ors and titles; it was necessary,
as the Prince confesses, to restore the old prestige of the Government,
in order to make the people respect it; and he adds--a truth which one
hardly would expect from him,--"At the commencement of a new society, it
is the legislator who makes and corrects the manners; later, it is the
manners which preserve the laws." Of course, and here is the great risk
that all revolutionizing people run--they must tend to despotism;
"they must personify themselves in a man," is the Prince's phrase; and,
according as is his temperament or disposition--according as he is a
Cromwell, a Washington, or a Napoleon--the revolution becomes tyranny or
freedom, prospers or falls.

Somewhere in the St. Helena memorials, Napoleon reports a message of
his to the Pope. "Tell the Pope," he says to an archbishop, "to remember
that I have six hundred thousand armed Frenchmen, qui marcheront avec
moi, pour moi, et comme moi." And this is the legacy of the revolution,
the advancement of freedom! A hundred volumes of imperial special
pleading will not avail against such a speech as this--one so insolent,
and at the same time so humiliating, which gives unwittingly the whole
of the Emperor's progress, strength, and weakness. The six hundred
thousand armed Frenchmen were used up, and the whole fabric falls; the
six hundred thousand are reduced to sixty thousand, and straightway all
the rest of the fine imperial scheme vanishes: the miserable senate, so
crawling and abject but now, becomes of a sudden endowed with a wondrous
independence; the miserable sham nobles, sham empress, sham kings,
dukes, princes, chamberlains, pack up their plumes and embroideries,
pounce upon what money and plate they can lay their hands on, and when
the allies appear before Paris, when for courage and manliness there
is yet hope, when with fierce marches hastening to the relief of his
capital, bursting through ranks upon ranks of the enemy, and crushing or
scattering them from the path of his swift and victorious despair, the
Emperor at last is at home,--where are the great dignitaries and the
lieutenant-generals of the empire? Where is Maria Louisa, the Empress
Eagle, with her little callow king of Rome? Is she going to defend her
nest and her eaglet? Not she. Empress-queen, lieutenant-general, and
court dignitaries, are off on the wings of all the winds--profligati
sunt, they are away with the money-bags, and Louis Stanislas Xavier
rolls in