Edward A. Freeman wrote, after the fall of the second Bonaparte empire: "The work of Richelieu is utterly undone, the work of Henry II and Louis XIV is partially undone; the Rhine now neither crosses nor waters a single rood of French ground. As it was in the first beginnings of northern European history, so it is now; Germany lies on both sides of the German river." This was not by any means the whole of the work wrought by that adventurer on an imperial throne, Napoleon III, through his disastrous war against a united Germany. He accomplished also the slaughter of five hundred thousand men, and the impoverishment of millions. He sounded the death knell of monarchical adventuring in France, which was indeed one good result of the Napoleonic _débâcle_, but he also fastened militarism, in the form of excessive and progressively increasing peace armaments, upon Europe, and magnified public debts and taxation to the limit of endurance. Every event here mentioned was a direct development, not of Napoleon III's original seizure of the French throne, but of the final years, and the eventual overthrow of his power--the overthrow itself due to the Franco-Prussian war. A single event, criminal in its character, might have prevented these results. That great benefits sometimes eventuate from men's crimes is no news, and no longer a marvel, to the philosopher, who, when good comes of evil, is apt to repeat the words, "God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform." The evil deed to which I have here referred, which would have saved the lives of five hundred thousand people and left the river Rhine still washing the confines of France, was the aiming of Orsini's bomb on the evening of the 14th of January, 1858. This bomb was designed to take the life of the emperor of the French. If the attempt had succeeded, and Napoleon had died as Alexander II of Russia and King Humbert of Italy afterward died, there would have been no Franco-German war. The throne of the baby Napoleon IV, who was then less than two years old, very likely would not have endured long; but whether the third republic had immediately arisen, or whether the Orleans Bourbons had been restored to the throne, it would have been found easy to preserve the peace with Prussia and Germany. For Napoleon III deliberately, and with malignant ingenuity, provoked war with Germany in 1870. There is now no doubt that Bismarck desired such a war. He afterward confessed that he deceived the aged King William in such a way that all chance of peace at Ems was lost. But nevertheless the provocation of Napoleon was direct and deliberate.