s merely as
investments, and the more profligately extravagant are the terms and the
amount, the better they like them.'

'Ten years ago,' I said, 'the cry that I heard was, "Ca ne durera pas."'

'That was my opinion,' he answered; 'indeed, it was the opinion of
everybody. I thought the Duc de Broglie desponding when he gave it three
years. We none of us believed that the love of liberty was dead in
France.'

'It is not,' I said, 'dead, for among the higher classes it still lives,
and among the lower it never existed.'

'Perhaps,' he answered, 'our great mistakes were that we miscalculated
the courage of the educated classes, and the degree in which universal
suffrage would throw power into the hands of the uneducated. Not a human
being in my commune reads a newspaper or indeed reads anything: yet it
contains 300 electors. In the towns there is some knowledge and some
political feeling, but for political purposes they are carefully swamped
by being joined to uneducated agricultural districts.

'Still I think I might enter the _Corps legislatif_ for our capital Le
Mans. Perhaps at a general election twenty liberals might come in. But
what good could they do? The opposition in the last session strengthened
Louis Napoleon. It gave him the prestige of liberality and success.'

'You think him, then,' I said, 'safe for the rest of his life?'

'Nothing,' he answered, 'is safe in France, and the thing most unsafe is
a Government. Our caprices are as violent as they are sudden. They
resemble those of a half-tamed beast of prey, which licks its keeper's
hand to-day, and may tear him to-morrow. But if his life be not so long
as to enable the fruits of his follies to show themselves in their
natural consequences--unsuccessful war, or defeated diplomacy, or
bankruptcy, or heavily increased taxation--he may die in the Tuileries.

'But I infer from his conduct that he thinks an insurrection against his
tyranny possible, and that he is preparing to meet it by a popular war--
that is to say, by a war with England.

'I found my opinion not so much on the enormous maritime preparations, as
on the long-continued systematic attempts to raise against England our
old national enmity. All the provincial papers are in the hands of the
Government. The constantly recurring topic of every one of them is, the
perfidy and the malignity of England. She is described as opposing all
our diplomacy, as resisting all our aggrandisement, as snarli