BETWEEN THE CZAR AND THE SULTAN. 215 CHAPTER XIV* I. In the beginning of the winter of 1851 France chap. . . XIV was still a republic; but the Constitution of 1848 1_ had struck no root. There was a feeling that the French"!'" country had been surprised and coerced into the SJv.'ism, act of declaring itself a republic, and that a mon- archical system of government was the only one adapted for France. The sense of instability which sprang from this belief was connected with an agonising dread of insurrections like those which, forty months before, had fdled the streets of Paris with scenes of bloodshed. Moreover, to those who watched and feared, it seemed that the shadow on the dial was moving on with a terrible steadiness to the hour when a return to anarchy was, as it were, pre-ordained by law ; for the con- stitution required that a new president should be chosen in the spring of the following year, and the French, being by nature of a keen and anxious
- Not a word of this chapter has been changed since the day
of its original publication in January 1863, when the French Emperor was at the height of his power.
