s
share of the superb; it had the sharpness and weight, and it had also the
shining, of the sabre. But this was not all; nothing could be more subtly
consecutive than the whole progress of the head of the government. In a
more superstitious age, it might have been almost believed that some
wizard had stood by his cradle, and sung his destiny; or that, like the
greatest creation of the greatest of dramatists, he had been met in some
mountain pass, or on some lonely heath, and had heard the weird sisters
predicting his charmed supremacy. At this period he was palpably training
the republic to the sight of a dictatorship. The return of the troops
through Paris had already accustomed the populace to the sight of military
power.

The movement of vast masses of men by a word, the simplicity of the great
military machine, its direct obedience to the master-hand, and its
tremendous strength--all were a continued lesson to the popular mind. I
looked on the progress of this lesson with infinite interest; for I
thought that I as about to see a new principle of government disclosed on
the broadest scale--Republicanism in its most majestic aspect, giving a
new development of the art of ruling men, and exhibiting a shape of
domination loftier and more energetic than the world had ever yet seen.
Still, I was aware of the national weaknesses. I was not without a strong
suspicion of the hazard of human advance when entrusted to the caprice of
any being in the form of man, and, above all, to a man who had won his way
to power by arms. Yet, I thought that society had here reached a point of
division; a ridge, from which the streams of power naturally took
different directions; that the struggles of the democracy were but like
the bursting of those monsoons which mark the distinction of seasons in
the East; or the ruggedness of those regions of rock and precipice, of
roaring torrent and sunless valley, through which the Alpine traveller
must toil, before he can bask in the luxuriance of the Italian plain.
Attached as I am in the highest degree to the principle of monarchy, and
regarding it as the safest anchorage of the state, still, how was I to
know that moral nature might not have her reserves of power, as well as
physical; that the science of government itself might not have its
undetected secrets, as well as the caverns of the earth; that the
quiverings and convulsions of society at this moment, obviously alike
beyond calculation and