The only opposition that is ventured is the
abstaining from voting. Whatever be the office, and whatever be the man,
the candidate of the Prefet comes in; but if he is a man who would have
been unanimously rejected in a state of freedom, the bolder electors show
their indignation by their absence.
'In such a state of society the traveller can learn little. Even those
who rule it, know little of the feelings of their subjects. The vast
democratic sea on which the Empire floats is influenced by currents, and
agitated by ground swells which the Government discovers only by their
effects. It knows nothing of the passions which influence these great
apparently slumbering masses. Indeed, it takes care, by stifling their
expression, to prevent their being known.
'We disapprove in many respects of the manner in which Louis Napoleon
employs his power, as we disapprove in all respects of the means by which
he seized it; but, on the whole, we place him high among the sovereigns
of France. As respects his foreign policy we put him at the very top. The
foreign policy of the rulers of mankind, whether they be kings, or
ministers, or senates, or demagogues, is generally so hateful, and at the
same time so contemptible, so grasping, so irritable, so unscrupulous,
and so oppressive--so much dictated by ambition, by antipathy and by
vanity, so selfish, often so petty in its objects, and so regardless of
human misery in its means, that a sovereign who behaves to other nations
with merely the honesty and justice and forbearance which are usual
between man and man, deserves the praise of exalted virtue.
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