TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE VISIT.
THE Emperor's visit has passed like a dream in its pageantry and its popular excitement, but not like a dream in its practical import or consequences. It has been at once a revelation to us English
of great facts in the state of Europe and of great facts in the state of our own mind. We have just been viewing the Emperor
Napoleon the Third entirely upon the splendid side of his charac- ter : it is not very long since we were viewing him entirely on the dark side; yet there must—as philosophers tell us, to prove the divisibility of matter—always be two sides to anything. That which is true of each must remain so permanently ; it only be- comes false when we see but one half and forget or ignore the other.
Nothing that we said of Louis Napoleon in 1851 was untrue of that personage. It was not alone the violent and subversive cha- racter of the coup d'etat that occasioned the revulsion in this country : it was, that an adventurer seized the opportunity, when a nation was divided and unguarded, to grasp power, not for a popular purpose, for a faction, or even for a legitimate tradition, but for his own personal aggrandizement. He took upon himself to override every kind of law, and carried violence to cold cruelty. As soon, however, as an immense majority of the French nation confirmed the extended lease of power, the coup d'etat was oon- doned ; and the country, impelled by whatsoever motives, passed a vote which, as we remarked at the time, " entitled its ruler to a tolerance and recognition on the part of foreign Governments, to which for the previous three weeks he had no claim." It is not uninteresting to note that the foreign Governments received the Prince President at the time, and on his assumption of the title of Emperor, in a fashion very different, very characteristic, and not without some relation to thet posture of the Powers of Eu-
rope. England never withheldete re e%ecognition, but accepted the accepted of France. Austria showed an inclination to counte- nance him from his first concentration of power. The Prussian view was more largely mingled with distrust and apprehension. Russia was silent in 1851, and refused to greet the Emperor as " Sir, my brother."
Louis Philippe was the first reigning French Monarch who visited this country of his own free will ; but that occurrence was as different from the present as some other royal visits. The Em- peror of All the Russias came upon us suddenly and privately. He received an invitation to Windsor Castle, as a travelling knight- errant might whose incognito had been penetrated, after he had privately passed a night at the Russian Embassy. We had French princes here before Louis Philippe—for the princes of both coun- tries have, by Norman title or other pretension, claimed the terries tories of either country. More than one, unceremoniously ex- pelled from his own land, has sought ours as a refuge. Louis the Eighteenth and his brother preceded Louis Philippe in the ca- pacity of fugitive ' • and when the bourgeois King came, although policy was at the bottom of that courtesy, (as it was at the bottom of everything that he did,) and although he took part in the state ceremonies, there was still a studied air of homeliness in his visit. He was a good and virtuous man, after the ordinary type • a kind of splendid emperor of the middle classes ; full of middle-class maxims—love of peace, cultivation of trade, essentially civil, and thoroughly retail in his ideas. He relied upon the " entente oor- diale " to obtain the support of this country, whom he outwitted in the Spanish marriage. He relied upon the National Guards, who were outwitted at once by the numerous French class of ad- venturer-statesmen and by the proletaires.
Whatever deliberate judgment may pronounce upon the com- parative frankness of Louis Philippe and Louis Napoleon,—a problem that we could not possibly solve in this year 1855,—it is undoubted that the actions of the Emperor constitute more substantial pledges for his professions. The absolute Emperor does more than the constitutional King to bring about a social and commercial intercourse between the peoples under the political alliance of the Governments.
There are other differences. When Louis Philippe came, the French people said that he bore with him " disgraceful conces- sions" to the British Government—the Pritchard indemnity and the treaty of Morocco. They discountenanced his visit, and he came on his own responsibility. It is exactly the reverse now : bearing the credentials of the people in a formal sense, Napoleon the Third has obtained no more general and pleased recognition by his own people than in undertaking this visit. The crowned fa- mily man left his wife behind him, and only brought her and the princes his children when he came as " Mr. Smith." Napoleon leads the Empress Eugenie in his hand : he is therefore the first reigning monarch with rising power who visits this court in a complete style, pledged to the alliance by his own actions, a learner of our own favourite commercial doctrines of free trade. Many a man who has quietly succeeded to his throne has perpetrated crimes in the use of his power outweighing more than the easy service of receiving his inheritance in an orderly way. Louis Napoleon perpetrated wrong in the acquisition of power ; in the use of it he has won our applause, substantiated in our alliance.
