one to attain. Our ungainly mixture of panic-struck preparation for defence, with honeyed assurances of undiminished confidence, show that the Emperor's estimate of our sensibility to threats, though uncomplimentary, was correct. Accordingly he has not spared the sort of threats which he knew would tell most effectually on English terrors. The refusal of furlough, even for a day, to officers of the transport service was obviously absurd as a practical measure at a time when the season for invasion was almost past; but as a shake of the fist it was very effective. Very little advantage would probably be derived by the War-office from a history of the seventy-eight different projects of invasion which at various epochs the French Government has entertained; but no little profit might be derived from the announcement that such a work was in preparation. To paralyze English efforts, either in the present negotiations or in some later crisis, is worth the expenditure of a little ingenuity in blustering. But if any blow was really meditated we should have none of these indiscreet discoveries. Instead of a fleet of steel-plated transports at Cherbourg the Emperor would be assembling an army of observation on the Pyrenees, and sending menacing despatches to Madrid.

But if the French peasantry must have glory, and the French army must have occupation, and England is for the present unavailable for the purpose, it becomes an interesting question to the Emperor's other neighbours to know which of them occupies the post of honour. Clearly the victim must be sought upon the eastern frontier; for from time immemorial the Pyrenees have proved almost as hopeless a barrier to French enterprise as the Channel. On the eastern frontier the claimants to his notice are numerous, and most of them possess territories which would be fitting jewels to add to the Imperial crown. Savoy is the most desirable of all; but probably even the Emperor of the French will think that some interval should elapse before it will be decent to plunder his brother in arms. An ally has always the privilege of being eaten last. Moreover Savoy has some unpleasant peculiarities, notwithstanding its strategic importance to an invader either from the French or the Italian side. The only party in it who are really anxious for annexation to France is the parti prêtre. We doubt very much if the Emperor reciprocates their affectionate feelings. He has probably had enough of the parti prêtre. He has humoured with wonderful skill the conflicting religious elements of which the French community is composed, and he has continued to make friends with the only party that in the present chaos of belief can really command a following. But it is

impossible he can really love the priests. Assuming that his cold temperament can forget the hideous papal misgovernment which as a Carbonaro he swore in 1830 to redress, or his own sufferings when, worn with sickness and fatigue, he was forced to fly from Ancona in disguise, it is inconceivable that as Emperor he can patiently endure the papal occupation of France. There is one paper that even in Paris speaks its mind, and one section whose compact organization can not only defy his tyranny at home, but can dictate his policy abroad. He has no intention probably of bearing this for ever. In time, no doubt, he will find an opportunity for taking the Pope at a disadvantage, and breaking the back of the serpent he is now obliged to cherish. But until that happy period arrives it is not unlikely that he will wish to defer the acquisition of a territory which will import into his dominions a fresh battalion of the spiritual garrison more uncompromisingly papal than that of Belgium itself.

Going north, Switzerland comes next in order; and to judge by the preparations she is making, and the suspicious eagerness with which Swiss newspapers are watching the movements of the Emperor, she does not think herself wholly out of danger. Those who have London to defend are apt to over-estimate the value of the prey to which French ambition will stoop, and the amount of plunder which will satisfy a Zouave. But, except for the precautionary measures the republic is taking, we should have thought she might have gone on her way rejoicing, vacuus coram latrone viator. Switzerland is the hedgehog of nations. She is small, moves but little, does nothing, makes no noise, and is worth nobody's trouble to attack; but, with the exception of France under the impulse of revolutionary energy, no nation that has ever attacked her has got anything but bloody fingers for its pains. Prudential motives will probably restrain the Emperor from seeking a conquest that promises so little and will cost so much. But even if the seizure of two or three valleys should be strategically profitable, and offer no great difficulty of execution, motives of a higher nature ought to restrain him from violating a territory which in his bitterest need was inviolable for him. He ought not to be the first person to forget that the Swiss Government braved the power of Louis Philippe rather than banish the defeated, friendless enthusiast from the asylum he had chosen. Perhaps, however, the Swiss are right in not trusting too implicitly to the Emperor's recollection of the experiences of the refugee. They have already had a taste of his gratitude to the land which sheltered him so gallantly, and which, according to his eulogists, he loves

so well. They cannot forget that, among all the insolent documents that issued from Paris on the occasion of the Orsini attentat, none was more violent or peremptory than the summons to the Swiss Diet to violate their asylum and banish their refugees.

