_Ach Gott!_ Is not Anarchy, and parliamentary eloquence instead
of work, continued for half a century everywhere, a beautiful
piece of business? We are in alliance with Louis Napoleon (a
gentleman who has shown only _housebreaker_ qualities hitherto,
and is required now to show heroic ones, _or_ go to the Devil);
and under Marechal Saint-Arnaud (who was once a dancing-master in
this city, and continued a _thief_ in all cities), a Commander of
the Playactor-Pirate description, resembling a _General_ as
Alexander Dumas does Dante Alighieri,--we have got into a very
strange problem indeed!--But there is something almost grand in
the stubborn thickside patience and persistence of this English
People; and I do not question but they will work themselves
through in one fashion or another; nay probably, get a great
deal of benefit out of this astonishing slap on the nose to their
self-complacency before all the world. They have not _done_ yet,
I calculate, by any manner of means: they are, however,
admonished in an ignominious and convincing manner, amid the
laughter of nations, that they are altogether on the wrong road
this great while (two hundred years, as I have been calculating
often),--and I shudder to think of the plunging and struggle they
will have to get into the approximately right one again.
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