The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface.
• List of Illustrations.
• Errata.
• The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot, Volume X
• Chapter I.: Introductory.
• Chapter II.: Langport and Its Surroundings.
• Chapter III.: Home and Family.
• Chapter IV.: Early Education.
• Chapter V.: University College.
• Chapter VI.: An Interregnum.
• Chapter VII.: Paris.
• Chapter VIII.: Author and Banker.
• Chapter IX.: Engagement and Marriage.
• Chapter X.: “the Arches” and London.
• Chapter XI.: India.
• Chapter XII.: “the Economist”
• Chapter XIII.: “the English Constitution.”
• Chapter XIV.: “physics and Politics.”
• Chapter XV.: “lombard Street.”
• Chapter XVI.: “economic Studies.”
• Chapter XVII.: Tributes From Contemporaries.
• Errata For Index.

CHAPTER VII.

PARIS.

During the year 1851, matters had been going from bad to worse with Bagehot. With the usual knack he had of knowing what was the best thing to do under difficulties, in the August of that year he flies off to Paris ostensibly to perfect himself in the French language, but more exactly in order to change the mental atmosphere. He had the good luck to come in for a Revolution. Mr. Roscoe, by a small kindness, had helped him to take this step, and Bagehot writes to him from Paris: “I was very unwell mentally and bodily when I came here. I had a good deal to put me out. Everything of all kinds had gone wrong with me for a long time, and there were some family matters which much annoyed me besides, so I was in a very weak-minded state and what you did for me was a real satisfaction just then, and I am very much obliged to you. I am much obliged also to Sanford for putting in my letter which is a queer thing I fancy.1 Please to tell him to send me a copy. There is no difficulty. I have half written another which I will send you next week, as soon as I have read over the other. I am rather full on the subject—perhaps in error—as my maxim just now is that a man’s favourite ideas are always wrong. But there are moments of truth about my view that I should not have known if I had been in England, and may be good for other people in consequence. I confine my immorality to speculation, and to the perusal of De Béranger who is really a great poet.”

Some years previously Bagehot’s mother had visited Paris with her brother, Mr. Vincent Stuckey. While there she had annexed a pink silk bonnet which she enjoyed for several years, and a pretty china clock which still lives at Herd’s Hill. She had gone into society and had made special friends with a French family, Meynieux by name, who welcomed Walter as the son of the lady they had “idolised”.

“41, Rue de Vangirard,
20th October, 1851.

“My dearest Mother,

“I have not heard from you for a long time but I suppose that you will write to me soon. Your friend Madame Meynieux desired to be remembered to you with such exceeding vigour that it seems a plain duty to put her affection in the very front of my letter. I had the honour of dining with her some days ago, and she made a really splendid panegyric on her ‘bien ancienne amie’ as she calls you (antiquity of course being your line) for the benefit of a stout and impressive French lady to whom she was introducing me. She stated that a few centuries back when she had the pleasure of knowing you she had been of all your many ‘idolateurs’ and ‘idolatrices’ by far the greatest. I was fumbling for a Christian answer to this heathenish sentiment and feebly striving to be agreeable to the French lady aforesaid, when I was surprised to hear, in a voice that seemed familiar to me, ‘Hullo, I say, Bagehot’. It turned out to be a legal friend of mine, Adams by name, who in his surprise at seeing me very nearly overturned Monsieur Meynieux (a round man fit to bowl with) who was advancing with numerous bows to receive him. I admire your old friend exceedingly.

