their absence.

'In such a state of society the traveller can learn little. Even those
who rule it, know little of the feelings of their subjects. The vast
democratic sea on which the Empire floats is influenced by currents, and
agitated by ground swells which the Government discovers only by their
effects. It knows nothing of the passions which influence these great
apparently slumbering masses. Indeed, it takes care, by stifling their
expression, to prevent their being known.

'We disapprove in many respects of the manner in which Louis Napoleon
employs his power, as we disapprove in all respects of the means by which
he seized it; but, on the whole, we place him high among the sovereigns
of France. As respects his foreign policy we put him at the very top. The
foreign policy of the rulers of mankind, whether they be kings, or
ministers, or senates, or demagogues, is generally so hateful, and at the
same time so contemptible, so grasping, so irritable, so unscrupulous,
and so oppressive--so much dictated by ambition, by antipathy and by
vanity, so selfish, often so petty in its objects, and so regardless of
human misery in its means, that a sovereign who behaves to other nations
with merely the honesty and justice and forbearance which are usual
between man and man, deserves the praise of exalted virtue. The
sovereigns of France have probably been as good as the average of
sovereigns. Placed indeed at the head of the first nation of the
Continent, they have probably been better; but how atrocious has been
their conduct towards their neighbour! If we go back no further than to
the Restoration, we find Louis XVIII. forming the Holy Alliance, and
attacking Spain without a shadow of provocation, for the avowed purpose
of crushing her liberties and giving absolute power to the most
detestable of modern tyrants. We find Charles X. invading a dependence
of his ally, the Sultan, and confiscating a province to revenge a tap on
the face given by the Bey of Algiers to a French consul. We find Louis
Philippe breaking the most solemn engagements with almost wanton
faithlessness; renouncing all extension of territory in Africa and then
conquering a country larger than France--a country occupied by tribes who
never were the subjects of the Sultan or of the Bey, and who could be
robbed of their independence only by wholesale and systematic massacre;
we find him joining England, Spain, and Portugal in the Quadruple
Alliance, and dese