But those who cheered his progress from port to castle, and from royal palace to civic hall, were thinking far more of the individual than of the sovereign : and very naturally. As a man, Louis Napo-
leon is far more remarkable than as the potentate Napoleon the Third. Although most men in this country would decline to gamble with Fortune as he did, and would not covet the power that he sought through such means, yet they cannot withhold an interest in his adventurous career. The man whom so recently they have fami- liarly seen, apparently idling his time with precarious subsistence, a dweller upon sufferance amongst ourselves, is now at the head of Europe. Romance cannot tell a more wonderful story ; and the hero of it has been a living man within our own sight and know- ledge. It was impossible that the crowds assembled in London this week, and thus reading the great book of romance spread out before them in real life, could fail to look upon its hero with more admiration than we regard the first actor of any stage ; for no stage is so vast as his, no actor in the most effective drama so absolutely real. But curiosity and amusement were justified in their admiration on reflection, because of the alliance which he re- presented and of its consequences. The mob cheered for its love of the pageantry, and felt that it was virtuous in cheering. The humour of the hour was intoxication under a pious sanction—a region into which human nature always rushes with a wondrous gusto.
But the lesson was not purely critical. Possibly we have been making large mistakes ; possibly we have been misappre- elating something besides Napoleon. Our own quiet life, during the latter years of the peace, had made us slumber in an unbroken routine until we began to think that Routine was the last tem- poral ruler of the world. Personal influence, we supposed, had passed away. Enlightened self-interest was henceforward to guide affairs, which would govern themselves smoothly by their own weight and profitableness. They entertained the same idea in France. Louis Philippeu thought that he had put his business into such train that it would give him no further trouble. The Revo- lution itself, which broke in upon that dream, had its routine; it proceeded upon its own dogma of self-government, and chose the most virtuous man, Cavaignac, to be its President. Suddenly, Louis Napoleon breaks in upon the peaceable machinery of these dogmatic institutions ; becomes the Elected of December over the head of the virtuous man; and is allowed to take the means of 'mastering an empire and mounting upon its throne.
It is an example of perfect success in a man at whose attempts we once laughed. He knows at least the science of perseverance -and opportunity. He has not always been able to make his op- portunities, though sometimes he did that; but he has used those that others would have let go by. When the bourgeois King had the Napoleon in his clutches, the prisoner of Ham invested a part of his leisure in that scheme for the extinction of pauperism which went far to procure the vote for the Elected of December. A paltry Chartist hubbub on the 10th of April enabled the exile, with a badge on his arm and a wooden baton, to give earnest of that esteem for England which made him aid in defending her institutions, and which has helped to procure the present alliance. France had a revolution, and he offered a President for whom Bonapartists could vote and proletaires could wish. Once on that vantage-ground, he could realize a general feeling that the tenure of power was too precarious. He proved how precarious it was by the coup d'etat, and by the plebiscite how permanent it may be made. He attempted to establish a spurious Latin influence in the East,—a trifle, a toy, which drew him into a serape ; but, cleverly used, the scrape became a great quarrel in which the latent enemy of Europe was exposed, and terminated in the alliance that clenches the power of the Emperor Napoleon the Third. The lord para- mount of the Continent, who refused to call him " Sir, my bro- ther," is worried to death ; his heir succeeding to a vast war, a doubtful finance, and a throne for whose insurance any office would exact an enhanced rate of premium.
There is here not only that success which always commands vulgar esteem, but something which shows that the man had learned the science of accumulating power better than those who had previously made it their business. Our own statesmen thought themselves perfect in the art. We had conceived the no- tion that personal influence was for ever to be merged in " the general interest " : Louis Philippe extended that philosophy to France, and applied to it the managing arts of our public men : the revolution of 1848 itself was based upon the idea that reason, conviction, and historical precedent, will determine the destiny of peoples, and that a yet more enlightened self-interest would over- ride the claims of class, as class had overridden those of person. Napoleon the Third is, and the doctrine is refuted. Devoid he may be of feelings and reflections that restrain some men who could excel him in the library or in the senate, but who had for- gotten that instruments for governing peoples lie in the arsenal and in the great physical passions by which multitudes are ruled. What they forgot he remembered ; and the statesmanship of ,quietism thus abandoned to him the monopoly of supreme power. Most men, it has been observed, whom we call "great," have achieved their greatness somewhat lawlessly. Perhaps this means that their greatness consists in their better appreciation of great forces, and their sympathy with the large passions that move whole races. A Louis Philippe triumphed because he thought that the ear of state had fallen-into a rut, and he could never get his country nearer to ours than the "entente cordiale." Louis Na- poleon wrenches the state from its rut, without a prayer to Her- *Milesj and we have under the usurping despot an alliance which tomiser to give to each country the united strength and wealth X both.
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