TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE EMPEROR'S SPEECH.
SEVENTEEN years of sovereignty, and the Emperor is still protesting his right to be The Speech with which Napoleon opened his Legislative Chambers on the 18th inst. has been sharply criticized from many sides, for though the Emperor is no longer arbiter of Europe, he is still the most obvious Sovereign within its limits. The Liberals see in the determined reassertion that the bases of the Constitution are beyond discussion, a death-blow to their lingering hopes that the Emperor may one day crown the edifice ; the politicians find in the " firm hope " that peace may be maintained, an absence of security that it will be ; the speculators hear in the proud exposition of the strength of France, her " perfected " armament, her filled magazines, her well-trained reserves, her new Garde Mobile, her reconstructed fleet, a murmur as of legions just getting into motion, and all these classes of critics may be in the right. But to us, we confess, the marked feature of the Emperor's speech is the sense it manifests of an abiding, incurable unrest. Throughout he is holding an argument with France, answering an opposition which, scarcely visible to the rest of mankind, is to him, with his strange intuitions as to French feeling —we say strange, for if ever a man lived whose mind was essentially un-French it is the Emperor—never even obscure. "I am," he begins by saying, " the responsible chief of a free State," not, observe, a despot or a constitutional ruler, but the one " responsible " and therefore rightly potent authority among a people whose freedom is established by the fact that they elected himself. Frenchmen are to judge the Emperor, not as they would a King, but as they might an hereditary President, as their own choice, the delegate of the nation, clothed with its right of sovereignty over itself. So judging, they cannot say—this seems to us the thought in the Emperor's mind—that he claims too lofty a power, or arrogates to himself too exclusive an initiative. The point for them is not his power, but the use he makes of it. " By their fruits," says Napoleon, quoting the Gospel, and startling the reader into a sudden perception of a grim incongruity, "by their fruits ye shall know them," and he enumerates the fruits. France has regained her military position in spite of Sadowa, a truth which, if not true to the world, is true to Frenchmen. Two Parliaments elected by universal suffrage have so supported the Emperor that he has never wished to shorten the limit of their legal duration,—a truth also, and one which decides not one dispute, but many. If Parliamentary sanction can ever legalize absolute power, Napoleon's has that Parliamentary sanction. Prosperity increases, and the revenue ; education spreads ; the power of the " deliberative assemblies" has been increased, and for myself, said the Emperor, for the first time raising his head, "for twenty years I have not had a single thought, I have not done a single deed of which the motive was other than the interest and greatness of France." These things also are truths, were acknowledged there and then by the representatives to be truths ; and what, then, asks the Emperor, whom all this "fruit" does not serve to reassure, is it that France requires ? The speech is one long query, saturated with doubt like the songs of Clough or Matthew Arnold, and, like the doubt in them, the Emperor's doubt is not of the existence of an all-powerful though invisible sentient force, but of its character and its will. He sees clearly, as his parasites do not see, that the mighty entity which alone on this earth is stronger than himself, that aggregate of forty million wills which we call "France," whose volition has throughout history been so strangely indivisible, has wishes which he has not fulfilled, instincts which he has not emancipated, behests to give which he has not obeyed, has not, he fears, as yet even clearly discerned. And so he questions " France," argues with her, pleads before her with a sort of mental wrestling, which imparts to his speech, otherwise somewhat too imperial, a singular intellectual charm. Napoleon is the clearest speaker in Europe, and yet most thinkers would class him with Mr. Carlyle's "inarticulate" heroes, so greatly does his thought, or rather so greatly does the impression which is below his thought, exceed his capacity of inspiring conviction. He struggles visibly, sometimes even painfully,—as in the oddly bathetic exclamation which commences his paragraph on the result of the new Press law, —to express in a State speech thoughts which require a six hours' burst of oratory, and succeeds at last not in expressing them, but in hinting what they are. Those thoughts, as it seems to us, are two,—that he is threatened by a danger he clearly sees, and must, to avert it, satisfy France in