In accordance with the President’s proclamation, a popular election was held throughout France, on the twentieth and twenty-first of December, at which the Coup d’Etat was signally vindicated.  Louis Napoleon was triumphantly elected President, for a period of ten years.  Out of eight millions of votes, fewer than one million were cast against him.  He immediately entered upon office, backed by this tremendous majority, and became Dictator of France.  In January of 1852, sharp on the heels of the revolution which he had effected, he promulgated a new constitution.  The instrument was based upon that of 1789, and possessed but few clauses to which any right-minded lover of free institutions could object.  On the twenty-eighth of March, Napoleon resigned the dictatorship, which he had held since the Coup d’Etat, and resumed the office of President of the Republic.

It was not long, however, until the After That began to appear.  Already in the summer and autumn of 1852 it became evident that the Empire was to be re-established.  In the season of the vintage the President made a tour of the country, and was received with cries of Vive L’Empereur!  In his addresses, particularly in that which he delivered at Bordeaux, the sentiment of Empire was cautiously offered to the people.  The consummation was soon reached.  On the seventh of November, 1852, a vote was passed by the French Senate for the re-establishment of the imperial order, and for the submission of the proposed measure to a popular vote.

The event showed conclusively that the French nation, as then constituted, was Bonapartist to the core.  Louis Napoleon was almost unanimously elected to the imperial dignity.  Of the eight millions of suffrages of France, only a few scattering thousands were recorded in the negative.  Thus, in a blaze of glory that might well have satisfied the ambition of the First Bonaparte, did he, who, only twelve years before at Boulogne, had tried most ridiculously to excite a paltry rebellion by the display of a pet-eagle to his followers, mount the Imperial throne of France with the title of Napoleon III.

THE CHARTIST AGITATION IN ENGLAND.

One of the most important political movements of the present century was the Chartist agitation in Great Britain.  This agitation began in 1838.  It was an effort of the under man in England to gain his rights.  In the retrospect, it seems to us astonishing that such rights as those that were then claimed by the common people of England should ever have been denied to the citizens of any free country.  The period covered by the excitement was about ten years in duration, and during that period great and salutary reforms were effected, but they were not thorough, and to this day the under man in Great Britain is mocked with the semblance of political liberty, the substance of which he does not enjoy; the same is true in America.