of voluntaryism, and that he hoped to see State operation introduced into every department of English social organization. The connection of this theory with the principle of Positivism, which would mould all men into a sort of hierarchy, is natural and obvious enough, and there is, to support it, a certain reaction now in England against the voluntary principle, in education and in public charities. But, as it is put forward and argued by men of the school I describe, it may be taken as one of the most remarkable points of departure from the common tendency of thought in England. The Positivists are all, indeed, un-English, in the common use of a phrase which is ceasing of late to be so dreaded a stigma as it once used to be in British politics. They are, as I have already said, a somewhat aggressive body, and are imbued with a contempt, which they never care to conceal, for the average public opinion of the British Philistine, whether he present himself as a West End tradesman or a West End Peer.

The Positivists are almost always to be found in antagonism with this sort of public opinion. They attack the Philistine, and they attack no less readily the dainty scholar and critic who lately gave the Philistine his name, and whose over-refining love of sweetness and light is so terribly offended by the rough and earnest work of Radical politics. Whatever way average opinion tends, the influence of the Positivists is sure to tend the other way.

There was a time, nearly two years ago, when the average English mind was suddenly seized with a passion of blended hate, fear, and contempt for Fenianism. The thing was first beginning to show itself in a serious light and it had not gone far enough to show what it really was. It looked more formidable than it proved to be, and it seemed less like an ordinary rebellious organization than like some mysterious and demoniacal league against property and public security. When I say it seemed, I mean it seemed to the average English mind, to the ordinary swell and the ordinary shopkeeper. Just at this time the Positivists drew up a petition to be presented to the House of Commons, in which they called upon the House to insist that lenity should be shown to all Fenian prisoners, that they should be regarded as men driven into rebellion by a deep sense of injustice, and that measures should be taken to prevent the British troops from committing such excesses in Ireland as had been perpetrated in the suppression of the Indian mutiny, and more lately in Jamaica. Now, if there was anything peculiarly calculated to vex and aggravate the House of Commons and the English public generally, it was such a view of the business as this. Fenianism had not acquired the solemn and tragic interest which it obtained a few months afterward. It is only just to say that Englishmen in general began to look with pity and a sort of respect on Fenianism, once it became clear that it had among its followers men who, to quote the language of one of the least sympathetic of London newspapers, "knew how to die." But, at the time I speak of, Fenianism was a vague, mystic, accursed thing, which it was proper to regard as utterly detestable and contemptible. Imagine then what the feeling of the English county member must have been when he learned that there were actually in London a set of educated Englishmen, nearly all trained in the universities and nearly all moving in good society, who regarded the Fenians just as he himself regarded rebels against the Emperor of Austria or the Pope of Rome, and who not merely asked that consideration should be shown toward them, but went on to talk of the necessity of protecting them against the brutality of the loyal British soldier! The petition was signed by all who had a share in its preparation. Such men as Richard Congreve, T. M. Ludlow, Frederick Harrison and Professor Beesly, were among the petitioners who risked their admission into respectable society by signing the document. The petitioners did not feel quite sure about getting any one of mark to present their appeal; and it is certain that a good many professed Liberals, of advanced opinions and full of sympathy with foreign rebels of any class or character, would have promptly refused to accept the ungenial office. The petitioners, however, applied to one who was not likely to be influenced by any considerations but those of right and justice, and whom, moreover, no body in the House of Commons would think of trying to put down. They asked Mr. Bright to present their petition, and there was, of course, no hesitation on his part. Mr. Bright not merely presented the petition, but read it amid the angry and impatient murmurs of an amazed and indignant House; and he declared, in tones of measured and impressive calmness, that he entirely approved of and adopted the sentiments which the petitioners expressed. There was, of course, a storm of indignation, and some members went the length of recommending that the petition should not even be received—an extreme and indeed extravagant course in a country where the right of petition is supposed to be held sacred, and which the good sense even of some Tory members promptly repudiated. Mr. Disraeli did his very best to aggravate the feeling of the House against the petitioners. During the Indian mutiny he had himself loudly protested against the spirit of vengeance which our press encouraged; asked whether we meant to make Nana Sahib the model for a British officer, and whether Moloch or Christ was our divinity. Yet he now declared that the language of the petition was a libel on the Indian army, and that nothing had ever occurred during the Bengal outbreak to warrant the imputations cast on the humanity of our soldiers.

I suppose it is not easy to convey to an American reader a correct idea of the degree of boldness involved in the presentation of this celebrated petition. It really was a very bold thing to do. It was running right in the very teeth of the public opinion of all the classes which are called respectable in England. It was, however, strictly characteristic of the men who signed it. Most, if not all of them, took a prominent part in the prosecution of Governor Eyre of Jamaica, for the lawless execution of George William Gordon and the wholesale and merciless floggings and hangings by which order was made to reign in the island. Most of them, indeed, have a pretty spirit of contradiction of their own, and a pretty gift of sarcasm. I think I hardly remember any man who received, during an equal length of time, a greater amount of abuse from the press than Professor Beesly drew down on himself not very long ago. It was at the time when the public mind was in its wildest thrill of horror at the really fearful revelations of organized murder in connection with the Sawgrinders' Union in Sheffield. The whole question of trades' union organization had been under discussion; and even before the Sheffield revelations came out, the general voice of English respectability was against the workmen's societies altogether. But when the disclosures of organized murder in connection with one union came out, a sort of panic took possession of the public mind. The first, and not unnatural impulse was to assume that all trades' unions must be very much the same sort of thing, and that the societies of workmen were little better than organized Thuggism. Now, Professor Beesly, Mr. Frederick Harrison and other signers of the petition for the Fenians, had long been prominent and influential advocates of the trades' union principle. They had been to the English artisan something like what the Boston Abolitionist was so long to the negro. The trades' union bodies, who felt aggrieved at the unjust suspicion which made them a party to hideous crimes they abhorred, began to hold public meetings to repudiate the charge, and record their detestation of the Sheffield outrages. Professor Beesly attended one of these meetings in London. He made a speech, in which he told the working men that he thought enough had been done in the way of disavowing crimes which no one had a right to impute to them; that there was no need of their further humiliating themselves; and that it was rather odd the English Aristocracy had such a horror of murderers among the poorer classes, seeing how very fond they were of men like Eyre, of Jamaica! In fact, Professor Beesly uplifted his voice very honestly, but rather recklessly and out of time, against the social hypocrisy which is the stain and curse of London society, and which is never so happy as when it can find some chance of denouncing sin or crime among Republicans, or Irishmen, or workingmen. There was nothing Professor Beesly said which had not sense and truth in it; but it might have been said more discreetly and at a better time; and it was said with a sarcastic and scornful bitterness which is one of the characteristics of the speaker. For several days the London press literally raged at the professor. "Punch" persevered for a long time in calling him "Professor Beastly;" a a strong effort was made to obtain his expulsion from the college in which he has a chair. He was talked of and written of as if he were the advocate and the accomplice of assassins, instead of being, as he is, an honorable gentleman and an enlightened scholar, whose great influence over the working classes had always been exerted in the cause of peaceful progress and good order. It was a common thing, for days and weeks, to see the names of Broadhead and Beesly coupled with ostentatious malignity in the leading columns of London newspapers.