“There is rather an interesting crisis in politics here just now. Prince Louis has changed his tack and his ministers won’t change with him. The whole object and idea of his present policy is to secure the Revision of the article of the Constitution which renders him ineligible at the next Presidential Election. This is rather a self-seeking end for the head of a great nation, but he has this excuse that the country really wish him to remain where he is, and all the better sort of people are ready to revise the constitution in order to keep him. Some of this attachment he owes to the good sense and the strength of character which in the main he has shown during his time of office, but much to the general spirit of timidity and depression which is the general sentiment here in the middle and especially in the commercial classes. Anybody who is in will be supported by people who dread any change and live by the mercantile credit that Revolutions are certain to destroy. On this account I think the President has a very good chance of beating, though the legal difficulties imposed by the constitution are very great. It required three-fourths of the assembly to consent to the revision and there is an organised opposition, partly Socialistic and partly factious which is about, or rather more than a fourth, and which won’t hear of it at any price. The present plan is to break up this opposition by proposing the repeal of a certain electoral law which requires three years’ continuous residence in a district before you can gain a vote there. There is a good law enough in itself, but perhaps scarcely wise here now. The only sort of institution for which the Red Republicans have any respect is Universal Suffrage and unless it could be really and substantially allowed it seems unwise to tamper with it and weaken the attachment to the one constitution which can really pretend to any. It is hardly consistent also with the Constitution of which Universal Suffrage is a main feature. However, this may be the offer to the Red Republican opposition that he will consent to the abolition of this law if they will on their side consent to the revision. Lamartine who is now from personal grounds in opposition, Emile de Girardin, a sort of French Cobbett, the head of the newspaper world, and a member of the Assembly, are all ready to consent to this compromise. But it is yet doubtful whether the law of election can be repealed, or whether if repealed, enough of the opposition would be willing to vote for the Revision. ‘The board has not determined on the result of what has taken place.’ But there is a general impression that somehow or other the President will win, whether by removing or quashing the technical difficulties is to be seen. The present constitution is not liked, and the Republic is felt to be rather a lame and impotent conclusion after being introduced with so great a flourish of trumpets four years ago. The ouvriers use the phrase Vous avez diné sur la Republique—‘You’ve been and dined on the Republique’ as equivalent to the Anglican compliment ‘What a muff you are’.

“Yours affectionately,

“W. Bagehot.”

Bagehot visited among others, Madame Mohl, whose salon was the rendez-vous of notable people from all countries, and who he was destined to see often in later years. He wrote accounts to his mother of his social successes and failures, the most amusing being a description of his attempts to waltz, an art which he never mastered, as he became giddy before any serious instruction could be made available.

“Paris,October, 1851.
Friday Evening.

“My dearest Mother,

“I have added what I call waltzing to my other accomplishments. It differs from what other people call by that name, not only in the step which is of my own invention, but also in its having no relation whatever to the music, and by preserving its rotatory motion in a great measure by collisions with the other couples. It’s very amusing running small French girls against some fellow’s elbow, it’s like killing flies years ago. There is, however, the inconvenience that one does not like to ask the same girl twice; she might say she had not insured her life, but if you are careful to select a fresh subject for each experiment, the pastime will succeed. I do not fancy it pleases the girls; he dances tout seul (‘all by himself’) I heard one of them say with great indignation to her female friends, as if a fellow of my age could be expected to keep time with her or with the music either, and it pleases me, it being a new, if not humane excitement, and is better than talking feeble philosophy in out of the way corners.

“People here take great interest in Lord Palmerston’s retirement. The minister for foreign affairs is here, in general, the first minister; he was so always in Louis Philippe’s time, though in consequence of the domestic confusion the minister of the Interior (the Home Secretary in our nomenclature) has naturally cut him out, and they know nothing of Lord John Russell scarcely, and wonder at his having the power to turn out Lord Palmerston who has been their bête noir for years and whom they fancied was omnipotent. The reason seems to be that he and Lord John got in a rage and the Queen cut up rough (hard phrase that to do into French) for they don’t really seem to differ much about Louis Napoleon, so I expound this, but the expression of my auditors is still puzzled. ‘You don’t explain it to me’ as Brother would say. Of course they are too polite to impute the difficulty to my mode of expression (they only cut you up afterwards like a rotten potato) but ascribe it all to the complicated wheel-within-wheel nature of the English constitution.”

Writing to his father and mother, Bagehot describes what he saw of the revolution of December, 1851:—

“Paris, 5th December, 1851.

“My dearest Father,

“I forgot the electric telegraph and thought that my note would be the first or about the first intelligence that you would receive of the new Revolution. Wednesday was extremely quiet, unnaturally so almost, and everybody seemed to stand in the streets to know as soon as might be what would turn up; however, no one seemed to like to stay still in any place for fear that something of great importance might have happened or be happening somewhere else. I assisted in the evening at a great gathering in the Boulevards, and a man whose name I could not learn read a paper announcing the déchéance of the President, but the appearance of a very few soldiers sent the swarm in all directions, for they were mere peaceful citizens or curious foreigners, and had no fighting aptitude. Altogether the characteristic of that day was exactly what Lord Byron in some letter calls ‘quiet inquietude’.

