American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
We can ourselves recall the memory of a time when that CHANGARNIER, who is
now a lion in fetters, held such rule over Paris military and Paris
constabulary, that a toss of his thumb would send half the representatives
to prison; and now, there is not so much as a regiment who would venture a
wail for his losses. This offers sad comment on the “thinking capacity” of
bayonets!
What shall we suppose of these hundred thousand scene-shifters in the red
pantaloons? Are they worked upon merely by the Napoleonic champagne to a
change of views; or are they tired of a sham Republic, and willing to take
instead a sham Empire; or have they grown political economists, with new
appreciation of government stability, and a long-sighted eagerness to
secure tranquillity? Or, is not the humbler truth too patent, that their
opinions herd together by a kind of brute sympathy, and are acted upon by
splendor—whether of crime or of munificence; and, moreover, is it not too
clear that those five hundred thousand men who prop the new dynasty with
bayonets, are without any sort of what we call moral education, and rush
to every issue like herds of wild bison—guided solely by instinct?
And would not a little of that sort of education which sets up
school-houses, and spreads newspapers, and books, and Harper’s Magazines
like dew over the length and the breadth of our land, do more toward the
healing of that sick French nation, than the prettiest device of
Constitution, or the hugest five-sous bath-house? Ah, well-a-day, we shall
have little hope for _la belle France_, UNTIL HER ARMY SHOWS INTELLIGENCE,
and HER STATESMEN HONESTY.
We can hardly give this current topic the go-by, without bringing to our
reader’s eye a happy summing up of suppositions in the columns of Punch,
and if our listener will only read Congressional for Parliamentary, and
the _Bentons_ and the _Casses_ for the _Grahames_ and the _Gladstones_, he
may form a very accurate idea of a _Napoleon-Mr.-Fillmore_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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