I give these random illustrations only to show in what manner the school of writers and thinkers I speak of usually present themselves before the English public. Now Mr. Harrison devotes himself to a pertinacious, powerful series of attacks on Eyre, of Jamaica, at a time when that personage is the hero and pet martyr of English society; now Professor Beesly horrifies British respectability by pointing out that there are respectable murderers who are quite as bad as Broadhead; now Mr. John Morley undertakes even to criticise the Queen; now Mr. Congreve assails the anonymous writers of the London press as hired and masked assassins; now the whole band unite in the defence of Fenians. This sort of thing has a startling effect upon the steady public mind of England; and it is thus, and not otherwise, that the public mind of England ever comes to hear of these really gifted and honest, but very antagonistic and somewhat crochetty men. Several of them are brilliant and powerful writers. Professor Beesly writes with a keen, caustic, bitter force which has something Parisian in it. I know of no writer in English journalism who more closely resembles in style a certain type of the literary gladiator of French controversy. He has much of Eugene Pelletan in him, and something of Henri Rochefort, blended with a good deal that reminds one of Jules Simon. Frederick Harrison is fast becoming a power in the Radical politics and literature of England. John Morley is a young man of great culture, and who writes with a quite remarkable freshness and force. I could mention many other men of the same school (I have already said that I do not know whether each and every one of these is or is not a professed Positivist) who would be distinguished as scholars and writers in the literature of any country. However they may differ on minor points, however they may differ in ability, in experience, in discretion, they have one peculiarity in common: they are to be found foremost in every liberal and radical cause; they are always to be found on the side of the weak, and standing up for the oppressed; they are inveterate enemies of cant; they hate vulgar idolatry and vulgar idols. Looking back a few years, I can remember that almost, if not quite, every man I have alluded to was a fearless and outspoken advocate of the cause of the North, at a time when it was de rigueur among men of "culture" in London to champion the cause of the South. Some of the men I have named were indefatigable workers at that time on the unfashionable side. They wrote pamphlets; they wrote leading articles; they made speeches; they delivered lectures in out-of-the-way quarters to workingmen and poor men of all kinds; they hardly came, in any prominent way, before the public, in most of this work. It brought them, probably, no notoriety or recognition whatever on this side of the ocean; but their work was a power in England. I feel convinced that, in any case, the English workingmen would have gone right on such a question as that which was at issue between North and South. As Mr. Motley truly said in his address to the New York Historical Society, the workers and the thinkers were never misled; but I am bound to say that the admirable knowledge of the realities of the subject; the clear, quick, and penetrating judgment, and the patient, unswerving hope and confidence which were so signally displayed by the London workingmen from first to last of that great struggle, were in no slight degree the result of the teaching and the labor of men like Professor Beesly and Frederick Harrison.

If I were to set up a typical Positivist, in order to make my American reader more readily and completely familiar with the picture which the word calls up in the minds of Londoners, I should do it in the following way: I should exhibit my model Positivist as a man still young for anything like prominence in English public life, but not actually young in years—say thirty-eight or forty. He has had a training at one of the great historical Universities, or at all events at the modern and popular University of London. He is a barrister, but does not practise much, and has probably a modest competence on which he can live without working for the sake of living, and can indulge his own tastes in literature and politics. He has immense earnestness and great self-conceit. He has an utter contempt for dull men and timid or half-measure men, and he scorns Whigs even more than Tories. He devotes much of his time generously and patiently to the political and other instruction of working men. He writes in the "Fortnightly Review," and sometimes in "MacMillan," and sometimes in the "Westminster Review." He plunges into gallant and fearless controversy with the "Pall Mall Gazette," and he is not easily worsted, for his pen is sharp and his ink very acrid. Nevertheless, is any great question stirring, with a serious principle or a deep human interest at the heart of it, he is sure to be found on the right side. Where the controversy is of a smaller kind and admits of crotchet, then he is pretty sure to bring out a crotchet of some kind. He is perpetually giving the "Saturday Review" an opportunity to ridicule him and abuse him, and he does not care. He writes pamphlets and goes to immense trouble to get up the facts, and expense to give them to the world, and he never grudges trouble or money, where any cause or even any crotchet is to be served. He is ready to stand up alone, against all the world if needs be, for his opinions or his friends. Benevolent schemes which are of the nature of mere charity he never concerns himself about. I never heard of him on a platform with the Earl of Shaftesbury, and I fancy he has a contempt for all patronage of the poor or projects of an eleemosynary character. He is for giving men their political rights and educating them—if necessary compelling them to be educated; and he has little faith in any other way of doing good. He has, of course, a high admiration for and faith in Mr. Mill. His nature is not quite reverential—in general he is rather inclined to sit in the chair of the scorner; but if he reverenced any living man it would be Mill. He admires the manly, noble character of Bright, and his calm, strong eloquence. I do not think he cares much about Gladstone—I rather fancy our Positivist looks upon Gladstone as somewhat weak and unsteady—and with him to be weak is indeed to be miserable. Disraeli is to him an object of entire scorn and detestation, for he can endure no one who has not deeply-rooted principles of some kind. He has a crotchet about Russia, a theory about China; he gets quite beside himself in his anger over the anonymous leading articles of the London press. He is not an English type of man at all, in the present and conventional sense. He cares not a rush about tradition, and mocks at the wisdom of our ancestors. The bare fact that some custom, or institution, or way of thinking has been sanctioned and hallowed by long generations of usage, is in his eyes rather a prima facie reason for despising it than otherwise. He is pitilessly intolerant of all superstitions—save his own—that is to say, he is intolerant in words and logic and ridicule, for the wildest superstition would find him its defender, if it once came to be practically oppressed or even threatened. He is "ever a fighter," like one of Browning's heroes; he is the knight-errant, the Quixote of modern English politics. He admires George Eliot in literature, and, I should say, he regards Charles Dickens as a sort of person who does very well to amuse idlers and ignorant people. I do not hear of his going much to the theatre, and it is a doubt to me if he has yet heard of the "Grande Duchesse." Life with him is a very earnest business, and, although he has a pretty gift of sarcasm, which he uses as a weapon of offence against his enemies, I cannot, with any effort of imagination, picture him to myself as in the act of making a joke.