“Yesterday, Thursday, the Coup d’Etat you will remember was on Tuesday, was much more disturbed, the Paris Royal was closed, and a formidable notice was affixed to all the walls informing all persons that the ‘enemies of order’ had begun their operations. Being curious to see their tactics, I immediately hied to the Boulevard St. Martin which I fancied would be the centre of operations, for it is in the narrow streets leading out of that great thoroughfare that the most ‘exalted’ of the ouvriers are said to reside. I had not been misinformed, for as soon as I got on the ground, the preparations for barricades were immediately visible. It is a simple process, though there being no paving stones on the Boulevards was a difficulty, but the stones of a half-built house supplied the place excellently well for the one where I was. These with palings, iron rails, planks, etc., and three overturned omnibuses and two upset cabs completed the bulwark. It took about half an hour to make nine, as the Boulevards are about there very wide, but others especially in the side streets were run up much more rapidly. The people making them were of two very unlike sorts. Immensely the greater number were mere boys or lads, gamins is the technical word, the lower sort of shopboys and sons of the better artisans, not bad-looking young fellows at all, liking the fair, and in general quite unarmed. Beside these and directing them were a few old stagers who have been at it these twenty years—men whose faces I do not like to think of—yellow, sour, angry, fanatical, who would rather shoot you than not. Each barricade that I saw was constructed under the eye of one or two, not more, of such fellows; the most of them do not, I was told, show until the building is over and the fighting begins. They were implicitly obeyed; indeed, a man must have a great deal of pluck not to do as they said, for they were armed, and a trifle bigoted in their temper. These (Montagnards is their name technically) I very studiously avoided, but I asked a question or two of some of the young fellows, and found that they thought that all the troups were out of Paris, that the provinces—Lyons especially—were rising, and that all the military would be wanted to prevent their march on the capital. It was likely enough that there was a row at Lyons, but not likely from the distance that they could yet be at the gates of Paris. Why the troups did not come I do not know, but for I suppose a couple of hours the barricade-people had it all their own way, and erected I think five in that part of the Boulevards, one after another, with about a hundred yards between them. I scrambled over two and got as far as I dared towards the centre. The silence was curious: on the frontier a raging though industrious multitude, within the kingdom no one, a woman hurrying home, an old man shrugging his shoulders, all as quiet as the grave. I did not stay long in the inside, as I feared the troups would come and I might be shot that Napoleon might rule the French or some Montagnard might be so kind as to do it just to keep his hand in. The moment the barricades were done, they began to break into the shops and houses, not to rob but for arms. As soon as they were satisfied there was no more weapons to be had, they chalked ‘death to robbers’ or something of that sort on the shutters and went away. I should not think they stole sixpenny worth of any matter except powder and guns. The Montagnards would have shot any young fellow that tried it on. I tried hard to hire a window to see the capture of the fortress as well as its erection but this was not to be, for everybody said they meant to shut their windows and indeed it would not have been very safe to look out on them firing. I therefore retired, though not too quickly. It is a bad habit to run in a Revolution, somebody may think you are the ‘other side’ and shoot at you, but if you go calmly and look English, there is no particular danger. As I retired I met the troups at some distance, slowly and cautiously hemming in the insurgents. Anybody might go out who would but no one come in. The whole operation reminded me very much of the description of the Porteous mob in the Heart of Midlothian. If you will read over that again you will have the best idea of the thoroughbred Parisian émeute that I know. There is the same discipline, order, absence of plunder, and in the leaders the same deep hatred and fanaticism. I am pleased to have had an opportunity of seeing it once but once is enough, as there is, I take it, a touch of sameness in this kind of sight, and I shall not go again into the citadel of operation. In no other part is there any danger for a decently careful person. To-day is much quieter. The troups soon cleared my barricade, though I heard cannon and musketry, the latter in plenty, and there was blood and a good deal of it in the approachable parts of the Boulevards; the field of the hardest battle was not to be approached for soldiers. I have not got time for a word more. You will have better accounts in the English papers than we have here. Only those of the Government are allowed to appear and these I know from the description of what I saw are written to tranquillise the provinces and diminish the disorder much. However, my notion is that the President will hold his own. Many thanks to my Mother for her note and also for your letter—I will write in a day or two.

“Yours ever,

“W. Bagehot.”

“41, Rue de Vangirard,
Paris.

