Unfortunately he abandoned the policy of letting the caricaturists alone. Several French rulers have adopted the principle of not regarding satire, but not one has had the courage to adhere to it long. Sooner or later all the world will come into the "American system," and all the world will at length discover the utter impotence of the keenest ridicule and the most persistent abuse against public men who do right and let their assailants alone. The chief harm done by the abuse of public men in free countries is in making it too difficult to expose their real faults. How would it be possible, for example, to make the people of the United States believe ill of a President in vilifying whom ingenious men and powerful journals had exhausted themselves daily for years? Nothing short of _testimony_, abundant and indisputable, such as would convince an honest jury, could procure serious attention. From President Washington to President Grant the history of American politics is one continuous proof of Mr. Jefferson's remark, that "an administration which has nothing to conceal has nothing to fear from the press." [Illustration: Charles Philipon.] When Louis Philippe had been a year upon the throne appeared the first number of _Le Charivari_, a daily paper of four small pages, conducted by an unknown, inferior artist--Charles Philipon. Around him gathered a number of Bohemian draughtsmen and writers, not one of whom appears then to have shared in the social or political life of the country, or to have had the faintest conception of the consideration due to a fellow-citizen in a place of such extreme difficulty as the head of a government. They assailed the king, his person, his policy, his family, his habits, his history, with thoughtless and merciless ridicule. A periodical which has undertaken to supply a cloyed, fastidious public with three hundred and sixty-five ludicrous pictures per annum must often be in desperation for subjects, and there was no resource to Philipon so obvious or so sure as the helpless family imprisoned in the splendors and etiquette of royalty. Unfortunately for modern governments, the people of Europe were for so many centuries preyed upon and oppressed by kings that vast numbers of people, even in free countries, still regard the head of a government as a kind of natural enemy, to assail whom is among the rights of a citizen. And, moreover, the king, the president, the minister, is unseen by those who hurl the barbed and poisoned javelin. They do not see him shrink and writhe. To many an anonymous coward it is a potent consideration, also, that the head of a constitutional government can not usually strike back.