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There are few cases in which there is more disagreement between the judgment of contemporaries and that of immediate posterity than the case of the French Emperor. The least surprised, and, among Italians, the most dissatisfied at the New Year's Day pronouncement was Mazzini, who when he read it in the Times next morning felt that the Napoleonic war closed the heroic period of Italian Liberation.
This democratic movement in Europe; Kossuth and Mazzini waiting for the moment to give the word; the Russian bear watchfully sucking his paws; the Napoleonic empire redivivus; Cuba, and annexation, and slavery; California and Australia, and the consequent considerations of political economy; dear me! exclaimed we, putting on a fresh hodful of coal, we must look a little into the state of parties.
A few months ago it was my good fortune to discuss the international situation with Monsieur Emile Ollivier, the veteran statesman, the Napoleonic Prime Minister with the light heart whose name will ever be identified, and identified unjustly, with a disastrous war.
Meanwhile the political and strategical conditions of these islands in the near future are far more likely to resemble those of the great Napoleonic struggle than those of the Colonial Empire in its halcyon period. In one aspect, then, the Union was the only feasible way of carrying out the principle which underlay the successful establishment of Colonial self-government.
Yet so profitable had grown the monopoly of trade secured by them as neutrals in the Napoleonic wars that they could well afford to lose occasionally by foreign orders and decrees for the sake of the profit as a whole.
But the detachment of a great section of the new middle-class from the aristocratic order of England to form the United States of America, and the sudden rejuvenescence of France by the swift and thorough sloughing of its outworn aristocratic monarchy, the consequent wars and the Napoleonic adventure, checked and modified the parallel development that might otherwise have happened in country after country over all Europe west of the Carpathians.
Sicily, which under English influences during the Napoleonic War had acquired a certain amount of constitutional freedom, was on the restoration of the Bourbons thrown back, so far as government was concerned, into the Middle Ages; with the same result as in the other Kingdoms of Italy, insurrection, finally suppressed by Austrian power.
This fulsome adulation would be unworthy of notice did it not convey the most signal proof of the danger which republics incur when men lose sight of the higher aims of life and wallow among its sordid interests. After the severe drilling of the last four years, the Chambers voted nearly unanimously in favour of a Napoleonic dynasty.
But is there not an important hint for the historian of culture in the fact that the sense for the finer dance rhythms began to die out at the time of the French revolution and was most completely extinguished in the rough days of the Napoleonic tempest and the decade immediately following, whereas in the age of Louis XIV. the ear for the subtleties of dance rhythm appears to have been most universally and most highly developed?
Friedrich Wilhelm also undertook to dragoon his subjects in the matter of religion, amalgamating the Lutherans with other reformed bodies, under the name of the "Evangelical Church." In foreign politics, in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, during the Napoleonic wars, Prussia, as yet hardly recovered from her defeats under Buonaparte, almost entirely followed the lead of Austria.
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