“My dearest Mother,

“. . . When I have not got this Parisian complaint—for everybody now has at least a bad cold here—I am extremely well, quite stout, gross and ruddy. I lost three parties by being ill last week, to one of which, I believe, a big one, your friend Madame Meynieux was to have chaperoned me. However, I observe that dances like wheelbarrows are much the same in all countries, and nowhere propitious to people too muffish to waltz. One has to fall back on elderly creatures and express edifying sentiments in bad grammar. Not having ‘been any place’ as Watty used to say, I have not got anything to tell you. Politics are as dull as ditch-water here now after the excitement, the only new thing is decree of banishment apparently for life against some socialists of note, and of temporary exile against M. Thiers and the African generals, and Madame de Girardin, the great journalist, and others. The African generals are much to be pitied, I think, for they are a fine race of men; the list of exiles is thought numerous, I think, even by the President’s friends—at least the people on his side whom I have happened to hear of—of course his enemies say there never was such ‘tyranny’ or oppression since the commencement of mankind. The Constitution hangs fire, that he may have more time to fill up the Consultative Commission—his privy Council, as he wants to get all the creditable names he can. I will write again in a day or two when I am less stupid and have more to say.

“Yours most affectionately,

“W. Bagehot.

“P.S.—I was very sorry to hear of poor Mr. Spark’s death whose mild manners and valuable qualities everybody I think respected. What a horrid loss of the Amazon, the French papers live and thrive on it since the coup d’état, except the government organs; they are at low life, and obliged to criticise old prima donnas and ‘fill their columns’ with accounts of the state of the Navy, pleasant reading that, careful deportations on old copy.

“My love universally.”

“7th December, 1851,
Sunday.

“My dearest Mother,

“At this moment Paris is as tranquil as a tea-party, at any rate to the eye. The barricaders have been quashed, and according to me there will be no more fighting of consequence for some days and it may be for some months. I do not think it possible for a populace to rise with bayonets so close upon them; the Government have as yet been very determined, cruel and bloody according to their enemies, and I cannot imagine that if they continue to pursue the same policy there can be any insurrection of importance; but no one can know this. The Montagnards may turn desperate, but they are much broken, their best leaders being in prison and in London. I wish for the President decidedly myself as against M. Thiers and his set in the Parliamentary World; even I can’t believe in a Government of barristers and newspaper editors, and also as against the Red party who, though not insincere, are too abstruse and theoretical for a plain man. It is easy to say what they would abolish, but horribly hard to say what they would leave, and what they would find. I am in short what they call here a réactionnair, and I think I am with the majority—a healthy habit for a young man to contract. M. Bein whom I live with said to me, ‘I do not approve of this violence and coup d’état, but I am for the President because he’s for “the tranquillity” ’. People want to be let alone; it is clear that the Republic has been burgled, and if the President were turned out no one knows who would come in. For the moment, the alternative is between him and the Socialists. How long he may last is another question. Your friend Madame Meynieux pitched into his private character yesterday at a great pace. She was arguing with a French lady whom I did not know. I have never heard two people talk so fast and so well at the same time. M. Meynieux and myself looked on open-mouthed and in perfect silence. I could not talk that pace in English, much less in French, where I require five minutes to express four ideas. I listened patiently for a long time. The French lady was for the President and your friend violently against. She is allied with some of the Parliamentary people whom he has knocked about. She professes to be a Socialist but not a Republican; on the contrary she disdains forms of government and is exclusively strong on the principle of ‘association’. I can’t tell you, for I do not know, who is to associate with whom? She don’t approve at all of the common Red Socialist, indeed the weak point of the system is that no Socialist will ever associate with any other; all I know is that, as they say in the kitchen, somebody is to ‘keep company’ with somebody. M. Meynieux didn’t seem so strong on that, he is a man with good notions of food but not much general ability, though jolly, and awake to the existing world. His idea was that if he said anything on the Boulevards, he might be ‘had up’ for it, which he didn’t like. However, in fact, people say what they please, and your friend did not please to spare the President. Don’t suppose society here is at an end. People eat their meals—the shops are open. Rachel is to play to-morrow. But of course there is uneasiness, great uneasiness, though as my Father will have observed the funds keep up miraculously. The English papers all stopped to-day. I do not know if there is row in the provinces which we are not to hear about. That would floor the Government, at least if they had to withdraw troops from Paris.”

It was in Paris, in the letters on the Coup d’État which he sent to his friend Mr. Sanford for insertion in The Enquirer that Bagehot “found himself” as an author.

