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