Mr. Bagehot dwells at length on what may be called the fictitious value of Constitutional Monarchy; and this he was evidently inclined to exaggerate. The English people, he thought, are, as a rule, too ignorant to understand what the Queen's Government really is--how completely it is carried on in the Royal name by Parliamentary Ministers. For them the law is really incarnate in the Sovereign; in yielding obedience to magistrates and policemen, to common law and Parliamentary statutes, in forbearing or resisting riot, they obey or uphold the Royal authority. Were they aware that at each general election they choose their real and effective rulers for an indefinite period, they would be confused, alarmed, and bewildered, to a degree which would render them incapable of a real and intelligent choice. The people--the lower orders--may have been, when Mr. Bagehot wrote, and probably are now, somewhat wiser and better informed as to the real character of the Government--the actual responsibility for particular measures--than their critic supposed. But it is beyond doubt that the Queen's name is a great power. The law is too mere an abstraction, the names of Ministers represent too much party feeling, excite too much antagonism, to command the prompt obedience, the loyal reverence, the enthusiastic support which is rendered to the name of the Sovereign. In France and America a very different feeling prevails. Mr. Senior, than whom no Englishman of his day was more intimate with a number of French statesmen of different parties, views and character--than whom there was, perhaps, no cooler, closer, or more constant observer of French politics--remarks that Frenchmen are always weak and timid in upholding, daring, resolute, and even fierce in resisting the powers that be. Confidence, enthusiasm, conviction, seem in every case of insurrection and dangerous riot to be on the side of the mob. The revolution of 1848 afforded very striking examples of this contrast. The overthrow of Louis Philippe, deeply as the King himself was disliked and despised, narrow as was the electorate, unpopular as was the Ministry, was the act of a small minority. The Republic was imposed upon France by a knot of reckless journalists and semi-communistic dreamers, backed by the dreaded populace of Paris, against the will of the peasantry who formed four-fifths of the voters, and of the educated or semi-educated classes, amounting to one half of the remaining fifth. Again and again was the Provisional Government--though backed by all who had anything to lose, by all who dreaded anarchy--on the point of overthrow, and saved only by Lamartine's eloquence from the conspiracy of a few thousand desperadoes, and the stormy passions of a mob that hardly knew what it wanted. The Assembly itself was invaded and terrorized for several hours: the lives of the leaders, to whom all France looked up with reverence, were in imminent peril at the hands of a faction numerically insignificant.