After referring to Burke, President Woodrow Wilson writes of these letters:—

“Bagehot showed the same precocious power, and saw clearly at twenty-five as at fifty, though he did not see as much or hold his judgment at so nice a balance. There is full evidence of this in the seven remarkable letters on the third Napoleon’s Coup d’État, which he wrote from Paris while he was yet a law student. They are evidently the letters of a young man. Their style goes at a spanking, reckless gait that no older mind would have dared attempt or could have kept its breath at. Their satirical humour has a quick sting in it; their judgments are offhand and unconscionably confident; their crying heresies in matters of politics are calculated to shock English nerves very painfully. They are aggressive and a bit arrogant. But their extravagance is superficial. At heart they are sound, and even wise. The man’s vision for affairs has come to him already. He sees that Frenchmen are not Englishmen, and are not to be judged, or very much aided either, by English standards in affairs. You shall not elsewhere learn so well what it was that happened in France in the early fifties, or why it happened, and could hardly have been staved off or avoided. ‘You have asked me to tell you what I think of French affairs,’ he writes. ‘I shall be pleased to do so; but I ought perhaps to begin by cautioning you against believing, or too much heeding, what I say.’ It is so he begins, with a shrewd suspicion, no doubt, that the warning is quite unnecessary. For he was writing to the editor of The Enquirer , a journal but just established for the enlightenment of Unitarian dissenters—a people Bagehot had reason to know, and could not hope to win either to the matter or to the manner of his thought. They were sure to think the one radically misleading and erroneous, and the other unpardonably flippant. But it was the better sport on that account to write for their amazement. He undertook nothing less bold than a justification of what Louis Napoleon had done in flat derogation and defiance of the constitutional liberties of France. He set himself to show an English audience, who he knew would decline to believe it, how desperate a crisis had been averted, how effectual the strong remedy had been, and how expedient at least a temporary dictatorship had become. ‘Whatever other deficiencies Louis Napoleon may have,’ he said, ‘he has one excellent advantage over other French statesmen: he has never been a professor, nor a journalist, nor a promising barrister, nor by taste a littérateur. He has not confused himself with history; he does not think in leading articles, in long speeches, or in agreeable essays. He has very good heels to his boots, and the French just want treading down, and nothing else—calm, cruel, business-like oppression, to take the dogmatic conceit out of their heads. The spirit of generalisation which, John Mill tells us, honourably distinguishes the French mind has come to this, that every Parisian wants his head tapped in order to get the formulæ and nonsense out of it. . . . So I am for any carnivorous Government.’ Conscious of his audacity and of what will be said of such sentiments among the grave readers of The Enquirer , he hastens in his second letter to make his real position clear. ‘For the sake of the women who may be led astray,’ he laughs, affecting to quote St. Athanasius, ‘I will this very moment explain my sentiments.’

“He is sober enough when it comes to serious explanation of the difficult matter. Laughing satire and boyish gibe are put aside, and a thoughtful philosophy of politics—Burke’s as well as his own—comes at once to the surface, in sentences admirably calm and wise. In justifying Napoleon, he says plainly and at the outset, he is speaking only of France and of the critical circumstances of the year 1852. ‘The first duty of society,’ he declares, ‘is the preservation of society. By the sound work of old-fashioned generations, by the singular painstaking of the slumberers in churchyards, by dull care, by stupid industry, a certain social fabric somehow exists; people contrive to go out to their work, and to find work to employ them actually until the evening; body and soul are kept together,—and this is what mankind have to show for their six thousand years of toil and trouble.’ You cannot better the living by political change, he maintains, unless you contrive to hold change to a slow and sober pace, quiet, almost insensible, like that of the evolutions of husbanding growth. If you cannot do that, perhaps it is better to hold steadily to the old present ways of life, under a strong, unshaken, unquestioned government, capable of guidance and command. ‘Burke first taught the world at large,’ he reminds us, ‘that politics are made of time and place; that institutions are shifting things, to be tried by and adjusted to the shifting conditions of a mutable world; that in fact politics are but a piece of business to be determined in every case by the exact exigencies of that case,—in plain English, by sense and circumstances. This was a great step in political philosophy, though it now seems the events of 1848 have taught thinking persons (I fancy) further: they have enabled us to see that of all these circumstances so affecting political problems, by far and out of all question the most important is national character. I need not prove to you that the French have a national character,’ he goes on, ‘nor need I try your patience with a likeness of it: I have only to examine whether it be a fit basis for natural freedom. I fear you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be about the most essential mental quality for a free people whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large scale: it is much stupidity. I see you are surprised; you are going to say to me, as Socrates did to Polus, “My young friend, of course you are right; but will you explain what you mean? As yet you are not intelligible.” ’

