Visionaries might say in vain and beautiful phrase, as they did then and do now, that, having harvested his laurels and exhausted the glories of conquest, he should turn to ameliorate the race, to guide a great nation with the easy reins of popular law in the brilliant paths illuminated by the light of the century. The ideal nation referred to did not exist. It was because the despotism of monarchy and the madness of revolution had shown the utter absence of self-control in the nation--because the French as a whole were avid not of virtue but of pleasure, not of self-denial but of luxury, not of stern morality but of glory--because Bonaparte was a man after their own heart, that he had some justification in his reply to a demand for liberty of the press: "In a moment," said he, "I should have thirty royalist journals and as many Jacobin ones, and I should have to govern with a minority." Many an earnest, liberty-loving French statesman of to-day has had cause in the bitterness of his heart to recall the language. As the ministries in France topple, and a dozen legislative factions, having each its journal, combine for no other purpose than the sport of overturning the government, it is, alas! too often a minority which neither governs nor rules, but guides the public career by a (p.~255) kind of sufferance. This occurs because control of the government, even for a short time, means the autocratic control of power, patronage, and honor, as it was arranged by Bonaparte for his own purposes.