found their republic are quite as incompatible with what the world has hitherto called social order; and those amongst them who may hesitate to follow those wild principles to their extreme developement will be-like Brissot, Barnave, Desmoulins, and even Danton himself-crushed beneath the blind interests and brutal passions of the parties they have set in motion. If such be not the result, there is no faith to be placed in history--no safe deduction to be made from either moral or political experience: if such consequences do not follow from such causes, the new French Republic will indeed have worked an unimagined, and we still say unimaginable, regeneration—a regeneration, not of France alone, but of human nature.

Hitherto, the acts of this Government have been in perfect harmony with its creation and composition. Every newspaper teems with the extravagances, follies, inconsistency, and violence of their proceedings, a few only of the more remarkable of which have we room to notice.

In the first line stand the two documents in which such a government-calling itself provisional, and protesting its anxiety to deliver up as soon as possible, and at latest within a few weeks, its temporary authority-has madly committed itself and its country on the two greatest and most difficult subjects of foreign and domestic policy-the presumptuous propagandist circular of Lamartine denouncing the treaties of 1815, which, if there were an independent government in Europe in a sound and healthy state, would have been taken (as we believe it was meant) as a declaration of war against the world; and that other insane promise and pledge-pregnant with early disappointment and incalculable calamities of all kinds-that it is the duty, and within the power, of a government to guarantee to its population certain prices of food, supplies of work, and rates of wages. On these monstrous doctrines, subversive of all faith amongst nations and all order and security in social life, we need not expatiate. Those that have sown the wind must reap the whirlwind.'

Again; when the Government were invited by their masters of the press to take off a halfpenny stamp-duty on newspapers, they for a moment declined it on the plea that they had no power to do so, and that the question must await the decision of the National Assembly. Very well. But then what power had they to abolish royalty, as they say, for ever-to tear to pieces the charter for which they pretend to have fought-to extinguish the Peerage to abolish titles-forfeit the civil list revenues legally voted and appropriated-to confiscate and sell the domains of the Crown-to sequester the King's private estate, and even that of his deceased sister-to abrogate, without a thought of compensation or consequences,

2Q 2

consequences, colonial slavery-to suppress capital punishment in cases of high treason-to promulgate organic laws of election, not pro hâc vice, but as the eternal rights of man?-what right, or power, or pretext could such a government have to anticipate and fetter the national will on all those great points? We are willing to admit that, in the difficulties in which they had placed themselves, they could hardly do otherwise than establish themselves in a kind of dictatorship-the necessity of the case seemed to require that assumption; but beyond that necessity, beyond the providing for public order till a National Assembly could be constituted, they had, as they themselves confessed in the matter of the halfpenny stamp, no shadow of pretext for such a usurpation-a usurpation not to meet present exigencies, but extending over the whole futurity of a great people.

What excuse can they make to a bankrupt nation for such a financial juggle and bravado as the ordering the payment of the dividends three weeks before they were due, as if the Exchequer were overflowing, and in the same breath calling on the people to anticipate by a year the payment of their taxes, as if they had not a franc in reserve? So childish a farce was assuredly never before attempted. For the majority of those acts of usurpation, tyranny, and knavery, there was not even the plausible excuse of necessity, for most of them had no relation to the pressure of the moment, and some of those that had were rather calculated to aggravate it. As to the restriction on the withdrawal of the deposits in the savings-banks, and the suspension of cash payments at the Bank of France, we admit that some such measures had become inevitable; but the panic that rendered them so was created, or at least enormously increased, by the disorganizing and anarchical principles and acts of the Provisional Government; and then-like their predecessors of the old revolution-they turn round and lay the blame on the victims-the wolf on the lamb. For example, they dissolve and send home the Chambers of Peers and Deputies then sitting in Paris; they decimate the Council of State-reduce to sudden indigence the numerous classes dependent on the civil list-deprive of their salaries a crowd of public functionaries-they alarm all the persons of property in a great capital by arming, arraying, and bribing 200,000 proletaires to overwhelm the National Guard-and of course drive all of what were the upper classes of society into the retirement of terror or economy; and then they loudly complain of, and their newspapers publish incendiary attacks on, those whose counterrevolutionary malice, they pretend, causes the runs on banks, hoarding of specie, dismissal of servants, sale of carriages and horses, and the depriving the trade of Paris of its best customers.

