rting them as soon as the time of action had arrived;
joining Russia, Prussia, Austria and England, in the arrangement of the
Eastern question, on the avowed basis that the integrity of the Ottoman
empire should be preserved, and then attempting to rob it of Egypt. We
find him running the risk of a war with America, because she demanded,
too unceremoniously, the payment of a just debt, and with England because
she complained of the ill-treatment of a missionary. We find him trying
to ruin the commerce of Switzerland because the Diet arrested a French
spy, and deposing Queen Pomare because she interfered with the sale of
French brandies; and, as his last act, eluding an express promise by a
miserable verbal equivocation, and sowing the seeds of a future war of
succession in order to get for one of his sons an advantageous
establishment in Spain.

'The greatest blot in the foreign policy of Louis Napoleon is the
invasion of Rome, and for that he is scarcely responsible. It was
originally planned by Louis Philippe and Rossi. The expedition which
sailed from Toulon in 1849 was prepared in 1847. It was despatched in the
first six months of his presidency, in obedience to a vote of the
Assembly, when the Assembly was still the ruler of France; and Louis
Napoleon's celebrated letter to Ney was an attempt, not, perhaps
constitutional or prudent, but well-intentioned, to obtain for the Roman
people liberal and secular institutions instead of ecclesiastical
tyranny.

'His other mistake was the attempt to enforce on Turkey the capitulations
of 1740, and to revive pretentions of the Latins in Jerusalem which had
slept for more than a century. This, again, was a legacy from Louis
Philippe. It was Louis Philippe who claimed a right to restore the dome,
or the portico, we forget which, of the Holy Sepulchre, and to insult the
Greeks by rebuilding it in the Latin instead of the Byzantine form. Louis
Napoleon has the merit, rare in private life, and almost unknown among
princes, of having frankly and unreservedly withdrawn his demands, though
supported by treaty, as soon as he found that they could not be conceded
without danger to the conceding party.

'With these exceptions, his management of the foreign relations of France
has been faultless. To England he has been honest and confiding, to
Russia conciliatory but firm, to Austria kind and forbearing, and he has
treated Prussia with, perhaps, more consideration than that semi-Russia