France had resources at her command which could and should have been used to drive the invaders beyond her boundaries.  Frenchmen can never live down the great blunder of abandoning their Emperor, forsaking themselves and the duty they owed to their native land.  They forsook in the hour of need all that was noble and honourable, and cast themselves into a cauldron of treason, such as has never been heard of in the world’s history.  They were soon disillusioned, but it was then too late.  The poison had done its work, and France was placed under the subjection of traitors, place-hunters and foreign Powers for many years to come.

I have already said that Louis XVIII. was put on the throne, not by the French people, but by their conquerors and their myrmidons.  He did not long survive his ignoble accession.  Then came Charles X., who had to fly to Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh because he governed so ill.  His qualification to rule was in putting down all reform and liberty; after him came Louis Philippe, but even he only governed on sufferance, though on the whole he occupied an onerous position with creditable success.  A monarch who rules under the tender mercies of a capricious people, and worse still, a capricious and not too scrupulous monarchy of monarchs, is not to be envied, and this was exactly the position of Louis Philippe.  He was beset by the noisy clamour of many factions, besides having to keep a shrewd eye on those lofty men to whom he had to look with perpetual nervous tension for the stability and endurance of his throne.  He knew the heart of the nation was centred on St. Helena, and that a wave of repentance was passing over the land.  The people wished to atone for the crime they allowed to be committed in 1815.

Louis Philippe showed great wisdom and foresight.  Nothing could have been done with more suitable delicacy than the negotiations which caused the British Government to consent to give the remains of the Emperor up to the French.  The air of importance and swagger put into it by Lord Palmerston is supremely farcical, but then the whole senseless blunder from beginning to end was a farce, which does not redound to our credit.  It is incredible that a nation so thickly stocked with men of ability in every important department should have had the misfortune to have her affairs entrusted to Ministers and officials who were childishly incompetent and ludicrously vindictive.  Men of meagre mental calibre, who hold office under the Crown or anywhere else, are invariably fussy, pompous, overbearing, and stifling with conceit.  This condition of things was in full swing during the Napoleonic regime and captivity, and that is the period we are concerned about.  There does not appear to have been a single man of genius in Europe but himself.  The population of France who were contemporary with him during his meteoric leadership remembered him as a matchless reformer and an unconquerable warrior.  Their devotion