law, and very few Romans had heard of them; still less had any one been
found to assert that the real truth of these theories would be soon
demonstrated retrogressively by the rapid degeneration of men into apes,
while apes would hereafter have cause to congratulate themselves upon not
having developed into men. Many theories also were then enjoying vast
popularity which have since fallen low in the popular estimation. Prussia
was still, in theory, a Power of the second class, and the empire of
Louis Napoleon was supposed to possess elements of stability. The great
civil war in the United States had just been fought, and people still
doubted whether the republic would hold together. It is hard to recall
the common beliefs of those times. A great part of the political creed of
twenty years ago seems now a mass of idiotic superstition, in no wise
preferable, as Macaulay would have said, to the Egyptian worship of cats
and onions. Nevertheless, then, as now, men met together secretly in
cellars and dens, as well as in drawing-rooms and clubs, and whispered
together, and said their theories were worth something, and ought to be
tried. The word republic possessed then, as now, a delicious attraction
for people who had grievances; and although, after the conquest of
Naples, Garibaldi had made a sort of public abjuration of republican
principles, so far as Italy was concerned, the plotters of all classes
persisted in coupling his name with the idea of a commonwealth erected on
the plan of "sois mon frere ou je te tue." Profound silence on the part
of Governments, and a still more guarded secrecy on the part of
conspiring bodies, were practised as the very first principle of all
political operations. No copyist, at half-a-crown an hour, had yet
betrayed the English Foreign Office; and it had not dawned upon the
clouded intellects of European statesmen that deliberate national
perjury, accompanied by public meetings of sovereigns, and much blare of
many trumpets, could be practised with such triumphant success as events
have since shown. In the beginning of the year 1865 people crossed the
Alps in carriages; the Suez Canal had not been opened; the first Atlantic
cable was not laid; German unity had not been invented; Pius IX. reigned
in the Pontifical States; Louis Napoleon was the idol of the French;
President Lincoln had not been murdered,--is anything needed to widen the
gulf which separates those times from these? The differen