DESIRE TO FORCE QUESTIONS

153

with elementary principles of right and wrong, are among the most difficult with which a politician has to deal. He must govern the country and preserve it in a condition of tolerable order, and he sometimes persuades himself that without a capitulation to anarchy, without attacks on property and violations of contract, this is impossible. Whether the necessity is as absolute, or the expediency as rightly calculated as he supposed, may indeed be open to much question, but there can be no doubt that most of the English statesmen who carried the Irish agrarian legislation sincerely believed it, and some of them imagined that they were giving a security and finality to the property which was left, that would indemnify the plundered landlords. Perhaps, under such circumstances, the most that can be said is that wise legislators will endeavour, by encouraging purchase on a large scale, gradually to restore the absolute ownership and the validity of contract which have been destroyed, and at the same time to compensate indirectly-if they cannot do it directly--the former owners for that portion of their losses which is not due to merely economical causes, but to acts of the legislature that were plainly fraudulent.

There are other temptations of a different kind with which party leaders have to deal. One of the most serious is the tendency to force questions for which there is no genuine desire, in order to restore the unity or the zeal of a divided or dispirited party. As all politicians know, the desire for an attractive programme and a popular election cry is one of the strongest in politics, and as they also know well, there is such a thing as manufactured public opinion and artificially stimulated agitation. Questions are raised and pushed, not because they are for the advantage of the country, but simply for

the purposes of party. The leaders have often little or no power of resistance. The pressure of their followers, or of a section of their followers, becomes irresistible; illconsidered hopes are held out; rash pledges are extorted, and the party as a whole is committed. Much premature and mischievous legislation may be traced to such causes.

Another very difficult question is the manner in which governments should deal with the acts of public servants which are intended for the public service, but which in some of their parts are morally indefensible. Very few of the great acquisitions of nations have been made by means that were absolutely blameless, and in a great empire which has to deal with uncivilised or semi-civilised populations, acts of violence are certain to be not unfrequent. Neither in our judgments of history nor in our judgments of contemporaries is it possible to apply the full stringency of private morals to the cases of men acting in posts of great responsibility and danger amid the storms of revolution, or panic, or civil war. With the vast interests confided to their care, and the terrible dangers that surround them, measures must often be taken which cannot be wholly or at least legally justified. On the other hand, men in such circumstances are only too ready to accept the principle of Machiavelli and of Napoleon, and to treat politics as if they had absolutely no connection with morals.

Cases of this kind must be considered separately and with a careful examination of the motives of the actor, and of the magnitude of the dangers he had to encounter. Allowances must be made for the moral atmosphere in which he moved, and his career must be considered as a whole, and not only in its peccant parts. In the trial of Warren Hastings, and in the judgments which historians

THE COUP D'ÉTAT OF NAPOLEON

155

have passed on the lives of the other great adventurers who have built up the Empire, questions of this kind continually arise.

In our own day also they have been very frequent. The Coup d'état of the 2nd of December, 1851, is an extreme example. Louis Napoleon had sworn to observe and to defend the Constitution of the French Republic, which had been established in 1848, and that Constitution, among other articles, pronounced the persons of the representatives of the people to be inviolable; declared every act of the President which dissolved the Assembly or prorogued it, or in any way trammelled it in the exercise of its functions, to be high treason, and guaranteed the fullest liberty of writing and discussion. 'The oath which I have just taken,' said the President, addressing the Assembly, 'commands my future conduct. My duty is clear; I will fulfil it as a man of honour. I shall regard as enemies of the country all those who endeavour to change by illegal means what all France has established.' In more than one subsequent speech he reiterated the same sentiments and endeavoured to persuade the country that under no possible circumstances would he break his oath or violate his conscience, or overstep the limits of his constitutional powers.

Before daybreak on

What he did is well known. December 2, some of the most eminent statesmen in France, including eighteen members of the Chamber, were, by his orders, arrested in their beds and sent to prison, and many of them afterwards to exile. The Chamber was occupied by soldiers, and its members, who assembled in another place, were marched to prison. The High Court of Justice was dissolved by force. Martial law was proclaimed. Orders were given that all who resisted the

usurpation in the streets were at once, and without trial, to be shot. All liberty of the press, all liberty of public meeting or discussion was absolutely destroyed. About one hundred newspapers were suppressed and great numbers of their editors transported to Cayenne. Nothing was allowed to be published without Government authority. In order to deceive the people as to the amount of support behind the President, a 'Consultative Commission' was announced and the names were placarded in Paris. Fully half the persons whose names were placed on this list refused to serve, but in spite of their protests, their names were kept there in order that they might appear to have approved of what was done.1 Orders were issued immediately after the Coup d'état that every public functionary, who did not instantly give in writing his adhesion to the new Government, should be dismissed. The Préfets were given the right to arrest in their departments whoever they pleased. By an ex post facto decree, issued on December 8, the Executive were enabled without trial to send to Cayenne, or to the penal settlements in Africa, any persons who had in any past time belonged to a 'Secret Society,' and this order placed all the numerous members of political clubs at the mercy of the Government. Parliament, when it was suffered to reassemble, was so organised and shackled that every vestige of free discussion for many years disappeared, and a despotism of almost Asiatic severity was established in France.

It may be fully conceded that the tragedy of December 4, when for more than a quarter of an hour some 3,000 French soldiers deliberately fired volley after volley

1 See Tocqueville's Memoirs (English trans.), ii. 189, Letter to the Times.

THE COUP D'ÉTAT OF NAPOLEON

157

without return upon the unoffending spectators on the Boulevards, broke into the houses and killed multitudes, not only of men but of women and children, till the Boulevards, in the words of an English eye-witness, were at some points a perfect shambles,' and the blood lay in pools round the trees that fringed them, was not ordered by the President, though it remained absolutely unpunished and uncensured by him. There is conflicting evidence on this point, but it is probable that some stray shots had been fired from the houses, and it is certain that a wild and sanguinary panic had fallen upon the soldiers. It is possible too, and not improbable, that the stories so generally believed in Paris that large batches of prisoners, who had been arrested, were brought out of prison in the dead hours of the night and deliberately shot by bodies of soldiers, may have been exaggerated or untrue. Maupas, who was Préfet of Police, and who must have known the truth, positively denied it; but the question what credence should be attached to a man of his antecedents who boasted that he had been from the first a leading agent in the whole conspiracy may be reasonably asked.' Evidence of these things, as has been truly said, could scarcely be obtained, for the press was absolutely gagged and all possibility of investigation was prevented. For the number of those who were transported or forcibly expelled within the few weeks after December 2, we may perhaps rely upon the historian and panegyrist of the Empire. He computes them at the

1 See Maupas, Mémoires sur le Second Empire, i. 511, 512. It is said that, contrary to the orders of St.-Arnaud, the soldiers, instead of immediately shooting all persons in the street who were found with arms or constructing or defending a barricade, made many prisoners, and it is not clear what became of them. Granier de Cassagnac, however, altogether denies the executions on the Champ de Mars (ii. 433).