A small drawing-room would assuredly hold all the London Positivists who make themselves effective in English politics. Yet I do not hesitate to say that they are becoming—that they have already become—a power which no one, calculating on the chances of any coming struggle, can afford to leave out of his consideration. Their public influence thus far has been wholly for good; and they set up no propaganda that I have ever seen or heard of, as regards either philosophy or religion. The course of lectures I have already mentioned was the nearest approach to any public diffusion of their peculiar doctrines which I can remember, and it created little or no sensation in London. Indeed, little or no publicity was sought for it. I have read lately somewhere that a newspaper, specially devoted to the propagation and vindication of Positivism, is about to be, or has been started in London. I do not know whether this is true or not; but for any such journal I should anticipate a very small circulation, and an existence only to be maintained by continual subsidy.

So quietly have these men hitherto pursued their course, whatever it may be, in religion or religious philosophy, that it was long indeed before any idea got abroad that the cluster of highly-educated, ultra-radical thinkers, who were to be found sharpshooting on the side of every great human principle and every oppressed cause, and who seemed positively to delight in standing up against the vulgar rush of public opinion, were anything more than chance associates, or were bound by any tie more close and firm than that of general political sympathy. Even now that people are beginning to know them, and to classify them, in a vague sort of way, as "those Positivists," they make so little parade of any peculiarity of faith that, without precise and personal knowledge, it would be rash to say for certain that this or that member of the group is or is not an actual professor of the Comtist religion. I read a few days ago, in one of the few sensible books written on America by an Englishman, some remarks made about a peculiar view of Europe's duty to Egypt, which was described as being held by "the Comtists." I do not know whether the men referred to hold the view ascribed to them or not; but, assuredly, if they do, the fact has no more direct connection with their Comtism than Bright's free-trade views have with Bright's Quakerism. An illustration, however, will serve well enough as an example of the vague and careless sort of way in which doctrines and the men who profess them get mixed up together insolubly in the public mind. The Sultan of a generation back, who told the European diplomatist that if he changed his religion at all he would become a Roman Catholic, because he observed that Roman Catholic people always grew the best wine, was not more unreasonable in his logic than many well-informed men when they are striving to connect cause and effect in dealing with the religion of others.

I do not myself make any attempt to explain why a follower of Comte's worship should, at least in England, be always on the side of liberty and equality and human progress. Indeed, if inclined to discuss such a question at all, I should rather be disposed to put it the other way and ask how it happens that men so enlightened and liberal in education and principles should yield a moment's obedience to the ghostly shadow of Roman Catholic superstition, which Auguste Comte, in the decaying years of his noble intellect, conjured up to form a new religion. But I am quite content to let the question go unanswered—and should be willing, indeed, to leave it unasked. I wish just now to do nothing more than to direct the attention of American readers to the fact that a new set or sect has arisen to influence English politics, and that their influence and its origin are different from anything which, judging by the history of previous generations, one might naturally have been led to expect. "Culture" in England has, of late years, almost invariably ranked itself on the side of privilege. The Oxford undergraduate shouts himself hoarse in cheering for Disraeli and groaning for Bright. Oxford rejects Gladstone the moment he becomes a Liberal. The vigorous Radicalism of Thorold Rogers costs him his chair as professor of political economy, although no man in England is a more perfect master of some of the more important branches of that science. The journals which are started for the sake of being read by men of "culture" are sure to throw their influence, nine times out of ten, into the cause of privilege and class ascendency. The "Saturday Review" does this deliberately; the "Pall Mall Gazette" does it instinctively. Suddenly there comes out from the bosom of the universities themselves a band of keen, acute, fearless gladiators, who throw themselves into the van of every great movement which works for democracy, equality and freedom. They invade the press and the platform; they write in this journal and in that; they are always writing, always printing; they are ready for any assailant, however big, they are willing to work with any ally, however small; they shrink from no logical consequence or practical inconvenience of any argument or opinion; they take the working man by the hand and talk to him and tell him all they know—and it is something worth studying, the fact that their scholarship and his no-scholarship so often come to the same conclusion. They will work with anybody, because they go farther than almost anybody; and they will allow anybody the full swing of his own crotchet, even though he be not so willing to give them scope enough for theirs. Thus they are commonly associated with Goldwin Smith, who has a perfect horror of French Democracy and French Imperialism, and who sees in Mirabeau only a "Voltairean debauchee;" with Tom Hughes, who is a sturdy member of the Church of England, and does not, I fancy, care three straws about the policy of ideas; with Bright, whose somewhat Puritanical mind draws back with a kind of dread from anything that savors of free-thinking; with Auberon Herbert, the mild young aristocrat, converted from Toryism by pure sentimentalism and philanthropy; with Connolly, the eloquent Irish plasterer, whose vigorous stump oratory aroused the warm admiration of Louis Blanc. It would be impossible that such a knot of men, so gifted and so fearless, so independent and so unresting, so keen of pen, and so unsparing of logic, should be without a clear and marked influence on the politics of England. It is quite a curious phenomenon that such a group of men should be found in close and constant co-operation with the English artisan, his trades' union organizations, and his political cause. Frederick Harrison represented the working men in the Parliamentary commission lately held to inquire into the whole operation of the trades' unions. Professor Beesly writes continually in the "Beehive," the newspaper which is the organ of George Potter and the trades' societies. I cannot see how the cause of Democracy can fail to derive strength and help from this sort of alliance, and I therefore welcome the influence upon English politics of the little group of Positivist penmen, believing that it will have a deeper reach than most people now imagine, and that where it operates effectively at all, it will be for good.

