one is as culpable, and likely to be as pernicious, as a physician who should prescribe without consideration of the other. Most especially to be taken into our estimate of the fitting political arrangements for this or that nation are the relative degrees of excitability in their constitution. No lawgiver who deserved or expected his work to be successful, or his name to live, would ordain similar administrative restraints, or an equal degree of unfettered individual action, for a phlegmatic as for a mercurial and susceptible race. The same liberty of speech and writing, the same freedom and facility for association, which could be safely and serviceably conceded to people slow and deliberate by nature, and inured for centuries to manage and restrain themselves, might obviously be perilous and noxious in the extreme if possessed by a nation of a singularly mobile and impressible organisation, who are destitute of that "inborn reverence for the constable's staff" which is so peculiarly Anglo-Saxon, and whose history for the last age has been a series of alternations between irrational submission to authority and irrational revolt against it. In this country we have always been accustomed, from the highest to the lowest, to meet and combine for recognised and lawful purposes; and, indeed, a considerable portion of our internal activity and municipal government is carried on through the medium of these voluntary or incumbent associations. But it by no means follows that a similar result would be secured by similar customs in a land where, the central power doing and having long done every thing, no legitimate field has been left for self-formed corporate organisations, and where consequently these have rarely existed except for purposes that could not be defended or avowed- -as the "secret societies" of Ireland, Italy, and France. In like manner, we have always enjoyed the right of criticising and vituperating our rulers, as well as of changing them more or less completely on occasions; but the dullness of habitual possession, and a certain inert sobriety of temper, suffice to guard us against any outrageously flagrant abuse of these prerogatives. But who can say that this would be so with a people who are fierce, emotional, and combative, and whose antecedents have led them to regard their government either as a tyrant to be crouched to, or an enemy to be assailed, or a treasure-chamber to be seized?

Now undeniably the French are a very excitable people. They are at once quick, vehement, and volatile. Speeches and writings, harangues at the tribune, leading-articles in the newspapers, produce a very different effect upon them and upon us. We hear them or read them with interest indeed and attention, but rarely with much emotion, still more rarely with any lasting emotion. We listen to the orator who has been declaim

ing earnestly against the corruption and incapacity of government; we lay down the journal in which we have been perusing a skilful and highly-wrought exposition of the unpardonable sins and shortcomings of our rulers; we talk the matter over with a friend; we decide upon our vote at the next election; we even, perhaps, think for a few moments whether we will not get up a petition, or call a public meeting;-and then we go quietly about our daily business; we never dream of proceeding, par voie de fait, to upset the peccant government at once. But it is very different across the Channel. The speeches are heard or the articles are read by all classes, are vehemently commented upon, and angrily discussed; each auditor and interlocutor communicates his own excitement to his neighbour; the multitude of individual emotions are, as it were, clubbed together, and make a sum-total truly formidable; in plain words, the glass of wine, or the pinch of snuff, which to us is a gentle exhilaration, gets into the head of our neighbours, and creates dangerous and disproportionate cerebral disturbance. Every foreigner who has attended the national assemblies, or heard the journals in times of interest read aloud in cafés, will confirm this statement ;you see men in knots, with fiery eyes and wild gesticulations, growing every moment more ungovernable; you see auditors and senators shaking their fists at one another (even at vis-à-vis they have never seen before) across the legislative chamber. Every Frenchman, of whatever party, will admit, more or less reluctantly, the accuracy of our picture; and it is curious that all parties in turn, from the most liberal to the most conservative, have drawn the same practical conclusion from it. All have felt, or deemed, that perfect freedom of the press, unrestrained journalism, was incompatible with public tranquillity or stable administration. Not only the government of Charles X. and the government of Louis Napoleon, but the ministry of Thiers and the ministry of Guizot introduced some restrictions, and licensed police interferences which on this side of the Channel we should consider strange and arbitrary indeed. And it was under the last republic that one of the most serious blows at the power and the daring of the periodical press was struck-whether a wise and warrantable one we need not here discuss-in the law which compelled the writers of newspaperarticles to affix their names. This will suffice to show what the impression of the French themselves is upon this subject. Few thoughtful men among them,-few who had not some special bête noire which they desired to overturn,-would, we believe, be found to advocate such complete license as prevails with us. None, we think, would be found to undertake the government of the country upon such terms. The amount and form of the

restrictions they would impose are the sole questions of difference among them. The present Emperor has carried these restrictions further than any of his predecessors; he has carried out the principle consistently, and has therefore obtained his aim effectually. Assuredly we are not prepared to defend him in this particular. We think he has endeavoured to crush a power which it would have been more patriotic to have sought to regulate. We think his interferences and "warnings" have often been arbitrary, unjust, needless, and petty. We are of opinion that by persisting so long without relaxation he has forfeited much of the justification or apology which might have been derived from the plea of exceptional and transient emergency. We have no doubt that the severity of his control over the journalism of France has saved the country from many mischiefs, and probably from much convulsion; but it is certain that this exemption has been dearly purchased,-by the people, because they have been subjected to much injustice, oppression, and misgovernment, which dared not have gone on under the vigilance of a free press,-by the government, because it has rushed into many blunders from which public discussion would have saved it.

