Hohenstiel-Schwangau (France) had made him her head-servant:  president of the assembly which she had elected to serve her; and he knew that his fellow-servants were working for their own ends, while he alone was faithful to his bond.  He, doubtless, had his dreams, conjured up by SAGACITY, of pouncing upon the unfaithful ones, denouncing them to his mistress, the State, and begging her to allow him to do their work as well as his own, till such time as the danger was past, and her desire for a more popular government could be fulfilled.  But in so doing he would have deceived her, and he chose the truth.  He knew that he had no right to substitute himself for the multitude, his knowledge for their ignorance, his will for theirs; since wise and foolish were alike of God’s creating, and each had his own place and purpose in the general scheme. (Here and through the following pages, 176-7, the real and the imaginary Prince appear merged into each other.) He performed his strict duty, and left things to their natural course.

His position grew worse and worse.  His fellow-servants made no secret of their plans—­to be carried into execution when his time of service should have expired, and his controlling hand been removed from them.  Each had his own mine of tyranny—­whether Popedom, Socialism, or other—­which he meant to spring on the people fancying itself free.  The Head Servant was silent.  They took fright at his silence.  “It meant mischief.”  “It meant counterplot.”  “It meant some stroke of State.”  “He must be braved and bullied.  His re-election must be prevented; the sword of office must be wrested from his grasp.”

At length his time expired, and then he acted and spoke.  He made no “stroke of State.”  He stepped down from his eminence; laid his authority in the people’s hand; proved to it its danger, and proposed that Hohenstiel-Schwangau should give him the needful authority for protecting her.  The proposal was unanimously accepted; and he justified his own judgment and that of his country by chastising every disturber of the public peace, and reducing alike knaves and fools to silence and submission.  But now SAGACITY found fault:  “he had not taken the evil in time; he might have nipped it in the bud, and saved life and liberty by so doing:  he had waited till it was full grown, and the cost in life and liberty had been enormous.”  He replied that he had been checked by his allegiance to the law; and that rather than strain the law, however slightly, he was bound to see it broken.

And so, the record continues, he worked and acted to the end.  He had received his authority from the people; he governed first for them.  (Here again, and at the following page 184, we seem to recognize the real Hohenstiel or Louis Napoleon, rather than the imaginary.) He walked reverently—­superstitiously, if spectators will—­in the path marked out for him, ever fearing to imperil what was good in the existing order of things; but casting all fear aside when an obvious evil cried out for correction.  Hohenstiel-Schwangau—­herself a republic—­had attacked the liberties of Rome, and destroyed them with siege and slaughter.  On his accession to power, he found this “infamy triumphant.”