ENGLISH TORYISM AND ITS LEADERS.

Sir John Mandeville tells a story of a man who set out on a voyage of discovery, and sailing on and on in a westerly direction, at last touched a land where he was surprised to find a climate the same as his own; animals like those he had left behind; men and women not only having the same dress and complexion, but actually speaking the same language as the people of his own country. He was so struck with this unexpected and wonderful discovery, that he took to his ship again without delay, and sailed back eastward to impart to his own people the news that in a far-off, strange, western sea he had found a race identical with themselves. The truth was that the simple voyager had gone round the world, reached his own country without recognizing it, and then went round the world again to get home.

If the voyage were made in our time, and the explorer were a British Tory who had left England in the opening of the year 1867, and after unconsciously sailing round the world had fallen in with British Tories again in the autumn of the same year, one could easily excuse his failing to recognize his own people. For in the interval of time from February to August, British Toryism underwent the most sudden and complete transformation known outside the sphere of Ovid's Metamorphoses. If any of my American readers will try to imagine a whole political party, great in numbers, greater still in wealth, station and influence, suddenly performing just such a turn-round as the "New York Herald" accomplished at a certain early crisis of the late civil war, he will have some idea of the marvellous and unprecedented feat which was executed by the English Tories, when, renouncing all their time-honored traditions, watchwords and principles, they changed a limited and oligarchical franchise into household suffrage. It is singular, indeed, that such a thing should have been done. It is more singular still that it should have been done, as it most assuredly was done, in order that one man should be kept in power. It is even more singular yet that it should have been done by a party of men individually high principled, honorable, unselfish, incapable of any deliberate meanness—and of whom many if not most actually disliked and distrusted the man in whose interest and by whose influence the surrender of principle was made.

Perhaps when I have said a little about the leadership of the English Tories, the phenomenon will appear less wonderful or at least more intelligible. It was not a mere epigram which Mr. Mill uttered when he described the Tories as the stupid party. An average Tory really is a stupid man. He is a gentleman in all the ordinary acceptation of the word. He has been to Oxford or Cambridge; he has received a decent classical education; he has travelled along the beaten tracks—made what would have been called in Mary Wortley Montague's day "the grand tour;" he has birth and high breeding; he is a good fellow, with manly, honorable ways, and that genial consideration for the feelings of others which is the fundamental condition, the vital element of gentlemanly breeding. But he is, with all this, stupid. His mind is narrow, dull, inflexible; he cannot connect cause with effect, or see that a change is coming, or why it should come; with him post hoc always means propter hoc; he cannot account for Goodwin Sands otherwise than because of Tenterden steeple. You cannot help liking him, and sometimes laughing at him. It may seem paradoxical, but I at least am unable to get out of my mind the conviction that there is a solid basis of stupidity in the mind of the great Conservative Chief, Lord Derby. Let me explain what I mean. The Earl of Derby is in one sense a highly accomplished man. He is a good classical scholar, and can make a speech in Latin. He has produced some very spirited translations from Horace; and I like his version of the Iliad better on the whole than any other I know. He is a splendid debater—Macaulay said very truly that with Lord Derby the science of debate was an instinct. He will roll out resonant, rotund, verbose sentences by the hour, by the yard; he is great at making hits and points; he has immense power of reply and repartee—of a certain easy and obvious kind; his voice is fine, his manner is noble, his invective is powerful. But he has no ideas. The light he throws out is a polarized light. He adds nothing new to the political thought of the age. I have heard many of his finest speeches; and I can remember that they were then very telling, in a Parliamentary point of view; but I cannot remember anything he said. He is always interpreting into eloquent and effective words the commonplace Philistine notions, the hereditary conventionalities of his party—and nothing more. His mind is not open to new impressions, and he is not able to appreciate the cause, the purpose or the tendency of change. This I hold to be the essential characteristic of stupidity; and this is an attribute of Lord Derby, with all his Greek, his Latin, his impetuous rhetoric, his debating skill and his audacious blunders, which sometimes almost deceive one into thinking him a man of genius. Now the Earl of Derby is the greatest Tory living; and if I have fairly described the highest type of Tory, one can easily form some conception of what the average Tory must be. Every one likes Lord Derby, and I fully believe it to be the fact that those who know him best like him best. I cannot imagine Lord Derby doing a mean thing; I cannot imagine him haughty to a poor man, or patronizingly offensive to a timid visitor of humble birth. Look at Lord Derby through the wrong end of the intellectual telescope and you have the average British Tory. The Tory's knowledge is confined to classics and field sports—when he knows anything. Even Lord Derby has been guilty of the most flagrant mistakes in geography and modern history. People are never tired of alluding to a famous blunder of his about Tambov in Russia. It is also told of him that he once spoke in Parliament of Demerara as an island; and when one of his colleagues afterward remonstrated with him on the mistake, he asked with ingenuousness and naïvete "How on earth was I to know that Demerara was not an island?" He once, at a public meeting, spoke of himself very frankly as having been born "in the pre-scientific period"—the period but too recently closed, when English Universities and high class schools troubled themselves only about Greek and Latin, and thought it beneath their dignity to show much interest in such vulgar, practical studies as chemistry and natural history, to say nothing of that ungentlemanly and ungenerous study, the science of political economy. The average British Tory is a Lord Derby without eloquence, brains, official habits and political experience.

