now depend upon rotten boroughs, but upon
rotten representatives. Therefore he did not understand Bonapartism. He
did not understand that French democracy became more democratic, not
less, when it turned all France into one constituency which elected one
member. He did not understand that many dragged down the Republic
because it was not republican, but purely senatorial. He was yet to
learn how quite corruptly senatorial a great representative assembly can
become. Yet in England to-day we hear "the decline of Parliament" talked
about and taken for granted by the best Parliamentarians--Mr. Balfour,
for instance--and we hear the one partly French and wholly Jacobin
historian of the French Revolution recommending for the English evil a
revival of the power of the Crown. It seems that so far from having left
Louis Napoleon far behind in the grey dust of the dead despotisms, it is
not at all improbable that our most extreme revolutionary developments
may end where Louis Napoleon began.

In other words, the Victorian Englishman did not understand the words
"Emperor of the French." The type of title was deliberately chosen to
express the idea of an elective and popular origin; as against such a
phrase as "the German Emperor," which expresses an almost
transcendental tribal patriarchate, or such a phrase as "King of
Prussia," which suggests personal ownership of a whole territory. To
treat the _Coup d'etat_ as unpardonable is to justify riot against
despotism, but forbid any riot against aristocracy. Yet the idea
expressed in "The Emperor of the French" is not dead, but rather risen
from the dead. It is the idea that while a government may pretend to be
a popular government, only a person can be really popular. Indeed, the
idea is still the crown of American democracy, as it was for a time the
crown of French democracy. The very powerful official who makes the
choice of that great people for peace or war, might very well be called,
not the President of the United States, but the President of the
Americans. In Italy we have seen the King and the mob prevail over the
conservatism of the Parliament, and in Russia the new popular policy
sacramentally symbolised by the Czar riding at the head of the new
armies. But in one place, at least, the actual form of words exists; and
the actual form of words has been splendidly justified. One man among
the sons of men has been permitted to fulfil a courtly formula with
awful and disastrous