Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, November 26, 1867

The Emperor of the French.

It is within a month of sixteen years since Louis Napoleon struck Liberty an assassin's blow and laid her dead upon the soil of France. He stole upon her in the night, while she watched with faithful eyes the land she had redeemed, and her mortal blow came from the hand of him whom she had set to guard the gates against the foe. Never was there a worse treason since the world began; never was there a treason so little looked for; but never was there one so successful. From that day to this, one of the most cunning, cold-blooded, unscrupulous of tyrants has held his throne, not only against all foreign foes, but against murmurs, discontents, and warnings from his own people, and there seems no reason why he should not keep his grip upon the sceptre until death and old age come hand in hand and lead him softly to a peaceful grave. Such lives as his, such deaths as his may be, put to shame all the accepted theories of Providence; to a casual eye, they show a God to whom the evil and the good are one; and it is not possible to explain the existence of such unmixed evils, working widespread ruin and misery unchecked and uncontrolled, by any dogmas of any sect. Before such mysteries, we can only stand in silence, happy if they do not strengthen our doubts or drive us into disbelief.

In one sense it may be allowed that, if the French people like this sort of government, it is no one's business but their own. If they like to have a chain about their necks, let them have it. If they like to have their press gagged, their freedom of speech taken away; if they relish being perpetually watched in their houses, dogged in the streets, questioned for every act; called to account for their comings and goings, told what they may read, and what they may not read, what plays they may see acted, and what songs they may sing—if a nation be sunk so low that it can love such things, let it hug this loathsome corpse of life in peace; we can hold our noses and keep to the windward. Meanwhile, it is not a little absurd to hear such a nation forever bragging of its high civilization, and claiming the right to lead the world of ideas as well as the world of national progress. But bragging, though offensive, hurts nobody, and France may be permitted to grovel and to brag unquestioned within her own domain.

It is only when this “vice of kings, this pick-purse of the empire and the rule,” steps out of his own kingdom and undertakes to set straight the affairs of other nations as he has done those of his own, that we have a right to complain; and Louis Napoleon has now reduced his meddling to such a system that there cannot be a movement for liberty in any part of the world that he does not send his armies to crush it, if possible, at the very least to hinder it, by every cruel, desperate, and insulting means.

And so completely has his will domineered over the rest of Europe, that until Prussia rose and confronted him, there was no power to say him nay, or even dared hint displeasure at his acts. England lies at

his feet cowering like a threatened hound; her only conquests of late are over the wretched Fenians, whom her own laws have made beggars and exiles, over Indian savages whom she frightens by a bloodthirstiness more awful than their own, over the merchant vessels of a nation with whom she is at peace; Austria, whose simple-minded heir has been inveigled by his cunning arts into a shameful death, makes haste to Paris to kiss the hands that shed his blood; Russia sends her Emperors to eat his salt who has brought her to open shame, and for a whole summer long, kings, princes, and nobles from every land that is overawed by them have made crowns and coronets as familiar in Paris streets as the citizen's hat.

When we were in the mortal agony of our civil war, this man put all his infernal enginery at work, and tried both to secure our ruin and to destroy the life of a great neighboring State. Gladly would he have done both, and long and hard he worked to accomplish his purpose. It was a bitter day for him when he found that Americans are not Frenchmen, and that Mexicans are not Italians; a bitter day when the bone to which he had set his teeth was snatched from his paws, and he was beaten to his kennel. But Louis Napoleon learns no lesson. Made the laughing-stock of the world by his disgraceful defeat in Mexico, sneered at for a prophet, scorned for a promise-breaker, he tried again to meddle, and this time with Prussia. All the world knows the end of that meddling, and perhaps there never was a jest so relished by the world as Napoleon's defeat by Bismarck. It might almost seem as if fate were bent on forsaking her favorite, if his heel were not still planted on the neck of England and on the head of Italy.

Three times, now, has this man, acting from his own selfish desires, to be thought the controller of events, and, driven by his own fears of liberty, prevented Italy from ordering her Government as she thinks best. When he first set his blood-hound army at the throat of this fair fugitive from tyranny, all the world cried out at the enormity of his crime. But he defies the conscience of the world, as he defies God and Justice, and sat for fifteen years by the side of prostrate Italy holding her chains and threatening her with his sword. Since then, the world has watched, heart-sick and weary, waiting for the time when he should release his hold, and lend an ear to the mingled threats and pleading of the world. But we wait in vain. While this man draws his hated breath, Italy shall not live, nor her children draw a free breath. Coward that he is, he has at last found one nation too weak to shake off his bonds, and the luxury of tyranny is too great that he should easily forego it. Thwarted in Mexico, snubbed in Prussia, kept in order by America, uneasy at home, he has of late been stinted in his craving for meddling, and must bully Italy while as yet she has no friends to stand up for her. How long shall Napoleon rule to hinder Europe in her yearning for unity and freedom? How long must the world be obliged to sit in patience, while one man thwarts the will of millions, and by the mere virtue of a name quenches every noble aspiration of the people of Europe, and makes them his own slaves?—N. J. Tribune.