some way, which he is resolved shall not be a concession of the " regime of the tribune," and hopes will not be war. What the danger is perhaps nobody but himself can tell. He may be feeling his years, and pleading mainly for his dynasty ; and in that case he would have no confidant, and would only brood over the fact that the youth of France is Republican ; that invitations to Compiegne were declined by the whole body of Paris students ; that no new men, as M. de Cassagnac angrily complains, appear to guard the throne. Or he may be aware of actual concrete insurrectionary dangers arising from the position of his throne in the heart of a Republican capital. That mysterious Baudin affair has never been even plausibly explained. It is certain that a powerful force, an army, in fact, complete in all its arms, was last year held in readiness to suppress an armed insurrection expected on the anniversary of 2nd December, and though Paris was as tranquil as ever, it is to us inconceivable that these preparations were the result of mere panic. Napoleon is not the kind of man who conjures up insurrections, and he has at his disposal an unequalled secret police, which hitherto has preserved his Government from all such mistakes. Or he may fear some definite rush of public feeling, some clear demand, as, for instance, to be led to the frontiers, and unwilling to play so tremendous a stake, unable to command in person, yet reluctant to confer such an opportunity on a general, he may be pleading with France that peace is never shameful to the strong. That is, no doubt, the most obvious meaning of his paragraph on military preparations ; but then in that, as in all things, he questions France, and the Bourse may have been wise to fall, for France may need more restraint than is implied in a reluctance to urge. Or,—and this is the most probable hypothesis of all,—he may see and dread the gradual growth of that most unique quality of France, its power of developing a solvent public opinion, an opinion in which existing authority dissolves like iron in a strong acid. That quality has been absent for years ; its secretion, indeed, requires years ; but the process may have commenced again, and if it has, in the next struggle authority will melt away, as it had melted away when Louis XVL entered the Salle des Menus, still the undisputed head of France, old and new. "Bayonets," said Schwarzenburg, "one can do anything with bayonets except sit on them ;" but for France the mot should be somewhat changed. There the fine-tempered steel yields only to an acid. Only Napoleon can know accurately if this process has begun, if any part of his authority, any morsel of concrete beneath his throne is beginning to crumble away, if his personal sceptre is shaking at all,—if, for example, he finds certain men indispensable, or certain influences irresistible, or certain over-zealous followers beyond control of the reins. The world says so, but the world has not succeeded in reading Napoleon very well, and his mind may still be, as it once was, very like water, which vacillates for ever, but is incompressible by anything known to man. Our impression is that he sees some such signs, wrestles with himself and France to disprove them, will finally, in some supreme effort to be rid of them, shake the world. What direction that effort will take remains a secret probably even to himself_ Were he what he was at fifty, it would, we confidently believe, be Socialist. No effort, say many French observers, would dislodge the man who abolished the mortgages on French peasant properties, a proposal which has three times emerged under one form or another into half light. Were he less bitterly assailed, were parties less irreconcilable, and feuds less savage, it would be the grant of "liberty," that is, of an American constitution, with a free legislature and a free press, but an irremovable President. Napoleon could interpret the wishes of a Legislature as readily as those of France, and he is no Andrew Johnson, to defy instead of leading representatives. Being as he is, his probable course is a great foreign enterprise, which shall once more let France feel that she is still first—as she estimates primacy—Among the nations of the world. It is to this resolve that all symptoms tend, but this resolve is not taken yet ; the Emperor still " hopes," " firmly hopes," honestly hopes, that if he can but wait, if time will but fight for him, it may never be unavoidable. But does Time ever fight for a living man, an existing being, a working organism That is the question Napoleon III., like Philip II.,—so like and so nillike him, the lemur of the Ciesarist family,—has now to decide, and we fear he will find that the truth is in Louis Blanc's wisest apophthegm, " Edifices have duration, it is only ruins which have eternity."
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