Their scheme of public works, for stopping the mouths of the wretched people whom their own measures have deprived of their natural support, has now probably grown to a necessity, but it is carried out with an extravagance of absurdity-such as pulling down and destroying one day only to rebuild and restore the next-which, we say it with shame, reminds us of the wild scheme of public works in Ireland the year before last. Amongst the Parisian undertakings we have been struck by certain works in the Champ de Mars, and the more so because (another remarkable coincidence) we remember a similar proceeding in the first Revolution in the self-same place. We think our readers will be amused by the juxtaposition of the following extracts from two publications of the respective dates:

1790.

'La première opération était de faire du Champ de Mars un vaste bassin, de le creuser, et d'en porter les terres autour pour former les élévations. Il fallait, en un mot, transformer cette vaste plaine en un vallon bordé circulairement d'un large et vaste amphithéâtre. 15,000 ouvriers furent destinés à cet immense travail. Mais on s'apperçut bientôt que, au lieu de trois semaines qui restaient jusqu'au 14 Juillet (jour consacré par l'Assemblée Nationale pour la fête de la fédération), trois mois suffireraient à peine. Le peu d'activité d'un grand nombre d'entre eux les fit même soupçonner d'être plus chèrement payés pour ne rien faire qu'ils ne l'étaient pour travailler.'-Tab. Hist. Juin, 1790.

1818.

Ordre

'De grands travaux de terrassement s'exécutent au Champ de Mars. On travaille à exhausser le milieu de près d'un mètre et demi, de façon à en faire une immense chaussée bombée. En second lieu, les larges et hauts talus des côtés vont disparaître, et les terres qui en proviendront serviront à exhausser le sol. est donné de poursuivre activement ces importans travaux, afin qu'ils soient terminés au jour de l'Assemblée Nationale, le 20 Avril. On annonce que de grandes fêtes publiques auront lieu alors. Chaque ouvrier adulte gagne deux francs par jour et les enfans un franc.'-Jour, des Déb., 11 Mars, 1848.

At both periods we see immense works-important works-thousands of hands employed at exorbitant wages to prepare the same local for the national fêtes ordered by the National Assembly! and the sum total of the work turns out to be that 1848 is to fill up the hollows that 1790 had dug out. They may accomplish this on the Champ de Mars-but they may be assured that in more general interests the new Revolution is not destined to repair any of the errors of the old.

The following exhibition of the respect paid to liberty and property is more serious. We copy from La Réforme, Louis Blanc's organ:

"The citizen J. Gouache, Commissary-General of the Government. in the three departments of Loiret, Eure-et-Loire, and Loire-et-Cher, has from the outset of his mission distinguished himself by his zeal and activity. On his arrival at Blois he found that city suffering under the same commercial and financial crisis as the rest of France; and after having consulted with the Tribunal of Commerce and the bankers of

the

the town, he has issued three decrees, which seem to us perfectly appropriate to the circumstances:

1st, An office of Discount is established at Blois.

2nd, The bankers of Blois are from this date (18th of March) to retain (conserver), for the purpose of facilitating the interests of trade, all the deposits that proprietors or capitalists may have placed in their hands; except only such sums as the proprietors or capitalists may consent to pay into a national discount office.

3rd, Suspends all proceedings against any persons engaged in trade for payment of bills, recovery of debts, or other commercial claims whatsoever, until the 15th of May next.'

