The lesson has sunk deeply. The mind of something better than Philistinism has learned that republics can be made to work on a large scale. I believe Mr. Gladstone is one of the eminent Englishmen who now openly admit that they have learned from the American war something which they did not know before, of the cohesiveness and durability of the republican system. Up to the time of that war in fact, most Englishmen, when they talked of republican principles, thought only of French republicanism, and honestly regarded such a system as a brilliant empty bubble, doomed to soar a little, and float, and dazzle, and then to burst. That idea, it is quite safe to say, no longer exists in the English mind. The fundamental, radical objection to republicanism--the objection which, partly out of mere reaction and partly for more substantial reasons, followed the brief and romantic enthusiasm of the days of Fox--is gone. The practical Englishman admits that a republic is practicable. Only those who know England can know what a change in public opinion this is. It is, in fact, something like a revolution. I think the most devoted monarchist will hardly deny that if some extraordinary combination of chances (after all, even the British Throne is but a human institution) were to disturb the succession of the house of Brunswick, Englishmen would be more likely to try the republican system than to hunt about for a new royal family, or endeavor to invent a new scheme of monarchy. Here, then, I leave the subject. Take all this into account, in considering the probabilities of the future, and then say whether, even in the case of England, it is quite certain that Byron's prediction is only the dream of a cynical poet, destined never to be fulfilled among human realities. THE REAL LOUIS NAPOLEON.