rnment officials. The terrible decree that all who had
ever belonged to a secret society might be sent to die in the fevers of
Africa was interpreted in the widest sense, and every political society
or organisation was included in it. All the functionaries of a highly
centralised country were turned into ardent electioneering agents, and
the question was so put that the voters had no alternative except for or
against the President, a negative vote leaving the country with no
government and an almost certain prospect of anarchy and civil war.
Under these circumstances 7,500,000 votes were given for the President
and 500,000 against him.

But after all deductions have been made there can be no real doubt that
the majority of Frenchmen acquiesced in the new _regime_. The terror of
Socialism was abroad, and it brought with it an ardent desire for strong
government. The probabilities of a period of sanguinary anarchy were so
great that multitudes were glad to be secured from it at almost any
cost. Parliamentarism was profoundly discredited. The peasant
proprietary had never cared for it, and the bourgeois class, among whom
it had once been popular, were now thoroughly scared. Nothing in the
contemporary accounts of the period is more striking than the
indifference, the almost amused cynicism, or the sense of relief with
which the great mass of Frenchmen seem to have witnessed the destruction
of their Constitution and the gross insults inflicted upon a Chamber
which included so many of the most illustrious of their countrymen.

We can hardly have a better authority on this point than Tocqueville. No
one felt more profoundly or more bitterly the iniquity of what had been
done; but he was under no illusion about the sentiments of the people.
The Constitution, he says, was thoroughly unpopular. 'Louis Napoleon had
the merit or the luck to discover what few suspected--the latent
Bonapartism of the nation.... The memory of the Emperor, vague and
undefined, but therefore the more imposing, still dwelt like an heroic
legend in the imaginations of the people.' All the educated, in the
opinion of Tocqueville, condemned and repudiated the _Coup d'etat_.
'Thirty-seven years of liberty have made a free press and free
parliamentary discussion necessary to us.' But the bulk of the nation
was not with them. The new Government, he predicted, 'will last until it
is unpopular with the mass of the people. At present the disapprobation
is confi