How, then, do the Tories exist as a party? How do they continue to believe themselves to be Tories, and speak of themselves as Tories, when they have surrendered all, or nearly all, the great principles which are the creed and faith, and business of Toryism? Because they have, in our times, never had Tories for leaders. A man is not a Tory merely because he fights the Tory battles, any more than a captain of the Irish Brigade was a Frenchman because he fought for King Louis, or Hobart Pasha is a Turk because he commands the Ottoman navy. The Tory party has always, of late years, had to call in the aid of brilliant outsiders, political renegades, refugees from broken-down agitations, disappointed and cynical deserters from the Liberal camp, or mere adventurers, to fight their battles for them. It used to be quite a curious sight, some three or four years ago, when the Tories were, as they are now again, in opposition, to look down from the gallery of the House of Commons and see the men who did gladiatorial duty for the party. Along the back benches, above and below the "gangway," were stretched out huge at length the stalwart, handsome, manly country gentlemen, the bone and sinew of the Tory party—the only real Tories to be found in the House. But they did not bear the brunt of debate. They could cheer splendidly, and vote in platoons; but you don't suppose they were just the sort of men to confront Gladstone, and reply to Bright? Not they; and they knew it. There sat Disraeli, the brilliant renegade from Radicalism, who was ready to think for them and talk for them: and who were his lieutenants? Cairns, the successful, adroit, eloquent lawyer, a North of Ireland man, with about as much of the genuine British Tory in him as there is in Disraeli himself; Seymour Fitzgerald, the clever, pushing Irishman, also a lawyer; Whiteside, the voluble, eloquent, rather boisterous advocate, also a lawyer, and also an Irishman; smart, saucy Pope Hennessy, a young Irish adventurer, who had taken up with Toryism and ultramontanism as the best way of making a career, and who would, at the slightest hint from his chief, have risen, utterly ignorant of the subject under debate, and challenged Gladstone's finance or Roundel Palmer's law. These men, and such men—these and no others—did the debating and the fighting for the great Tory party of England at a most critical period of that party's existence. Needless to say that the party who were compelled by their own poverty of idea, their own stupidity, to have these men for their representatives, were stupid enough to be led anywhere and into anything by the force of a little dexterity and daring on the part of the one man into whose hands they had confided their destinies.

In speaking, therefore, of the leaders of Toryism, I must distinctly say that I am not speaking of Tories. The rank and file are Tories; the general and officers belong to another race. Mr. Disraeli is so well known on this side of the Atlantic that I need not occupy much time or space in describing him. He is the most brilliant specimen of the adventurer or political soldier of fortune known to English public life in our days. I do not suppose anybody believes Mr. Disraeli's Toryism to be a genuine faith. This is not merely because he has changed his opinions so completely since the time when he came out as a Radical, under the patronage of O'Connell, and wrote to William Johnson Fox, the Democratic orator, a famous letter, in which he, Disraeli, boasted that "his forte was revolution." Men have changed their views as completely, and even as suddenly, and yet obtained credit for sincerity and integrity. It is not even because, in all of Mr. Disraeli's novels, a prime and favorite personage is a daring political adventurer, who carries all before him by the audacity of his genius and his unscrupulousness; it is not even that Mr. Disraeli, in private life, frequently speaks of success in politics as the one grand object worth striving for or living for. "What do you and I come to this House of Commons night after night for?" said Mr. Disraeli once to a great Englishman, and when the latter failed to reply very quickly, he answered his own question by saying, "You know we come here for fame." The man to whom he spoke declared, in all truthfulness, that he did not follow a political career for the sake of fame. But Disraeli was quite incredulous, and probably could not, by any earnestness and apparent sincerity of asseveration, be got to believe that there lives a being who could sacrifice time, and money, and intellect, and eloquence merely for the sake of serving the public. Yet it is not alone this cynical avowal of selfishness which makes people so profoundly sceptical as to Mr. Disraeli's Toryism. It is the fact that he always escapes into Liberalism whenever he has an opportunity; that he lives by hawking Toryism, not by imbibing it himself; that he is ready to sell it, or betray it, or drag it in the dirt whenever he can safely serve himself by doing so; that he can become the most ardent of Freetraders, the most uncompromising champion of a Popular Suffrage to-day, when it is for his interest, after having fought fiercely against both yesterday, when to fight against them was for his interest. Mr. Disraeli is decidedly a man without scruple. Those who have read his "Vivian Grey" will remember with what zest and unction he describes his hero bewildering a company and dumbfoundering a scientific authority by extemporizing an imaginary quotation from a book which he holds in his hand, and from which he pretends to read the passage he is reciting. It is not long since Mr. Disraeli himself publicly ventured on a bold little experiment of a somewhat similar kind. The story is curious, and worth hearing; and it is certain that it cannot be contradicted.

