There is yet another letter in the _Times_[27] of more importance than the one from Strasburg. It is headed, "The Difficulties of Neutrality," dated Bonn, and anticipates part of what I was going to say; for the rest, the lessons of the war, as I read them, are briefly these. As to its cause, neither the French nation nor their Emperor brought on war by any present will of their own. Neither of them were capable of a will at all--far less of executing it. The nation has since declared, by submission, with acclaim, to a change of Government which for the time renders all political treaty with it practically impossible, that during the last twenty years it has been deceived or subdued into obedience to a man for whom it had no respect, and who had no hereditary claim to the throne. What "will" or responsibility of action can be expected from a nation which confesses this of itself? On the other hand, the Emperor, be his motives never so selfish, could only have hoped to save his dynasty by compliance with the passions of a populace which he knew would overthrow it in the first hour of their mortification. It is in these vain passions and the falsehoods on which they have fed that we must look for the deep roots of all this misery. Since the days of the First Empire, no cottage in France has been without its Napoleonic picture and legend, fostering one and the same faith in the heart of every peasant boy, that there is no glory but in battle; and since the founding of the Second Empire no street of any city has risen into its foolish magnificence without collateral proclamation that there was no pleasure but in vice.