prevailed almost everywhere. The fact that he had been recently our ally did not do much to diminish this distrust. On the contrary, it helped in a certain sense to increase it. Against what state, it was asked, did he enter into alliance with us? Against Russia. To defend Turkey? Not at all, Louis Napoleon always acknowledged that he despised the Turks, and felt sure nothing could ever be made of them. It was to have his revenge for Moscow and the Beresina, people said, that he struck at Russia; and he made us his mere tools in the enterprise. Now he turns upon Austria, to make her atone for other wrong done against the ambition of the Bonapartes; and he was conquered. Austria, believed by all men to have the greatest military organizition in Europe, lies crushed at his feet. What next? Prussia perhaps or England? The official classes in this country had from the first been in sympathy with Austria, and would, if they could, have had England take up her quarrel. The Tories were Austrian for the most part. Not much of the feeling for Italy which was afterward so enthusiastic and effusive had yet sprung up in England among the Liberals and the bulk of the population. People did not admit that it was an affair of Italy at all; they saw in it rather an evidence of the ambition of Piedmont. When, soon after the close of the short war, it became known that Sardinia was to pay for the alliance of France by the surrender of Nice and Savoy, the indignation in this country became irrepressible. The whole thing seemed a base transaction. The House of Savoy, said an indignant orator in Parliament, had sprung from the womb of those mountains; its connection with them should be as eternal as the endur ance of the mountains themselves. Men saw in the conduct of Louis Napoleon only an evidence of the most ignoble rapacity. It is of no use, they said, talking of alliances and cordial understandings with such a man. There is in him no faith and no scruple. Cras mihi

To-morrow he will try to humble and to punish England as he has already humbled and punished Austria; his alliance with us will prove to be of as much account as did his alliance with Sardinia. He did not scruple to wring territory from the confederate whose devoted friend and patron he professed to be; what should we have to expect, we against whom he cherishes up a national and a family hatred, if by any chance he should be enabled to strike us a sudden blow?

The feeling therefore in England was almost entirely one of revived dread and distrust of Louis Napoleon. There was a good deal to be said for his bargain about Savoy and Nice by those who were anxious to defend it. But taken as a whole it was a singularly unfortunate transaction. It turned back the attention of conquerors to that old-fashioned plan of partition which sanguine people were beginning to hope was gone out of European politics, like the sacking of towns and the holding of princes to ransom. It is likely that Louis Napoleon thought of this himself somewhat bitterly later on in his career, when the Germans adopted his own principle, although, as they themselves pleaded, with somewhat better excuse; for they only extorted territory from an enemy; he extorted it from a friend. There could be no pretence that it was other than an act of extortion. Even the Piedmontese statesmen who conducted the transactionCavour cleverly dodged out of it himself-did not venture to profess that they were doing it willingly. It had to be done. Perhaps it had to be done by Louis Napoleon as well as by Victor Emanuel. Cavour had compelled the Emperor of the French to make a stand for Italy; but the Emperor could hardly face his own people without telling them that France was to have something for her money and her blood. Wars for an idea generally end like this. On the whole, however, let it be owned that the Italians had made a good bargain. Savoy and Nice were provinces of

