Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky

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Название Democracy and Liberty
Автор произведения William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Жанр Юриспруденция, право
Серия none
Издательство Юриспруденция, право
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781614872207



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when its members, on their refusal to obey, were led between files of soldiers to the barracks, and thence conducted to prison; when all resistance was crushed by military force, martial law, and wholesale deportations. One of the first acts of Louis Napoleon was to announce in the proclamation that dissolved the Chamber that the electoral law of 1850 was annulled and universal suffrage re-established. Two days after the Coup d'Etat it was sanctioned by a plebiscite of the army, and within three weeks of the same event, when the greater part of France was still under severe martial law, the act of the President was ratified by universal suffrage. Nearly eight millions of electors are said to have voted for him.

      Most good observers felt that a state of things had been called into existence which could not possibly last. The Emperor, in opening the Chamber, while deploring the growth of subversive and anarchical passions, declared his determination to persevere in the path he had chosen, and, although he refused to abandon his action over the constituencies, and expressly reserved to himself the right of always appealing to his people independently of his ministers, he greatly enlarged the powers of the Assembly. In conjunction with himself it now obtained the right of initiating laws; it obtained the fullest powers of amending them, and the ministers became responsible to it. The Constitution was denounced by the Radical party as a worthless mockery, but it was sanctioned by the Plebiscite of 1870. There were about 7,350,000 votes in favour of the Government, and rather more than 1,500,000 votes against it.

      It deprived France of a settled Government at the moment when such a Government was most imperiously needed, and one of its most certain results was the useless prolongation of a hopeless war. There is little doubt that if the Empire had survived Sedan peace would have speedily been made, and, although Strasburg was irrevocably lost, Metz would have been saved; the war indemnity would have been far less; the vast expenditure of life and property and human suffering that marked the later months of the war would have been prevented, and France might have escaped the most hideous, shameful, and wicked of all insurrections—the Communist rising against a French Government under the eyes of a victorious invading army.

      Happily, in this dark crisis of her fate France found a really great man, who in intellectual stature seemed to tower like a giant among his contemporaries; and it is a curiously significant fact that he was one of the few surviving statesmen who had been formed in the parliamentary conflicts under Louis Philippe, before the millennium of universal suffrage had dawned upon the land.