d spoke. He made no
"stroke of State." He stepped down from his eminence; laid his authority
in the people's hand; proved to it its danger, and proposed that
Hohenstiel-Schwangau should give him the needful authority for
protecting her. The proposal was unanimously accepted; and he justified
his own judgment and that of his country by chastising every disturber
of the public peace, and reducing alike knaves and fools to silence and
submission. But now SAGACITY found fault: "he had not taken the evil in
time; he might have nipped it in the bud, and saved life and liberty by
so doing: he had waited till it was full grown, and the cost in life and
liberty had been enormous." He replied that he had been checked by his
allegiance to the law; and that rather than strain the law, however
slightly, he was bound to see it broken.

And so, the record continues, he worked and acted to the end. He had
received his authority from the people; he governed first for them.
(Here again, and at the following page 184, we seem to recognize the
real Hohenstiel or Louis Napoleon, rather than the imaginary.) He walked
reverently--superstitiously, if spectators will--in the path marked out
for him, ever fearing to imperil what was good in the existing order of
things; but casting all fear aside when an obvious evil cried out for
correction. Hohenstiel-Schwangau--herself a republic--had attacked the
liberties of Rome, and destroyed them with siege and slaughter. On his
accession to power, he found this "infamy triumphant."

SAGACITY suggested that he should leave it untouched. "It was no work of
his; he was not answerable for its existence. It had its political
advantages for his own country."

But he would not hear of such a course. There was a canker in the body
politic, requiring to be cut out; and he cut it out: though the patient
roared, the wound bled, and the operator was abused by friend and foe.

"Why so rough and precipitate?" again SAGACITY interposed, "though the
right were on your side? Why not temporize, persuade, even threaten,
before coming to blows?"

"Yes," was the reply, "and see the evil strengthen while you look on."

SAGACITY defended her advice on larger grounds; and here too he was at
issue with her. Hohenstiel-Schwangau had a passion for fighting. She
would fight for anything, or for nothing, merely to show that she knew
how. Give her a year's peace after any war, and she was once more ready
for the fray. Prince H