Lepelletier, Paris, by exploding hand-grenades under his carriage. The Emperor and Empress escaped, but ten persons were killed, and 156 were wounded. The plot had been concocted by Felix Orsini in England. Therefore, the followers of the Emperor, whose fortunes depended on his life, denounced the English nation as Orsini’s accomplices. The Emperor himself was so unmanned by the incident, that after he drove home to the Tuileries, he and the Empress, on retiring to their room, wept bitterly over the wretched prospect before them. His terror probably prevented him from appreciating the fact, that if his own police could not protect him from Orsini, it was not likely that the police of a foreign country would be much more efficient. It may be, too, that the ease with which he had forced Palmerston to accept a humiliating settlement of the Question of the Principalities deluded him into the idea that it would be equally easy to compel him to restrict the freedom of Englishmen, in the interests of the Bonapartist dynasty.[11] He may also have imagined that England’s difficulties in the East would render Palmerston’s Government more complaisant than the Tory Ministry showed itself on this matter in 1853. His calculations, however arrived at, proved to be correct. The French Government addressed menaces on the subject of harbouring refugees to Sardinia, Switzerland, and Belgium. On the 20th of January Walewski wrote a despatch to Persigny, which he had to communicate to Lord Clarendon, and which not only accused England of deliberately sheltering the assassins of the French Emperor, but also asserted that the English Government ought to assist that of France, in averting “a repetition of such guilty enterprises.” Instead of answering this despatch in the high-spirited tone which Lord Malmesbury had taken in his conversation with the Emperor in 1853, a reply of a timid and indefinite character was privately sent through what was called the “usual official channels of personal communication.” The substance of it was that the Government needed no inducement to amend the English law of conspiracy, and that the Attorney-General had the matter in hand already. The assumption that the English Government was deliberately aiding and abetting a gang of assassins was an insult which Lord Palmerston, as the exponent of a spirited foreign policy, was expected to resent. His failure to resent it gave his enemies an opportunity of recalling his _Civis Romanes Sum_ doctrine, and holding him up to contempt. But at first it was not known that he had shown the white feather in his dealings with the French Emperor. Addresses from the Army, burning with rancorous insults to England, had been presented to the Emperor, and published in the _Moniteur_. The Emperor finding that these insults, which were only intended for home consumption, had been republished in England, where he feared they might inflame popular