One clear benefit, indeed, is traceable to the unrelenting strictness of the course the Emperor has pursued, which deserves more attention than it has received. To the effectual "gagging" of journalism we owe, beyond dispute, the maintenance of the cordial alliance between the two countries. With a perfectly free newspaper press in France we do not believe that alliance could have endured three months. In the first place, though the more enlightened portion of the nation has nearly discarded and outgrown the past, it is undeniable that some classes still retain their old traditional dislike and jealousy of England, and these feelings would have found utterance in the favourite organs of those classes. In the second place, some of the most widely circulated daily journals-one especially we have in our eye-are the property, or under the guidance of men whom personal motives or exaggerated nationality prompt to read backwards and to paint in the darkest colours every thing we say and do; who regard us much in the same way as do the Irish rebels, or the lowest American democracy; and whom nothing would delight so much as to baffle and embarrass us;- men to whom statesmanlike views are unknown, and who would be wholly unrestrained by any magnanimous or patriotic reticence. In the third place, Russia is far too sagacious not to have seen her account in seizing the weapons thus presented to her; she would have actually purchased some organs, and would have influenced others, and made them virtually her own by those astute and wily strata

gems which she knows so well how to employ. All these antiEnglish journals would have been at work day after day, misrepresenting facts, inventing rumours, attributing designs, imagining affronts and slights, fanning into a flame every incipient misunderstanding, putting the worst construction upon every action. Where our army had succeeded better than the French, or our navy had outsailed theirs, unfair proceedings would have been audaciously insinuated; where we had comparatively failed, our blunders or mishaps would have been ungenerously magnified and sneered at. On the occasion of every victory, it would be hinted, or boldly affirmed, that we had taken more of the credit than of right belonged to us; every disaster would be attributed to our backwardness or incapacity. The English press in its turn would probably not be slow to resent and to retaliate; French boasts would be caricatured; French defeats and weaknesses would be exposed and denounced. The newspapers of both countries, filled with these unworthy recriminations, would have spread throughout the length and breadth of the land, and would have been transmitted to the seat of war and perused eagerly in both camps; flame and fuel would have been at once supplied to all the worst and pettiest feelings that can rage in the human breast; every dormant jealousy would have been roused into exuberant life; every trivial and latent suspicion would have acquired stature and certainty; mutual cordiality would have given way to mutual distrust, and all hearty and effective co-operation would have become impossible. Even where two nations have long been friends, and are united by an intrinsic harmony of nature,—a free press, with its reckless spirit, its violent language, and its low necessities, makes it difficult enough to avoid quarrels, and to suffer old animosities to go to sleep. How much greater would be the danger in the case of allies so different in temperament and character as the English and the French, and where the friendly understanding and thorough good-fellowship and mutual confidence of the governments have not yet had time to percolate downwards to the core of the nations' heart!

The stern control which the government has exercised over the newspaper press in France has averted these evils, and rendered our cordial alliance possible, and prevented bad feeling from growing up between the two armies: in other words, it has prevented the reckless, passionate, and malignant spirits of the nation from undoing the beneficent work at which the wise and magnanimous on both sides of the Channel have laboured so incessantly. And when to this we add, that the same control hindered the French papers from repeating (and therefore the French public from knowing) the virulent attacks on Louis Napoleon with which at one time our papers abounded,—we shall

be obliged to confess that a vast and unquestionable good has resulted from those restrictive measures which at first sight seem so indefensible.

But, though disposed to admit that the severe restraint on newspaper freedom in France may have been justifiable and wise, we cannot extend these excuses to the interference of government with other and soberer organs of public opinion. The plea alleged for controlling discussion and declamation, addressed by the daily organs of the press to an excitable, a miscellaneous, and often an ignorant audience, does not apply to freedom of speech confined to such quarters as the benches of the Académie Française or the pages of the Revue des deux Mondes, where the audience addressed is comparatively select, of a higher rank, and composed mainly, if not exclusively, of the class of the educated and reflecting few. These voices of opinion might surely have been allowed to speak out with safety. Their criticisms on public affairs might, we can well conceive, prove mortifying and irritating to the powers that be; but it could scarcely be plausibly alleged that the utterance of them in those limited circles, and in that deliberate form, was really attended with danger to the national tranquillity. A calm and cutting sarcasm from Villemain, or a clear exposition of fallacious statesmanship from Guizot, uttered in the presence of the cultivated intelligence of the nation, ought, no doubt, to be more painful to erring or incapable ministers than a fierce denunciation in the columns of La Presse or Le Constitutionnel; but it cannot be urged that it is as likely to lead to popular tumult or to weaken administrative action. It is addressed ad clerum, and not ad populum. Therefore, while we may believe the restrictions on journalism to have been dictated by considerations for the public weal, it is difficult to believe that personal feeling and personal fears have not been the actuating motive of the recent assaults on the liberty of the Académie, and of the cautions to the Revue des deux Mondes.

L'INSTITUT DE FRANCE, which received its present form from the hands of the first Napoleon, though originally founded in 1795, consists of five sections, or académies, among which the Académie Française, founded by Richelieu for the encouragement of letters, holds the first rank. This académie has survived all the various changes of dynasty and constitution which have swept over France. It succumbed for a brief space under the reign of terror, but soon reared its head again above the deluge. It is the only national institution which every convulsion has left standing; and it preserved the forms, the traditions, and to a great degree the reality of liberty of speech and action, when these were suppressed and in danger of being forgotten every where else in France. It has, in fact, been a precious ark