A violation of guaranteed neutrality and a fresh alarm to all the powers of Europe would be too costly a price to pay for the narrow slip of land which he might be able to steal from the Swiss Confederation. If he plays at all it will be for a higher stake. There is one traditional object of ambition which is far older than any zeal for oppressed nationalities, and was a standing beacon of policy long before there was any disgrace of Waterloo to wipe away. From the time that Maximilian carried away Mary of Burgundy out of the very grasp of Louis XI., French statesmen have never ceased to long for the remnant of the inheritance which the cunning intriguer then suffered to escape him. France is nothing without the frontier of the Rhine' was a maxim in which Napoleon's predecessors had thoroughly anticipated him in act if not in word. Louis XIV. combated for it during the whole of his long and restless reign; and the seizure of Alsace during time of peace-one of the most outrageous of his many violations of the law of nations-shows the value he attached to it. Napoleon, having once conquered it, preferred to abdicate rather than submit to the humiliation of giving it up. His nephew knows well that even the subjugation of England could not please his people more than the achievement of this darling project of ambition. Germany and Belgium also know it well: they are fully alive to the danger that is hanging over them, and to the necessity of active and immediate measures of precaution. In the case of Germany, for once a bitter experience has not been thrown away. A sense of the blessings of Napoleonic rule has been ineffaceably burnt into German memory. The grinding pressure of the war contributions, the bloody executions, the relentless tyranny of that era of servitude, have not passed away from the popular imagination. If there is a magic in Napoleon's name to win the affections of the nation whom he led to glory, it possesses no less powerful a spell in reawakening the terror and the hatred of the races whose land and homes were desolated by his sword. There is no danger of another Confederation of the Rhine. The spirit which roused the whole youth of Germany to join in the war of liberation is far from having spent its salutary force. No German patriot of sixty years ago would have believed in the possibility of the marvellous change which in a space, brief in a nation's life, has come over the German people.

And

The mere sight of another Napoleon leading another French army again to fight Austria in the plains of Italy has scattered to the winds all prudential considerations, as well as all 'solidarity of the peoples. If they have been saved from a headlong participation in a quarrel which was not theirs, and on behalf of claims which no fair disputant can defend, it has been owing, not to their wisdom or to their fears, but to the sound judgment of the wise ruler who in a happy moment has been raised up to replace the incompetence by which the councils of Prussia have been for so many years disgraced.

Some of the more violent continental Radicals, who are disgusted that even for once the hated House of Hapsburgh should have popular enthusiasm at its back, have laboured to prove that the manifestation of feeling is a mere 'polizei-begeisterung,'an enthusiasm got up by order of the police. The pliant ability of the despotism of these later days is capable, it is true, of twisting almost any instrument to its ends. Wiser than of old, it never puts forward the naked symbols of power as the foundation of its title or the justification of its acts. The old motto, 'Sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas,' is altogether forgotten and obsolete. Whenever it perpetrates any atrocity or folly of a quality more than usually conspicuous, it is always ready with its proof that the people love to have it so. Every pet weapon of the democratic armoury, warranted to detect and to carry out the people's will with unerring certainty, has been converted into a loyal instrument of absolute power. Universal suffrage, vote by ballot, trial by jury, a newspaper press, and public education, have all been commonplaces for liberal eulogy on this side of the Channel, as palladiums of freedom and unfailing bulwarks against tyranny. Unhappily for the credit of human inventions, they have been found on the other side of the Channel to be as faithful ministers of one man's will as the sword and halter were in other days. In countries, therefore, where despotism is scientifically done, it is a very perplexing problem to distinguish a real burst of popular feeling from some unusually brilliant achievement of the claqueurs; but in Germany, even in the worst-governed States, there is no such quintessential tyranny as this. The Governments may not want the will to introduce it, but they lack the power. Their system of administration is so ponderous, and their routinism is so inveterate, that they are incapable of adopting any of the newer patents of oppression. Moreover, in a great part of Germany the press is free, either entirely or to a very great extent; and wherever there remained the slightest glimmer of freedom, it would be impossible for a Government, by means of a press, to manu

facture an artificial outburst of enthusiasm. From the positive to the negative despotism-from the tyranny that restrains to the tyranny that compels-is a very long step indeed. To muzzle your slave is easy to make him say what he does not think, and what he does not wish to say, implies not only that you are powerful, but that he is utterly degraded. It would be a mere libel to say that such a description was true, to any considerable extent, even of Austrian journalists and pamphleteers. But this is not the only nor the strongest reason for believing that the sudden enthusiasm for their country's defence, and the fierce hatred of the French which late events have roused in Germany, is thoroughly genuine and sincere. Not only was it utterly beyond the power of the despotic courts to have manufactured such a feeling, but it was not their interest to do it if they could. Of course to any expedient that could avert the impending danger, Austria would cling; but it is not from Austria that we in England have heard most of the burning indignation which the bare idea of French invasion has provoked. To our eyes it seems to have burnt more fiercely in the second and third rate States-in Hesse and Wurtemberg, in Hanover and Dresden. Now to the sovereigns of these States, the movement which is taking place in Germany is an absolute deathwarrant. The only weak point presented by a people so stubborn and so widely spread as the Germans, is the number of different governments into which their nation is split up. The first aim of every foreign power that wishes to weaken Germany is to maintain her present condition of political comminution in all its vigour. The first wish of every patriot who wishes to see his country strong enough to disregard the shifting caprices of neighbouring despots, is for German unity. They justly attribute the ease with which Napoleon overran and subjugated their territory to the fact that the great German people was no organized whole, but a weakly-cemented conglomerate of two or three real kingdoms and some three hundred microscopic states. The result of this arrangement was to generate a multiplicity of dynastic feuds, and to elevate every petty local rivalry into the dignity of a diplomatic difficulty. It was an ingenious contrivance for producing disunion, of which no French prince who had a quarrel with the Emperor ever failed to avail himself. Matters are not quite so bad now, but there remains a sufficient leaven of the old system in the swarm of small states that still raise the Germanic Confederation to the unwieldy number of thirty-seven. What infatuation it was that induced the Congress of Vienna to weaken by such useless divisions the only true bulwark against France, it is almost impossible to conceive. They