e sneers or hostilities of statesmen
out of place, or of editors whose journals were muzzled or suppressed;
especially when the people saw great public improvements going on, had
both bread and occupation, read false accounts of military successes,
and were bewildered by fetes and outward grandeur. But when the army was
a sham, and corruption had pervaded every office under government; when
the expenses of living had nearly doubled from taxation, extravagance,
bad example, and wrong ideas of life; when trusted servants were turned
into secret enemies, incapable and false; when such absurd mistakes were
made as the expedition to Mexico, and the crowning folly of the war
with Prussia, proving the incapacity and folly of the master-hand,--the
machinery which directed the armies and the bureaus and all affairs of
State itself, broke down, and the catastrophe was inevitable.

Louis Napoleon certainly was not the same man in 1870 that he was in
1850. His burdens had proved too great for his intellect. He fell, and
disappeared from history in a storm of wrath and shame, which also hid
from the eyes of the people the undoubted services he had rendered to
the cause of order and law, and to that of a material prosperity which
was at one time the pride of his country and the admiration of the
whole world.

But a nation is greater than any individual, even if he be a miracle of
genius. When the imperial cause was lost, and the armies of France were
dispersed or shut up in citadels, and the hosts of Germany were
converging upon the capital, Paris resolved on sustaining a
siege--apparently hopeless--rather than yield to a conqueror before the
last necessity should open its gates. The self-sacrifices which its
whole population, supposed to be frivolous and enervated, made to
preserve their homes and their works of art; their unparalleled
sufferings; their patience and self-reliance under the most humiliating
circumstances; their fertility of resources; their cheerfulness under
hunger and privation; and, above everything else, their submission to
law with every temptation to break it,--proved that the spirit of the
nation was unbroken; that their passive virtues rivalled their most
glorious deeds of heroism; that, if light-headed in prosperity, they
knew how to meet adversity; and that they had not lost faith in the
greatness of their future.

Perhaps they would not have made so stubborn a resistance to destiny if
they had realized