Three or four years ago, a bitter factious attack was made in the House of Commons upon Mr. Stansfeld, then holding office in the Liberal government, because of his open and avowed friendship for, and intimacy with Mazzini. This was at a time when the French government were endeavoring to connect Mazzini with a plot to assassinate the Emperor Napoleon. Mr. Disraeli was very stern in his condemnation of Mr. Stansfeld for his friendship with one who, twenty odd years before, had encouraged a young enthusiast (as the enthusiast said) in a design to kill Charles Albert, King of Sardinia. Mr. Bright, in a moderate and kindly speech, deprecated the idea of making unpardonable crimes out of the hotheaded follies of enthusiastic men in their young days; and he added that he believed there would be found in a certain poem, written by Disraeli himself some twenty-five or thirty years before, and called "A Revolutionary Epick," some lines of eloquent apostrophe in praise of tyrannicide. Up sprang Mr. Disraeli, indignant and excited, and vehemently denied that any such sentiment, any such line, could be found in the poem. Mr. Bright at once accepted the assurance; said he had never seen the poem himself, but only heard that there was such a passage in it; apologized for the mistake—and there most people thought the matter would have ended. In truth, the volume which Mr. Disraeli had published a generation before, with the grandiloquent title, "A Revolutionary Epick" (not "epic," in the common way, but dignified, old-fashioned "epick"), was a piece of youthful, bombastic folly long out of print, and almost wholly forgotten. But Disraeli chose to attach great importance to the charge he supposed to be made against him; and he declared that he felt himself bound to refute it utterly by more than a mere denial. Accordingly, in a few weeks, there came out a new edition of the Epick, with a dedication to Lord Stanley, and a preface explaining that, as the first edition was out of print, and as a charge founded on a passage in it had been made against the author, said author felt bound to issue this new edition, that all the world might see how unfounded was the accusation. Sure enough, the publication did seem to dispose of the charge effectually. There was only one passage which in any way bore on the subject of tyrannicide, and that certainly did not express approval. What could be more satisfactory? Unluckily, however, the gentleman on whose hint Mr. Bright spoke, happened to possess one copy of the original edition. He compared this, to make assurance doubly sure, with the copy at the British Museum, the only other copy accessible to him, and he found that the passage which contained the praise of tyrannicide had been partly altered, partly suppressed, in the new edition specially issued by Mr. Disraeli, in order to prove to the world that he had not written a line in the poem to imply that he sanctioned the slaying of a tyrant. Now, this was a small and trifling affair; but just see how significant and characteristic it was! It surely did not make much matter whether Mr. Disraeli, in his young, nonsensical days, had or had not indulged in a burst of enthusiasm about the slaying of tyrants, in a poem so bombastical that no rational man could think of it with any seriousness. But Mr. Disraeli chose to regard his reputation as seriously assailed; and what did he do to vindicate himself? He published a new edition, which he trumpeted as not merely authentic, but as issued for the sole purpose of proving that he had not praised tyrannicide, and he deliberately excised the lines which contained the passage in question! The controversy turned on some two lines and a half; and of these Mr. Disraeli cut out all the dangerous words and gave the garbled version to the world as his authoritative reply to the charge made against him! This, too, after the famous "annexation" of one of Thiers's speeches, and the delivery of it as a panegyric on the memory of the Duke of Wellington, and after the appropriation of a page or two out of an essay by Macaulay, and its introduction wholesale, as original, into one of Mr. Disraeli's novels.

The truth is that Disraeli is so reckless a gladiator that he will catch up any weapon of defence, use any means of evasion and escape; will fight anyhow, and win anyhow. In political affairs, at least, he has no moral sense whatever; and the public seems to tolerate him on that understanding. Certainly, escapades and practices which would ruin the reputation of any other public man do not seem to bring Disraeli into serious disrepute. The few high-toned men of his own party and the other who hold all trickery in detestation, had made up their minds about him long ago; and nothing could hurt him more in their esteem—the great majority of politicians laugh at the whole thing, and take no thought. The feeling seems to be, "We don't expect grave and severe virtue from this man; we take him as he is. It would be ridiculous to apply a grave moral test to anything he may say or do." In Lockhart's "Life of Walter Scott," it is told that the great novelist went one morning very early to call on a certain friend. The friend was in bed, and Scott, pushing into the room familiarly, found that his friend was—not alone, as he expected him to be. Scott was a highly moral man, and he would have turned his back indignantly on any other of his friends whom he found guilty of vice; but his biographer says that he took the discovery he had made very lightly in this instance; and he afterward explained that the delinquent was so ridiculously without depth of character it would be absurd to find serious fault with anything he did. Perhaps it is in a similar spirit that the British public regard Mr. Disraeli. He delivered a memorable peroration one night last year in the House of Commons, the utterance and the language of which were so peculiar that charity itself could not affect to be ignorant of the stimulating cause which sent forth such extraordinary eloquence. Yet hardly anybody seemed to regard it as more than a good joke; and the newspapers which were most indignant and most scandalized over Andrew Johnson's celebrated inaugural address made no allusion whatever to Mr. Disraeli's bewildering outburst. One reason, probably, is that Disraeli, in private, is much liked. He is very kindly; he is a good friend; he is sympathetic in his dealings with young politicians, and is always glad to give a helping hand to a young man of talent. Personal ambition, which, in Mr. Bright's eyes, is something despicable, and which Mr. Gladstone probably regards as a sin, is, in Disraeli's acceptation, something generous and elevating, something to be fostered and encouraged. Therefore, young men of talent admire Disraeli, and are glad and proud to gather round him. The men who have any brains in the Tory ranks are usually of the adventurer class; and they form a phalanx by the aid of which Disraeli can do great things. No matter how the honest, dull bulk of his party may distrust him, they cannot do without him and his phalanx; and they allow him to win his battles by the force of their votes, and they think he is winning their battles all the time.

One young man of brains there was on the Tory side of the House of Commons, who did not like Disraeli, and never professed to like him. This was Lord Robert Cecil, who subsequently became Viscount Cranbourne, and now sits in the House of Lords as Marquis of Salisbury. Lord Robert Cecil was by far the ablest scion of noble Toryism in the House of Commons. Younger than Lord Stanley he had not Lord Stanley's solidity and caution; but he had much more of original ability; he had brilliant ideas, great readiness in debate, and a perfect genius for saying bitter things in the bitterest tone. The younger son of a wealthy peer, he had, in consequence of a dispute with his father, manfully accepted honorable poverty, and was glad, for no short time, to help out his means by the use of his pen. He wrote in the "Quarterly Review," the time-honored organ of Toryism; and after a while certain political articles regularly appearing in that periodical became identified with his name. One great object of these articles seemed to be to denounce Mr. Disraeli and warn the Tory party against him as a traitor, certain in the end to sell and surrender their principles. Lord Robert Cecil was an ultra-Tory—or at least thought himself so—I feel convinced that his intellect and his experience will set him free one day. He was a Tory on principle and would listen to no compromise. People did not at first see how much ability there was in him—very few indeed saw how much of genuine manhood and nobleness there was in him. His tall, bent, awkward figure; his prematurely bald crown, his face with an outline and a beard that reminded one of a Jew pedler from the Minories, his ungainly gestures, his unmelodious voice, and the extraordinary and wanton bitterness of his tongue, set the ordinary observer strongly against him. He seemed to delight in being gratuitously offensive. Let me give one illustration. He assailed Mr. Gladstone's financial policy one night, and said it was like the practice of a pettifogging attorney. This was rather coarse and it was received with loud murmurs of disapprobation, but Lord Robert went on unheeding. Next night, however, when the debate was resumed, he rose and said he feared he had used language the previous evening which was calculated to give offence, and which he could not justify. There were murmurs of encouraging applause—nothing delights the House of Commons like an unsolicited and manly apology. Yes, he had, on the previous night, in a moment of excitement, compared the policy of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the practice of a pettifogging attorney. That was language which on sober consideration he felt he could not justify and ought not to have used, "and therefore," said Lord Robert, "I beg leave to offer my sincere apology"—here Mr. Gladstone half rose from his seat, with face of eager generosity, ready to pardon even before fully asked—"I beg leave to tender my sincere apology—to the attorneys!" Half the House roared with laughter, the other half with anger—and Gladstone threw himself back in his seat with an expression of mingled disappointment, pity and scorn, on his pallid, noble features.

