f
opposing it--they would resign. Where is the Emperor to find another
Cabinet? a peace Cabinet? What and who are the orators for peace?--whom
a handful!--who? Gambetta, Jules Favre, avowed Republicans,--would they
even accept the post of ministers to Louis Napoleon? If they did,
would not their first step be the abolition of the Empire? Napoleon is
therefore so far a constitutional monarch in the same sense as Queen
Victoria, that the popular will in the country (and in France in such
matters Paris is the country) controls the Chambers, controls the
Cabinet; and against the Cabinet the Emperor could not contend. I say
nothing of the army--a power in France unknown to you in England,
which would certainly fraternise with no peace party. If war is
proclaimed,--let England blame it if she will--she can't lament it more
than I should: but let England blame the nation; let her blame, if she
please, the form of the government, which rests upon popular suffrage;
but do not let her blame our sovereign more than the French would blame
her own, if compelled by the conditions on which she holds her crown to
sign a declaration of war, which vast majorities in a Parliament just
elected, and a Council of Ministers whom she could not practically
replace, enforced upon her will."

"Your observations, M. Duplessis, impress me strongly, and add to the
deep anxieties with which, in common with all my countrymen, I regard
the menacing aspect of the present hour. Let us hope the best. Our
Government, I know, is exerting itself to the utmost verge of its power,
to remove every just ground of offence that the unfortunate nomination
of a German Prince to the Spanish throne could not fail to have given to
French statesmen."

"I am glad you concede that such a nomination was a just ground of
offence," said Lemercier, rather bitterly; "for I have met Englishmen
who asserted that France had no right to resent any choice of a
sovereign that Spain might make."

"Englishmen in general are not very reflective politicians in foreign
affairs," said Graham; "but those who are must see that France could
not, without alarm the most justifiable, contemplate a cordon of hostile
states being drawn around her on all sides,--Germany, is, itself so
formidable since the field of Sadowa, on the east; a German prince
in the southwest; the not improbable alliance between Prussia and the
Italian kingdom, already so alienated from the France to which it
owed so m