which the Italian nationality was very doubtful; of which the Italian sentiment was perhaps more doubtful still. Louis Napoleon had the worst of the bargain in that as in most other transactions wherein he thought he was doing a clever thing. He went very near estranging altogether the friendly feeling of the English people from him and from France. The invasion panic sprang up again here in a moment. The volunteer forces began to increase in numbers and in ardor. Plans of coast fortification and of national defences generally were thrust upon Parliament from various quarters. A feverish anxiety about the security of the island took possession of many minds that were usually tranquil and shrewd enough. It really seemed as if the country was looking out for what Mr. Disraeli called, a short time afterward, when he was not in office and was therefore not responsible to public clamor for the defence of our coasts, "a midnight foray from our imperial ally." The venerable Lord Lyndhurst took on himself in special the task of rousing the nation. With a vigor of manner and a literary freshness of style well worthy of his earlier and best years, he devoted himself to the work of inflaming the public spirit of England against Louis Napoleon; a graceful and acrid lawyer Demosthenes denouncing a Philip of the Opera Comique. "If I am asked," said Lyndhurst, "whether I cannot place reliance upon the Emperor Napoleon, I reply with confidence that I cannot, because he is in a situation in which he cannot place reliance upon himself." "If the calamity should come," he asked, "if the conflagration should take place, what words can describe the extent of the calamity, or what immagination can paint the overwhelming ruin that would fall upon us?" The most harmless and even reasonable actions on the part of France were made a ground of suspicion and alarm by some agitated critics. A great London newspaper saw strong reason for uneasiness, in the fact that "at this moment the French

Government is pushing with extraordinary zeal the suspicious project of the impracticable Suez Canal.

We have already remarked upon the fact that up to this time there was no evidence in the public opinion of England of any sympathy with Italian independence such as became the fashion a year later. At least, if there was any such sympathy here and there, it did not to any preceptible degree modify the distrust which was felt toward the Emperor Napoleon. Mrs. Barrett-Browning's passionate praises of the emperor and lamentations for the tailure of "his great deed," were regarded as the harmless and gushing sentimentalism of a poet and woman-indeed, a poet, with many people, seems a sort of woman. The King of Sardinia, Victor Emanuel, had visited England not long before, and had been received with public addresses and other such demonstrations of admiration here and here; but even his concrete presence has not succeeded in making impression enough to secure him the general sympathy of the English public. Some association in Edinburgh had had the singular bad taste to send him an address of welcome in which they congratulated him on his opposition to the Holy See, as if he were another Achillis or Gavazzi come over to denounce the pope. The king's reply was measured out with a crushing calmness and dignity. It coldly reminded his Edinburgh admirers of the fact, which we may presume they had forgotten, that he was descended from a long line of Catholic princes, and was the sovereign of subjects almost entirely Catholic, and that he could not therefore accept with satisfaction "words of approbation injurious to the head of the Church to which he belonged." We only recall to memory this unpleasant little incident for the purpose of pointing a moral which it might of itself suggest. It is much to be feared that the popular enthusiasm for the unity and independence of Italy which afterward flamed out in England was only enthusiasm against the pope. Something

no doubt was due to the brilliancy of Garibaldi's exploits in 1860, and to the romantic halo which at that time and for long after surrounded Garibaldi himself; but no Englishman who thinks coolly over the subject will venture to deny that nine out of every ten enthusiasts for Italian liberty at that time were in favor of Italy because Italy was supposed to be in spiritual rebellion against the pope.

The Ministry attempted great things. They undertook a complete remodelling of the Customs system, a repeal of the paper duties, and a reform bill. The news that a commercial treaty with France was in preparation broke on the world somewhat abrubtly in the early days of 1860. The arrangement was made in a manner to set old formalism everywhere shaking its solemn head and holding up its alarmed hands. The French treaty was made without any direct assistance from professional diplomacy. It was made, indeed, in despite of professional diplomacy. It was the result of private conversations and an informal agreement between the Emperor of the French and Mr. Cobden. The first idea of such an arrangement came, we believe, from Mr. Bright; but it was Mr. Cobden who undertook to see the Emperor Napoleon and exchange ideas with him on the subject. The Emperor of the French, to do him justice, was entirely above the conventional formalities of imperial dignity. He sometimes ran the risk of seeming undignified in the eye of the vulgar by the disregard of all formality with which he was willing to allow himself to be approached. Although Mr. Cobden had never held official position of any kind in England, the emperor received him very cordially, and entered readily into his ideas on the subject of a treaty between England and France, which should remove many of the prohibitions and restrictions then interfering with a liberal interchange of the productions of the two nations. Napoleon the Third was a free-trader or something nearly approaching to it. His cousin, Prince Napoleon, was still