The First Republic was the deadly enemy both of liberty and of law. The conduct of its first envoy to the United States would have justified Washington in locking him up. When a stop was put to his mischievous impertinences, he preferred exile in America to the chance of the guillotine at Paris, and his name died out, I believe, curiously enough, with one of the chief instruments of the notorious Tweed Ring in New York. The first shots fired in anger under the American flag after the peace of 1783 were fired against cruisers of the French Republic captured in the West Indies by American men-of-war, to put an end to the ignorant and insolent attempt of what called itself a government at Paris to issue letters of marque on American soil against English commerce. So grateful was France to the Emperor for restoring the reign of law, that she never troubled herself about liberty, and but for the indomitable defence of constitutional liberty and national independence which England maintained, often single-handed, from the rupture of the peace of Amiens to the victory of Waterloo, the very names of the chief actors in the odious and ridiculous dramas of the Revolution would have long since faded, as Napoleon intended they should fade, out of the memory of the masses of mankind. VII How little confidence the Government of the Third Republic really felt in the efficacy of the 'principles of 1789,' and of the 'Centennial Exposition,' to save it at the polls in 1889 from the natural consequences of its intolerance and its corruption, was instructively shown by the absolute panic into which it was thrown by the election at Paris of General Boulanger on January 27. Here, at the very threshold of the great electoral year, rose the spectre of the 'man on horseback'! Certainly General Boulanger was not Napoleon Bonaparte. The Government, which had itself put General Boulanger on horseback, knew the strength and the weakness of the man himself. But it was the legend, not the man, they dreaded. If the French people, or even if Paris, really believed in the legend of Boulanger--and this tremendous vote of January 27 looked very much like it--it mattered little what the real value of the man might be, the legend would make him master of France. That would mean for the Third Republic the fate of the First Republic and of the Second, and for the men who had identified it with their own fanaticism and folly, and greed, and incapacity, a long farewell to all their greatness! As for the eventual results, what mattered these to them? The Universal Exposition might collapse, or it might be opened by General Boulanger on his black horse, instead of President Carnot in his landau. What did that signify? But it signified much that the men who had invented President Carnot were not likely to make part of the _cortege_ of General Boulanger.