Note 139 — Chapter XIV · THE TWO AMERICAS AND THE RELATION OF SOUTH AMERICA TO EUROPE
Reading edition
In the days when Louis Napoleon was trying to establish for France a hegemony over the Romance-speaking peoples of Europe, the days when his Life of Julius Cæsar was published and his expedition to Mexico despatched, this term first came into common use. It was the fashion for his literary court to represent the French people as the heirs of ancient Rome, the modern perpetuator of her spirit and her greatness. Yet in reality the character and the conduct of the English government during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bear a closer resemblance than ever did the French, both in their strong and in their weak points, to the government of the Roman republic.