Finally, a new international and national right, which should have sanctioned, in accordance with popular suffrage, the obligation of non-intervention and accomplished facts, far from reconciling nations and various classes of citizens among themselves by superseding the inalienable right of nature, would have become a firebrand of civil discord, an incentive to foreign wars, and a germ of revolutions which would have plunged Europe into the horrors of socialism. An eagle eye was not needed to see and foresee these weighty dangers. However affairs might have turned, even if they had succeeded according to every wish, it is indubitable that the ship of Napoleonic politics, following in its navigation the star of this idea, must eventually have struck on three rocks, each one hard enough to send ship and pilot to the bottom: the Papacy, Germany, and Revolution. The Papacy, oppressed by the Italy of the Carbonari, would have taken from France her greatest moral force. Germany, in one way or another, strongly united in her armies, would have tried, as in 1813, to overwhelm the Empire. Revolution, kindled and fed from without, would have gathered strength in France to the ruin of the Empire. These rocks were not only visible, but palpable to touch. Napoleon III. saw them, felt them, and used all the licit and illicit arts of his administration to avoid them. In vain; it was impossible. He should not have followed the guidance of his enchantress, his idea; following it, perdition was inevitable. V. Perhaps history offers no other example of a man who has grasped the sceptre under conditions so propitious for good and so opposed to evil as those under which Louis Napoleon Bonaparte began his reign; or of one who has so pertinaciously abused his advantages to his own ruin and that of others. The vote of the better and larger portion of the French nation had raised him to the throne, that he might save them from the hydra of socialism, and stop the course of political changes in France. Europe, just recovering from terrible agitations, welcomed his elevation as a pledge of order and peace. Catholics of every country rejoiced over it almost as the reward of the uncontested restoration in Rome of the principality of S. Peter. Interest and conscience seemed to unite in inducing him to take the triumphal road of justice which must lead to certain glory. But _cum in honore esset non intellexit_.[23] He seemed to wish to take this path. But, in fact, he showed that he was preparing to follow another by the ephemeral light of that _idea_ which he worshipped on the imperial throne with the same devotion which he had professed in prison and in exile.