The question has been asked, "Will the unbiased judgment of posterity allow to Louis Napoleon some extenuating circumstances, or will it pronounce an unqualified condemnation upon the man who, for the sake of consolidating his own power and strengthening his corrupt government, spilled the blood of no less than a hundred thousand Frenchmen?" When all Europe was putting to itself some such question as this, and answering it with varying degrees of leniency, Browning conceived the idea of making Napoleon speak for himself, and at the same time he added what purports to be the sort of criticism of him indulged in by a Thiers or a Victor Hugo. The interest of the poem centers in Napoleon's own vindication of himself as portrayed by Browning. What Browning wrote of the poem in a letter to a friend in 1872 explains fully his aim, as well as showing by indirection, at least, how much he was interested in political affairs at this time, though so little of this interest crops out in his poetry: "I think in the main he meant to do what I say, and but for weakness--grown more apparent in his last years than formerly--would have done what I say he did not. I thought badly of him at the beginning of his career, _et pour cause_; better afterward, on the strength of the promises he made and gave indications of intending to redeem. I think him very weak in the last miserable year. At his worst I prefer him to Thiers's best." At another time he wrote: "I am glad you like what the editor of the _Edinburgh_ calls my eulogium on the Second Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be, 'a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England.' It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself." Browning depicts the man as perfectly conscious of his own limitations. He recognizes that he is not the genius, nor the creator of a new order of things, but that his power lies in his faculty of taking an old ideal and improving upon it. He contends that in following out his special gifts as a conservator he is doing just what God intended him to do, and as to his method of doing it that is his own affair. God gives him the commission and leaves it to his human faculties to carry it out, not inquiring what these are, but simply asking at the end if the commission has been accomplished.