Spirit Of The Times

A lesson to Royalties.

According to a German proverb, "when a mishap occurs it may turn to good."

So is it with the visit to London of the unguillotined Louis Bonaparte. This farcical spectacle enforces after all a grave historical lesson. Royalty, aristocracy, and all the like leprous tails of the past, which for nearly a century have deservedly been dragged in the mire on the Continent of Europe, have maintained themselves in England as in an inaccessible retreat. England seemed proud of her mediaeval stagnation, so admired by Continental Royalties.

With haughty satisfaction she pointed to the dust of ages on her royal purple, and her Sovereigns never deigned to associate with parvenus. All at once these shams have disappeared under the touch of a most contemptible new comer. England lies prostrate before him.

For whole days she uplifted on her royal escutcheon the bloody miscreant, whose offense known to the world! as murder, perjury and robbery, according to the English common law would inevitably have been expiated by punishment on the gallows. In this she has shown the intrinsic value of royalty. What true man can henceforward be pleased or honored by shaking hands with residents of Buckingham or St. James Palace?

No more it behoves her clergy to preach to the masses of the moral purity and elevation of the Anointed: these now see that infamy coalesces readily with a monarch. It is well that it is so: well that royalty loses the spurious glamour which still dazzle the sight of the masses, and prevented them from penetrating its real character. The people, on their second sober thought, will discover the contamination of the French Usurper.

Victoria dusting the rooms for the reception of Eugenie, with whom a Guelph or a Coburg would hardly have united by a left-handed morganatic-marriage, well illustrates the flimsiness of these shams, the pride of legitimacy, and the stainlessness of royal honor.

We do not dwell on the brilliant display of snobism shown by the Londoners, beginning with princes and dukes and going down to the vilest ragamuffins, from Belgravia down to the Tower-hamlets--as well as by other cities sending dutiful addresses to the Bonaparte. This was somehow a matter of course. The great act is that this blood-stained caricature has brought the British monarchy to this level. He has polluted it and dragged it in the mud. Frenchmen may forgive him something accordingly.

Pressing his heel on the neck of England, making her blush for the day of Waterloo, and piteously screening its glories and recollections, he has avenged his uncle's. He has humiliated England more than by gaining battles over her. His quiet landing and taking possession of London amid a storm of snobbish applause is a deeper wound than would have been inflicted half a century ago by the successful Boulogne Expedition contemplated by the original Napoleon. Whatever may be the commentaries and sophisms put forward by the English journals to give a certain elevated tone to this visit and reception it is not the result of a generous impulse or the sincere recognition of popular sovereignty personified in this small Napoleon by the choice of a whole people

The English did all this through the sentiment of fear--through a consciousness of prostration. England knows well that the utter destruction of the life of a free people--the Liberty of the Press--together with intimidation, corruption and bayonets--gave the millions of votes to the usurper. Englishmen, on this occasion proud to be called gentlemen well know that Louis Bonaparte is not of their order. But her governing classes at last, if not her people, feel that she is at the mercy of this daring and unprincipled schemer; and that they must conciliate his favor. To a man of genius no such ovation would have been proffered. Shakespeare was a vagrant by act of Parliament: Dr. Johnson wanted a dinner; and the highest honor ever tendered by royalty to an Arkwright or Stephenson was a greasy knighthood, which the latter spurned. But to this red-mouthed, red-handed villain she gives her dearest decoration--the garter.

In this fierce irony read a stupendous lesson--to the present as well as to the future. Not only in his own person does Bonaparte debase royalty but in that of others. The proudest form among the brotherhood bends before him in the hitherto uncontaminated halls of Windsor Castle. Scorers of genius, they worship a jail-bird!