Ever since the 2nd of December last, the whole interest that 
foreign, or at least continental politics may excite, is taken up by 
that lucky and reckless gambler, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. 
‘What is he doing? Will he go to war, and with whom? Will he 
invade England?” These questions are sure to be put wherever 
continental affairs are spoken of. 

And certainly there is something startling in the fact of a 
comparatively unknown adventurer, placed by chance at the head 
of the executive power of a great republic, seizing, between sunset 
and sunrise, upon all the important posts of the capital, driving 
the parliament like chaff to the winds, suppressing metropolitan 
insurrection in two days, provincial tumults in two weeks, forcing 
himself, in a sham election, down the throat of the whole people, 
and establishing, in the same breath, a constitution which confers 
upon him all the powers of the state.'*7 Such a thing has not 
occurred, such a shame has not been borne by any nation since 
the praetorian legions of declining Rome put up the empire to 
auction and sold it to the highest bidder. And the middle-class 
press of this country, from The Times down to The Weekly Dispatch, 
has never, since the days of December, allowed any occasion to 
pass without venting its virtuous indignation upon the military 
despot, the treacherous destroyer of his country’s liberties, the 
extinguisher of the press, and so forth. 

Now, with every due contempt for Louis Napoleon, we do not 
think it would become an organ of the working-class* to join in 
this chorus of high-sounding vituperation in which the respective 


* Notes to the People.— Ed.