t is now from the Avenue des
Champs-Elysees. I am most humanly liable, of course, to make mistakes,
and am by temperament perhaps over hopeful and sanguine. But I do see
with my own eyes and feel with my own spirit, and not with other
people's eyes and spirits, though they should happen to be the
dearest--and that's the very best of me, be certain, so don't quarrel
with it too much.

As to the worst of the President, let him have vulture's beak, hyena's
teeth, and the rattle of the great serpent, it's nothing to the
question. Let him be Caligula's horse raised to the consulship--what
then? I am not a Buonapartist; I am simply a 'democrat,' as you say. I
simply hold to the fact that, such as he is, the people chose him, and
to the opinion that they have a right to choose whom they please. When
your English Press denies the _fact of the choice_ (a fact which the
most passionate of party-men does not think of denying here), _I_ seem
to have a right to another opinion which might strike you as unpatriotic
if I uttered it in this place. _Hic tacet_, then, rather _jacet_.

For the rest, for heaven's sake and the truth's, do let us try to take
breath a little and be patient. Let us wait till the dust of the
struggle clears away before we take measures of the circus. We can't
have the liberty of a regular government under a dictatorship. And if
the 'constitution' which is coming is not model, it may wear itself into
shape by being worked calmly. These new boots will be easier to the feet
after half an hour's walking. Not that I like the pinching meanwhile.
Not that stringencies upon the Press please _me_--no, nor arrests and
imprisonments. I like these things, God knows, as little as the loudest
curser of you all, but I don't think it necessary and lawful to
exaggerate and over-colour, nor to paint the cheeks of sorrows into
horrors, nor to talk, like the 'Quarterly Review' (betwixt excuses for
the King of Naples), of two thousand four hundred persons being cut to
mincemeat in the streets of Paris, nor to call boldness hypocrisy
(because hypocrisy is the worse word), and the appeal to the sovereignty
of the people usurpation, and universal suffrage the pricking of
bayonets. Above all, I would avoid insulting the whole French nation,
who have judged their own position and acted accordingly. If Louis
Napoleon disappoints their expectation, he won't sit long where he is.
Of that I feel satisfactory assurance; and, considering the