He did not understand that many dragged down the Republic because it was not republican, but purely senatorial.

He was yet to learn how quite corruptly senatorial a great representative assembly can become.

Yet in England to-day we hear "the decline of Parliament" talked about and taken for granted by the best Parliamentarians--Mr.Balfour, for instance--and we hear the one partly French and wholly Jacobin historian of the French Revolution recommending for the English evil a revival of the power of the Crown.

It seems that so far from having left Louis Napoleon far behind in the grey dust of the dead despotisms, it is not at all improbable that our most extreme revolutionary developments may end where Louis Napoleon began.
In other words, the Victorian Englishman did not understand the words "Emperor of the French." The type of title was deliberately chosen to express the idea of an elective and popular origin; as against such a phrase as "the German Emperor," which expresses an almost transcendental tribal patriarchate, or such a phrase as "King of Prussia," which suggests personal ownership of a whole territory.

To treat the _Coup d'etat_ as unpardonable is to justify riot against despotism, but forbid any riot against aristocracy.