His grievance was that the Hohenzollern prince, Leopold, had consented to become a candidate for the vacant throne of Spain. King William withdrew Prince Leopold's candidature. This really destroyed Napoleon's pretext for bringing on a war. But he desired a foreign war in order to forestall revolutionary opposition at home, which threatened to become irresistible. Napoleon thereupon caused his ambassador, Benedetti, insolently, and in a manner quite unbearable, to demand personally from King William a declaration that no Hohenzollern should ever be permitted to become king of Spain. King William treated this insolence as it deserved, and France, thereupon, declared war against Prussia. What followed, the world knows. The consequences were tremendous. France was maimed of Alsace and Lorraine. Half a million of the flower of the manhood of both nations perished. France taxed herself with five millions of francs of indemnity, and though she has paid the debt to Germany, she still owes it to her own citizens. The difficulties of French government and finance were increased prodigiously and indefinitely by the war and the empire's delinquencies. And all as a result contingent upon the failure of a criminal act! Felice Orsini meant to kill Napoleon III, and he and his two companions did kill ten innocent persons, and did wound one hundred and fifty others. Yet the man for whom their bombs were intended--the adventurer who had once been their comrade as a member of the Italian secret society, the Carbonari, but who had afterward betrayed the cause of Italian independence by leading an army into the peninsula and restoring the papal power--escaped unharmed, to wind the trail of his infamous conspiracies through European politics for twelve years longer. If the bomb had done its direful work, one man, utterly without character or conscience, would have died, and five hundred thousand men, mostly honest, good and true, would have lived. As it happened, the one man was spared, to make a vast holocaust of human life twelve years later. It is, indeed, strange that the averting of a single crime may sometimes precipitate a myriad of other crimes. CHAPTER XX IF PRESIDENT BUCHANAN HAD ENFORCED THE LAW IN NOVEMBER, 1860 Speaking of the lighting of the fires of civil war in this country in the years 1860 and 1861, Charles Francis Adams said, in 1873, "One single hour of the will displayed by General Jackson would have stifled the fire in its cradle." The metaphor in the last phrase is peculiar, and strangely Celtic for a Yankee, but the history is true. Montgomery Blair expressed the idea with greater plainness and vividness in that same year, 1873, in these words, "If we could have held Fort Sumter, there never would have been a drop of blood shed." Both these remarks were made by men who had been in some sense actors in the events to which they referred, and made after years of reflection upon the circumstances.