There was something so wanton, something so nearly approaching to outrageous buffoonery, in conduct like this, on the part of Lord Robert Cecil, that it was long before impartial observers came to recognize the fine intellect and the manly character that were disguised under such an unprepossessing exterior. When the Tories came into power, the great place of Secretary for India was given to Lord Robert, who had then become Viscount Cranbourne, and the responsibilities of office wrought as complete a change in him as the wearing of the crown did in Harry the Fifth. No man ever displayed in so short a time greater aptitude for the duties of the office he had undertaken, or a loftier sense of its tremendous moral and political responsibility, than did Lord Cranbourne during his too brief tenure of the Indian Secretaryship. The cynic had become a statesman, the intellectual gladiator an earnest champion of exalted political principle. The license of tongue, in which Lord Cranbourne had revelled while yet a free lance, he absolutely renounced when he became a responsible minister. He extorted the respect and admiration of Gladstone and Bright, and indeed of every one who took the slightest interest in the condition and the future of India. The manner of his leaving office became him, too, almost as much as his occupation of it. He was sincerely opposed to a sudden lowering of the franchise, and he insisted that his party ought to think nothing of power when compared with principle. He found that Disraeli was determined to surrender anything rather than power, and he withdrew from the uncongenial companionship. He resigned office, and dropped into the ranks once more, never hesitating to express his conviction of the utter insincerity of the Conservative leader. He would have been a sharp and stinging thorn in Disraeli's side, only that death intervened and took away, not him, but his father. The death of his elder brother had made Lord Robert Cecil, Viscount Cranbourne; the death of his father now converted Viscount Cranbourne into the Marquis of Salisbury, and condemned him to the languid, inert, lifeless atmosphere of the House of Peers. The sincere pity of all who admired him followed the brilliant Salisbury in his melancholy descent. I should despair of conveying to an American reader unacquainted with English politics any adequate idea of the profundity and hopelessness of the fall which precipitates a young, ardent and gifted politician from the brilliant battle-ground of the House of Commons into the lifeless, Lethean pool of the House of Lords.

Still, the Tory party may be led, as it has been, by a chief in the House of Lords, although its great and splendid fights must be fought in the Commons. If then, in our time, Toryism ever should again become a principle which a man of genius and high character could fairly fight for, it has a leader ready to its hand in the Marquis of Salisbury. For the present it has Lord Cairns. The Earl of Derby's health no longer allows him to undertake the serious and laborious duties of party leadership. When he withdrew from the front, an attempt was made to put up with Lord Malmesbury. But Malmesbury is stupid and muddle-headed to a degree which even Tory peers cannot endure in a Tory peer; and it has somehow been "borne in upon him" that he had better leave the place to some one really qualified to fill it. Now, the Tories in the House of Commons, the country gentlemen of England, the men whose ancestors came over, perhaps, with the Conqueror, the men who imbibed family Toryism from the breasts of their mothers, are driven, when they want a capable leader, to follow a renegade Radical, the son of a middle-class Jew. In like manner the Tory Lords, also sadly needing an efficient leader, are compelled to take up with a lawyer from Belfast, the son of middle-class parents in the North of Ireland, who has fought his way by sheer talent and energy into the front rank of the bar, into the front bench of the Parliamentary Opposition, and at last into a peerage. Lord Cairns is a very capable man; his sudden rise into high place and influence proves the fact of itself, for he was not a young man when he entered Parliament, obscure and unknown, and he is now only in the prime of life, while he leads the Opposition in the House of Lords. He is one of the most fluent and effective debaters in either House; he has great command of telling argument; his training at the bar gives him the faculty of making the very most, and at the shortest notice, of all the knowledge and all the facts he can bring to bear on any question. He has shown more than once that he is capable of pouring forth a powerful, almost indeed, a passionate invective. An orator in the highest sense he certainly is not. No gleam of the poetic softens or brightens his lithe and nervous logic; no deep feeling animates, inspires and sanctifies it. He has made no speeches which anybody hereafter will care to read. He has made, he will make, no mark upon his age. When he dies, he wholly dies. But living, he is a skilful and a capable man—far better qualified to be a party leader than an Erskine or a Grattan would be. A North of Ireland Presbyterian, he has made his way to a peerage, and now to be the leader of peers, with less of native genius than that which conducted Wolfe Tone, another North of Ireland Presbyterian, to rebellion and failure and a bloody death. He has, above all things, skill and discretion; and he can lead the Tory party well, so long as no great cause has to be vindicated, no splendid phantom of a principle maintained. His name and his antecedents are useful to us now, inasmuch as they serve still farther to illustrate the fact that Toryism is not led by Tories.

