J24	ENGLISH    SAGA
depicted a number of seasick French colonels and poodles attempt-
ing to cross the Channel^1 while a very senile Duke of Wellington
in a Field Marshall's cocked hat vainly tried with a quill pen
to tickle up a sleeping British lion which only replied, "All
right, old boy, I shall be ready when I'm wanted." Palmerston
confessed to Russell in 1851 that it was "almost as difficult to
persuade the peopk of this country to provide themselves with
the means of defence as it would be for them to defend themselves
without those means."^2
At the end of that year there came a new alarm, Louis
Napoleon, interpreting the will of the rising generation in
France, established himself in permanent power as life President
by a military coup d'etat. A year later he became Emperor of
the French in fictitious succession to his famous uncle. This
arbitrary act, though accompanied by remarkably little loss of
life, aroused the utmost indignation among English radicals,
who merely saw it as a brutal attack on their liberal and
socialist brethren across the Channel. It outraged their English
respectability and their most cherished democratic ideals. They
pictured the "man of December" as throttling the nation .he
had sworn to serve. "The soldiery had already been corrupted
by a feast of sausages and champagne. For the officers there was
gold, . . . The gutters of the boulevards ran with blood ... a
disreputable adventurer was wading through blood to the
throne,"^8
The relapse of France into imperial despotism seemed to
complete the isolation of England: the three Eastern tyrants
were now joined by a Western. Punch went so far as to address
a salutation to the democrats of the United States, hitherto
little liked in aristocratic England:
"Oh, Jonathan! dear Jonathan! a wretched world we see;
There's scarce a freeman in it now, excepting you and me.
In soldieMidden Christendom the sceptre is the sword;
The statutes of the nation from the cannon's mouth are
roared.
^la Ye broode of Gallic cocke,
Defying rollt and rocjte.
Across ye Channele sailing
Punch,
*ff. C J. BeU, Palmerston, /,      .
*W. & Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom, /, 342-51.