This citizen Gouache (whose very name sounds like a burlesque) was, we believe, in some way connected with the Réforme; he was prominent in the insurrection with his friend Etienne Arago, but is now, it seems, one of the forty or fifty proconsuls who are administering each his own individual despotism in the provinces of France. A circular instruction to these Commissaries from the Minister, Ledru-Rollin, commences with these astonishing words:- Quels sont vos pouvoirs? Ils sont illimités. Pour l'accomplissement de votre tâche vous êtes investis de la souveraineté du peuple! What a state of society must it be when the Minister of the Interior sends forth such emissaries with such powers-powers greater than he himself pretends to-and when one of these petty tyrants can follow his own wild impulses, with no other notice of such an incredible depotism than the applause it obtains from one of his own colleagues in the corner of their common newspaper! To us it seems that this order to bankers not to pay the checks of their depositors is the most extraordinary of all the incredible proceedings that the last fortnight has produced. But the same tyranny is going on in every considerable city, though it is evident that the press does not dare to denounce these enormities. We learn from a very gentle and timid remonstrance of the once formidable Journal des Débats that Emmanuel Arago (the son of the place-abjuring savant) is now lording it over Lyons with the same insolent intrepidity that fixed his uncle in the Post Office :—

'The Government, in order to meet the wants of the Treasury, has contented itself with adding 45c. per franc to the four direct contributions. M. Arago, the commissary at Lyons, has doubled that at a blow; and he has even done more. By a second decree he has decided that every one leaving the town shall not carry with him in cash more than 500f., without satisfying the authorities as to its intended And this conduct is pursued at Lyons, the second city in France.' -Journ. des Débats, 24 Mars.

use.

Nor is this all; for another decree provides that an impôt supplémentaire soit fixé pour les capitalistes—a supplemental tax on

capitalistes

capitalistes-and the rate at which these poor capitalists are to be assessed is to be settled by a jury appointed by Citizen Emmanuel Arago! This exceeds even M. Gouache, or, we believe, any spoliator that the annals of conventional rapine record. But tant mieux-the worse the shorter!

We believe that there is no rational man, in or out of France, who believes that a constitution founded on such bases as the Provisional Government has programmed, and living by such violent expedients, can maintain the country in peace and itself in authority for six months. What an extension of the reign of terror, which already exists and is hourly becoming more and more perceptible, might do we cannot say, but we doubt whether the Bourgeoisie-annihilated as Louis Blanc and the National proclaim and as the great popular demonstration of the 17th of March proves that for the moment it is—has not yet vitality enough to prevent, or at least very soon to overcome, that danger. The cries and visions of the old revolution, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, which figure at the head of the new proclamations, are worn out, and have now no effect on any class-not even on the lowest-they look only to Louis Blanc's paradise of wages without work. All parties are pretty well convinced that they have had as much individual liberty as is compatible with the liberty of others, and of equality and fraternity also-unless these words mean the reduction of man and woman to the lowest level however deep, and a community of goods even down to its last result-squalidity and starvation. France, we trust, is too civilised the educated classes (with the exception of some hotheaded youngsters and wild theorists) are too well informedand the gros peuple is, we are willing to hope, too good natured and honest, to submit long to a reign of terror; it may bend them down before it as it does at this moment, and probably will do with a still more visible tyranny-but they cannot long be kept in that unnatural and cruel abasement. We saw clearly enough, in M. Ledru-Rollin's outrageous attempt on the freedom of election, much of the same spirit with which Danton, one of the ministers of the 10th of August, too successfully influenced the choice of the execrable Convention; but we saw also that the attempt excited enough of public disapprobation to extract a kind of disclaimer on the part of the collective Government. Their circular was a tribute, no doubt, to public opinion; but it does not diminish the danger, for, though abundantly stuck with fine phrases about freedom of election, purity of conscience, personal independence, and so forth, it insists after all, that the only name to be inscribed on the balloting ticket of a good citizen shall be that of an able and honest republican,' which, verbiage

apart,