a name. The Emperor Napoleon is to them a name, and the prefects and
officials who influence their votes are paid for incorporating all
principles in the shibboleth of that single name. You have thus sought
the well-spring of a political system in the deepest stratum of popular
ignorance. To rid popular ignorance of its normal revolutionary bias,
the rural peasants are indoctrinated with the conservatism that comes
from the fear which appertains to property. They have their roots of
land or their shares in a national loan. Thus you estrange the
crassitude of an ignorant democracy still more from the intelligence of
the educated classes by combining it with the most selfish and abject of
all the apprehensions that are ascribed to aristocracy and wealth. What
is thus embedded in the depths of your society makes itself shown on the
surface. Napoleon III. has been compared to Augustus; and there are
many startling similitudes between them in character and in fate. Each
succeeds to the heritage of a great name that had contrived to unite
autocracy with the popular cause; each subdued all rival competitors,
and inaugurated despotic rule in the name of freedom; each mingled
enough of sternness with ambitious will to stain with bloodshed the
commencement of his power,--but it would be an absurd injustice to fix
the same degree of condemnation on the _coup d'etat_ as humanity fixes
on the earlier cruelties of Augustus; each, once firm in his seat,
became mild and clement,--Augustus perhaps from policy, Napoleon III.
from a native kindliness of disposition which no fair critic of
character can fail to acknowledge. Enough of similitudes; now for one
salient difference. Observe how earnestly Augustus strove, and how
completely he succeeded in the task, to rally round him all the leading
intellects in every grade and of every party,--the followers of Antony,
the friends of Brutus; every great captain, every great statesman, every
great writer, every mail who could lend a ray of mind to his own Julian
constellation, and make the age of Augustus an era in the annals of