But the time for Bagehot’s full adoption of the suspensive principle in public affairs was not yet. In 1851 he went to Paris, shortly before the _coup d’état_. And while all England was assailing Louis Napoleon (justly enough, as I think) for his perfidy, and his impatience of the self-willed Assembly he could not control, Bagehot was preparing a deliberate and very masterly defence of that bloody and high-handed act. Even Bagehot would, I think, if pressed judiciously in later life, have admitted—though I can’t say he ever _did_—that the _coup d’état_ was one of the best illustrations of ‘the ruinous force of the will’ in engendering, or at least crystallising, a false intellectual conclusion as to the political possibilities of the future, which recent history could produce. Certainly he always spoke somewhat apologetically of these early letters, though I never heard him expressly retract their doctrine. In 1851 a knot of young Unitarians, of whom I was then one, headed by the late Mr. J. Langton Sanford—afterwards the historian of the Great Rebellion, who survived Bagehot barely four months—had engaged to help for a time in conducting the _Inquirer_, which then was, and still is, the chief literary and theological organ of the Unitarian body. Our _régime_ was, I imagine, a time of great desolation for the very tolerant and thoughtful constituency for whom we wrote; and many of them, I am confident, yearned, and were fully justified in yearning, for those better days when this tyranny of ours should be overpast. Sanford and Osler did a good deal to throw cold water on the rather optimist and philanthropic politics of the most sanguine, because the most benevolent and open-hearted of Dissenters. Roscoe criticised their literary work from the point of view of a devotee of the Elizabethan poets; and I attempted to prove to them in distinct heads, first, that their laity ought to have the protection afforded by a liturgy against the arbitrary prayers of their ministers; and next, that at least the great majority of their sermons ought to be suppressed, and the habit of delivering them discontinued almost altogether. Only a denomination of ‘just men’ trained in tolerance for generations, and in that respect, at least, made all but ‘perfect,’ would have endured it at all; but I doubt if any of us caused the Unitarian body so much grief as Bagehot, who never was a Unitarian, but who contributed a series of brilliant letters on the _coup d’état_, in which he trod just as heavily on the toes of his colleagues as he did on those of the public by whom the _Inquirer_ was taken. In those letters he not only, as I have already shown, eulogised the Catholic Church, but he supported the Prince-President’s military violence, attacked the freedom of the Press in France, maintained that the country was wholly unfit for true Parliamentary government, and—worst of all perhaps—insinuated a panegyric on Louis Napoleon