“The explanation is easily made, and with convincing force. He means that only a race of steady, patient, unimaginative habits of thought can abide steadfast in the conservative and businesslike conduct of Government, and he sees the French to be what De Tocqueville had called them,—a nation apt to conceive a great design, but unable to persist in its pursuit, impatient after a single effort, ‘swayed by sensations, and not by principles,’ her ‘instincts better than her morality’. ‘As people of “large roundabout common sense” will as a rule somehow get on in life,’ says Bagehot, ‘no matter what their circumstances or their fortune, so a nation which applies good judgment, forbearance, a rational and compromising habit, to the management of free institutions will certainly succeed; while the more eminently gifted national character will be but a source and germ of endless and disastrous failure, if, with whatever other eminent qualities, it be deficient in these plain, solid, and essential requisites.’ It is no doubt whimsical to call ‘large roundabout common sense,’ good judgment, and rational forbearance ‘stupidity’; but he means, of course, that those who possess these solid practical gifts usually lack that quick, inventive originality and versatility in resource which we are apt to think characteristic of the creative mind. ‘The essence of the French character,’ he explains, ‘is a certain mobility; that is, a certain “excessive sensibility to present impressions,” which is sometimes “levity” for it issues in a postponement of seemingly fixed principles to a momentary temptation or a transient whim; sometimes “impatience” as leading to an exaggerated sense of existing evils; often “excitement,” a total absorption in existing emotion; oftener “inconsistency,” the sacrifice of old habits to present emergencies,’—and these are qualities which, however engaging upon occasion, he is certainly right in regarding as a very serious, if not fatal, impediment to success in self-government. ‘A real Frenchman,’ he exclaims, ‘can’t be stupid: esprit is his essence; wit is to him as water, bonsmots as bonsbons.’ And yet ‘stupidity,’ as he prefers to call it, is, he rightly thinks, ‘nature’s favourite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion: it enforces concentration; people who learn slowly learn only what they must.”

“This, which reads like the moral of an old man, is what Bagehot saw at twenty-six; and he was able, though a youth and in the midst of misleading Paris, to write quick sentences of political analysis which were fit to serve both as history and as prophecy. ‘If you have to deal with a mobile, a clever, a versatile, and intellectual, a dogmatic nation,’ he says, ‘inevitably and by necessary consequence you will have conflicting systems; every man speaking his own words, and giving his own suffrage to what seems good in his own eyes; many holding to-day what they will regret to-morrow; a crowd of crotchety notions and a heavy percentage of philosophical nonsense; a great opportunity for subtle stratagem and intriguing selfishness; a miserable division among the friends of tranquillity, and a great power thrown into the hands of those who, though often with the very best intentions, are practically and in matter of fact opposed both to society and civilisation. And moreover, besides minor inconveniences and lesser hardships, you will indisputably have periodically—say three or four times in fifty years—a great crisis: the public mind much excited; the people in the streets swaying to and fro with the breath of every breeze; the discontented ouvriers meeting in a hundred knots, discussing their real sufferings and their imagined grievances with lean features and angry gesticulations; the Parliament all the while in permanence, very ably and eloquently expounding the whole subject, one man proposing this scheme, and another that; the opposition expecting to oust the ministers and ride in on the popular commotion, the ministers fearing to take the odium of severe or adequate repressive measures, lest they should lose their salary, their places, and their majority; finally a great crash, a disgusted people overwhelmed by revolutionary violence, or seeking a precarious, a pernicious, but after all a precious protection from the bayonets of military despotism.’ ”

Could you wish a better analysis of the affairs of that clever, volatile people, and can you ascribe it wholly to his youth that Bagehot should in 1852 have deliberately concluded that “the first condition of good Government” in France was “a really strong, a reputedly strong, a continually strong executive power”?

Paris and the writing of these Coup d’État articles had effected the cure. Walter Bagehot returned from Paris in 1852, refreshed, braced, and determined. He went to Herd’s Hill, discussed his future with his father, and when back in London, wrote to him:—

“9 Spring Gardens,
31st August, 1852.

“My dearest Father,

“I have been considering carefully the question which we almost decided upon when I was at home. I mean my abandoning the law at the present crisis—and in accordance with what we very nearly resolved upon when I was with you,—I have decided to do so at this juncture—utterly and for ever.”

[Page 193, line 5 from foot,]for Paris Royal read Palais Royal.

[Page 199, lines 1 and 30,]for Enquirer read Inquirer.

[Page 200, line 20,]for Enquirer read Inquirer.

[1 ] First letter on the Coup d’État which Mr. Sanford, the editor, inserted in the Enquirer.