In speaking of Tory leaders one ought not, of course, to leave out the name of Lord Stanley. But Lord Stanley is only a Tory ex officio, and by virtue of his position as the eldest son and heir of the great Earl of Derby. I have never heard of Lord Stanley's uttering a Tory sentiment, even when he had to play a Tory part. His speeches are all the speeches of a steady, respectable, thoughtful sort of Liberal, inclined to study carefully both or all sides of a question, and opposed to extreme opinions either way. He will never, it is quite clear, be guilty of the audacity of openly breaking with his party while his father lives; and perhaps when he becomes Earl of Derby, there may be nothing distinctively Tory worth fighting about. Lord Stanley is indeed totally devoid of that generous ardor which makes men open converts. He is no longer young, and he will probably remain all his life where he stands at present. But a genuine Tory he is not. I confess that at one time I looked to him with great hope, as a man likely to develop into statesmanship of the highest order, and to announce himself as a votary of political and intellectual progress. Some years ago I wrote an article in the "Westminster Review," the object of which was to point to Lord Stanley as the future colleague of Gladstone in a great and a really liberal government. I have changed my opinion since. Lord Stanley wants, not the brains, but the heart for such a place. He has not the spirit to step out of his hereditary way. He is one of the sort of men of whom Goethe used to say, "If only they would commit an extravagance even, I should have some hope for them." He seems to care for little beyond accuracy of judgment and propriety; and I do not suppose accuracy of judgment and propriety ever made a great statesman. There is nothing venturesome about Lord Stanley—therefore there is nothing great. A man to be great must brave being ridiculous; and I do not remember that Lord Stanley has ever run the risk of being ridiculous. One of the finest and most celebrated passages of modern Parliamentary eloquence is that in which George Canning, vindicating his recognition of the South American republics, proclaimed that he had called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old. I once heard a member of the House of Lords, now dead, who sat in the House of Commons near Canning, when Canning spoke that famous speech, say that when the orator came to the great climax the House was actually breaking into a titter, so absurd then did any grandiloquence about South American republics seem; and it was only the earnestness and resolve of his manner that commanded a respectful attention, and thus compelled the House to recognize the genuine grandeur of the idea, and to break into a tempest of applause. I have heard something the same told of one of the grandest passages in any of Bright's speeches—that in one of his orations against the Crimean War, in which he declared that he already heard, during the debate, the beating of the wings of the Angel of Death. The House was under the influence of a war fever, and disposed to scoff at all appeals to prudence or to pity; and it was just on the verge of a laugh at the orator's majestic apostrophe, when his earnestness conquered, the grandeur of the moment was recognized, and a peal of irrepressible applause proclaimed the triumph of his eloquence. Now, these are the risks that a man like Lord Stanley never will run. Only genius makes such ventures. He is always safe: great statesmen must sometimes brave terrible hazards. In England he has received immense praise for the part he took in averting a war between France and Prussia on the Luxembourg question. Now, it is quite true that he did much; that, in fact, he lent all the influence of England to the mode of arrangement by which both the contending Powers were enabled to back decently out of a dangerous and painful position. But the idea of such a mode of settlement did not come from him. It was originated by Baron von Beust, the Austrian Prime Minister, and it was quietly urged a good deal before Lord Stanley saw it. Von Beust, who has a keener wit than Stanley, knew that if the proposition came directly from him it would, ipso facto, be odious to Prussia; and he was, therefore, rejoiced when Lord Stanley took it up and adopted it as his own and England's. Von Beust was well content, and so was Lord Stanley—just as Cuddie Headrigg, in "Old Mortality," is content that John Gudyill shall have the responsibility and the honor of the shot which the latter never fired. The one original thing which Lord Stanley did during the controversy was to write a dispatch to Prussia recommending her to come to terms, because of the superior navy of France, and the certainty, in the event of war, that France would have the best of it at sea.

Now, this was a capital argument to influence a man like Lord Stanley himself—calm, cold-blooded, utterly rational. But human ingenuity could hardly have devised an appeal less likely to influence Prussia in the way of peace. Prussia, flushed with her splendid victories over Austria, and deeply offended by the arrogant and dictatorial conduct of France, was much more likely to be stung by such an argument, if it affected her at all, into flinging down the gauntlet at once, and inviting France to come if she dared. The use of such a mode of persuasion is, indeed, an adequate illustration of the whole character of Lord Stanley. Cool, prudent, and rational, he is capable enough of weighing things fairly when they are presented to him; but he can neither create an opportunity nor run a risk. Therefore, he remains officially a Tory, mentally a Liberal, politically neither the one nor the other. His bones are marrowless, his blood is cold. He can forfeit his own career, and hazard his reputation for his party; but that is all. He cannot give his mind to it, and he cannot redeem himself from his futile bondage to it. He is a respectable speaker, despite his defective articulation and his lifeless manner; he will be a respectable politician, despite his want of faith in, or zeal for the cause he tries to follow. That is his career; that is the doom to which he voluntarily condemns himself.

I do not know that there are any other Tory chiefs worth talking about. Sir Stafford Northcote looks like a Bonn or Heidelberg professor, and has a fair average intellect, fit for commonplace finance and elementary politics; there is not a ghost of an idea in him. Walpole is a pompous, well-meaning, gentlemanlike imbecile. Gathorne Hardy is fluent, as the sand in an hourglass is fluent—he can pour out words and serve to mark the passing of time. Sir John Pakington is an educated Dogberry, a respectable Justice Shallow. Not upon men like these do the political fortunes of the Tory party of our day depend, although Walpole and Pakington fairly represent the sincerity, the manhood, and the respectability of Toryism.

I come back to the point from which I started—that Toryism, in itself, is only another word for stupidity, and that any triumphs the party have won or may win are secured by the surrender of the principle they profess to be fighting for, and by the skilful management of men whose conscience permits them to adapt the means unscrupulously to the end. Were the Tory party led by genuine Tories it would have been extinct long ago. It lives and looks upon the earth, it has its triumphs and its gains, its present and its future, only because by very virtue of its own dulness it has allowed itself to be led by men whom it ought to detest, whom it sometimes does distrust, but who have the wit to sell principle in the dearest market, and buy reputation in the cheapest.