id not, however, escape
them. They observed with annoyance that the message, despite its prolix
enumeration of the lately enacted laws, passed, with affected silence,
over the most important of all, the election law, and, moreover, in
case no revision of the Constitution was held, left the choice of
the President, in 1852, with the people. The election law was the
ball-and-chain to the feet of the party of Order, that hindered them
from walking, and now assuredly from storming. Furthermore, by the
official disbandment of the "Society of December 10," and the dismissal
of the Minister of War, d'Hautpoul, Bonaparte had, with his own hands,
sacrificed the scapegoats on the altar of the fatherland. He had turned
off the expected collision. Finally, the party of Order itself anxiously
sought to avoid every decisive conflict with the Executive, to weaken
and to blur it over. Fearing to lose its conquests over the revolution,
it let its rival gather the fruits thereof. "France demands, above
all things, peace," with this language had the party of Order been
apostrophizing the revolution, since February; with this language
did Bonaparte's message now apostrophize the party of Order: "France
demands, above all things, peace." Bonaparte committed acts that aimed
at usurpation, but the party of Order committed a "disturbance of
the peace," if it raised the hue and cry, and explained them
hypochrondriacally. The sausages of Satory were mouse-still when
nobody talked about them;--France demands, above all things, "peace."
Accordingly, Bonaparte demanded that he be let alone; and the
parliamentary party was lamed with a double fear: the fear of
re-conjuring up the revolutionary disturbance of the peace, and the fear
of itself appearing as the disturber of the peace in the eyes of its own
class, of the bourgeosie. Seeing that, above all things, France demanded
peace, the party of Order did not dare, after Bonaparte had said "peace"
in his message, to answer "war." The public, who had promised to itself
the pleasure of seeing great scenes of scandal at the opening of the
National Assembly, was cheated out of its expectations. The opposition
deputies, who demanded the submission of the minutes of the Permanent
Committee over the October occurrences, were outvoted. All debate that
might excite was fled from on principle. The labors of the National
Assembly during November and December, 1850, were without interest.

Finally, toward the en