human intellect and genius. But this has not been the good fortune of
your Emperor. The result of his system has been the, suppression of
intellect in every department. He has rallied round him not one great
statesman; his praises are hymned by not one great poet. The celebrates
of a former day stand aloof; or, preferring exile to constrained
allegiance, assail him with unremitting missiles from their asylum in
foreign shores. His reign is sterile of new celebrites. The few that
arise enlist themselves against him. Whenever he shall venture to give
full freedom to the press and to the legislature, the intellect thus
suppressed or thus hostile will burst forth in collected volume. His
partisans have not been trained and disciplined to meet such assailants.
They will be as weak as no doubt they will be violent. And the worst
is, that the intellect thus rising in mass against him will be warped
and distorted, like captives who, being kept in chains, exercise their
limbs on escaping in vehement jumps without definite object. The
directors of emancipated opinion may thus be terrible enemies to the
Imperial Government, but they will be very unsafe councillors to France.
Concurrently with this divorce between the Imperial system and the
national intellect,--a divorce so complete that even your salons have
lost their wit, and even your caricatures their point,--a corruption of
manners which the Empire, I own, did not originate, but inherit, has
become so common that every one owns and nobody blames it. The gorgeous
ostentation of the Court has perverted the habits of the people. The
intelligence abstracted from other vents betakes itself to speculating
for a fortune; and the greed of gain and the passion for show are
sapping the noblest elements of the old French manhood. Public opinion
stamps with no opprobrium a minister or favourite who profits by a job;
and I fear you will find that jobbing pervades all your administrative
departments."