isaffection
among his soldiers. Promotion, many men believed, had for some years
been distributed through favoritism. The men had little confidence
in their officers, the officers complained loudly of their men. A
dashing exploit in Algeria made up for irregularities of discipline.
Even the staff officers were deficient in geography, and the stories
that afterwards came to light of the way in which the War Department
collected worthless stores, while serviceable ones existed only on
paper, seem almost incredible. Yet when war was declared, Emile
Ollivier said that he went into it with a light heart, and Marshal
Le Boeuf was reported to have told the emperor that he would not
find so much as one button missing on his soldiers' gaiters.

The discovery that the army was not to be depended on, and needed
a war of glory to put it in good humor with itself and with its
emperor, decided Napoleon III. to enter precipitately into the
Franco-Prussian war while he still had health enough to share in
it. Besides this, a struggle with Germany was inevitable, and he
dared not leave it to his successor. Then, too, if successful,--and
he never doubted of success,--all opposition at home would be crushed,
and the prestige of his dynasty would be doubled, especially if
he could, by a brilliant campaign, give France the frontier of
the Rhine, at least to the borders of Belgium. This would indeed
be a glorious crowning of his reign.

He believed in himself, he believed in his star, he believed in his
own generalship, he believed that his army was ready (though his
army and navy never had been ready for any previous campaign), and he
believed, truly enough, that the prospect of glory, aggrandizement,
and success would be popular in France.

Spain was at that time in want of a king. Several princes were
proposed, and the most acceptable one would have been the Duc de
Montpensier; but Napoleon III., who dreaded the rivalry of the
Orleans family, gave the Spaniards to understand that he would never
consent to see a prince of that family upon the Spanish throne. Then
the Spaniards took the matter into their own hands, and possibly
stimulated by a wish to make a choice disagreeable to the French
emperor, selected a prince of the Prussian royal family, Prince
Leopold of Hohenzollern. The Emperor Napoleon objected at once.
To have Prussia on the eastern frontier of France, and Prussian
influence beyond the Pyrenees, was worse in his eyes than