Austria naturally felt considerable interest in the movements of a formidable neighbour, whose troops were now winding round her frontier, who, by overrunning Turkey, would enclose some of her provinces, and who, at the next step in advance, would control the Lower Danube. She therefore, in conjunction with Prussia, made common cause with the Western Powers, so far as to offer a strong remonstrance against the occupation of the Danubian provinces, and to join in their efforts to preserve peace. Mr Kinglake contends that this kind of pacific pressure would have secured its object, and that if it had not, Austria would have joined France and England in having recourse to sterner measures. But he says that, without waiting for the result of this joint coercion, England was persuaded to join France in a separate course of action, which, without necessity, involved us in a war desired only by the French Emperor. “In order to see how it came to be possible,” says the historian, “that the vast interests of Europe should be set aside in favour of mere personal objects, it will presently be necessary to contract the field of vision, and, going back to the winter of 1851, to glance at the operations of a small knot of middle-aged men who were pushing their fortunes in Paris.” And here is interpolated—for as an interpolation we regard it—that curious episode which has for its subject the _coup d’état_ and the establishment of the second French Empire. Standing apart from the purpose of the book, its isolation gives it peculiar distinctness. But its inherent character is such that it needs no art or accident to bring it into strongest relief. It is a singularly clever and singularly acrimonious attack upon the foremost statesman and most powerful potentate of these times. And it makes demands on our credulity which are too heavy for anything short of absolute proof to maintain. For we are asked to believe that a set of men with no more character or consideration than Falstaff and his associates, were able to call on the French nation to stand and deliver, and that the nation thereupon submitted to be knocked down, to have its throat cut, and to be plundered by these minions of the moon. Now, does anybody think that diadems, such as that of France, are to be stolen from a shelf by any cutpurse who wants to put them in his pocket? Or does anybody think that a mere cutpurse, having succeeded in the theft, could so have worn his stolen diadem as to enhance its splendour and renown? That which made the Empire possible, and that which maintains it now, was the conviction that the choice of the nation lay between it and Red Republicanism. And to establish, in any degree, his case, Mr Kinglake should have proved that no such conviction existed. But if it be true that France found in the Empire a refuge from anarchy, then reasonable men will not be ready to scrutinise, in too severe a spirit, the means taken to consolidate the throne.