between the civil and military portions of society, the man elevated on the shields of the soldiers above his deserts, must side with the soldiers, or he is deposed by the Prætorians, the Strelitzes, or the Janissaries who lifted him up on their bucklers from worse than nothingness-that is to say, from notoriety without good fame. The evidence of history goes to prove this, and the case of M. Buonaparte will not be an exception to the rule. It may be answered that the will of the soldiers' sabre is ratified by the free vote of the civilian. Free vote, indeed! when the device of the new dictator is Vote pour moi, ou je te tue.' Free vote, when Paris and forty-four departments are in a state of siege! Free vote, when military tribunals are alone sitting! Free vote, when soldiers are bivouacking in the streets! Free vote, when the leaders of the people are in prison! Free vote, when public opinion is suffocated! Free vote, when twelve Parisian journals have been suppressed! Free vote, when the National Guards are disbanded! Free vote, when mayora are displaced! Free vote, when terror and espionage reign in every quarter! Free vote, when any printer striking off negative bulletins is certain to lose his brevet! Free vote, when passports are denied to the deputies to go among their constituents! Free vote, when letters are read, and if obnoxious to authority, destroyed at the post-office! Free vote, when there is no alternative between sycophancy and silence! Free vote, when violence and tyranny make men dissemble their real sentiments, but where neither violence nor tyranny can induce them to believe that this mockery of empire can endure longer than a dark hour, unless, indeed, as Niebuhr supposes, we are to have a second edition of the dark ages over again. Free vote, when the electorial lists are in packed hands! Free vote, when the administrative machinery is corrupted and debauched! Free vote, when M. Suchet d'Albufera is told that if he wrote fifty letters to his constituents, not one of them should go! Free vote, when the proofs of all journals are sent to the Minister of the Interior! Free vote, when Arthur Berryer, who

called at the Home Office to ask permission to see his imprisoned father, the illustrious orator of the Chamber, is gazetted by the organ of despotism, the Patrie, as having called to make his submission, a calumny which the noble young man cannot get contradicted to this day! Free vote, when men are called to deliberate without choice and compelled to vote, Aye or No, to a proposition backed up by 120,000 men, with cannons pointed and bayonets fixed. The question, in truth, has been proposed in a manner full of fraud and destitute of every element of fairness; and under compulsion, terror, and a species of halfconsternation, half-stupefaction, men have been induced to ballot. But that the majority of them have voted freely I never can admit. Freely, however, or under compulsion, they have surrendered their liberties for a time to a master who has been false to everything but his own ambition.

It is idle to say, as some journals in England say, that this question concerns France alone; it concerns all Europe, if not the civilized world. Thirty-six millions of slaves in France would be fitting instruments to enslave the world. France, in surrendering her own liberties, may be seized with the furia Francese to level down other, and most of all free and constitutional nations, to her own level. She may wish, by way of lightening them or rendering them less galling, to impose the fetters, which she must ever wear uneasily, on other nations. It is therefore puerile to say that this question does not concern the rest of Europe, and in an especial degree England. France is now delivered over, bound and bleeding, to M. Buonaparte, and France has taken no precaution whatever to prevent him from abusing the most formidable power he has assumed. He has not given one single guarantee. Not one barrier has been raised against his absolute will. The man believes in nothing but in the strength of his own destiny and the weakness of human nature. Should one wise or good measure fall from his hands, it will not be because he believes it wise or good in itself, but because he believes it to be favourable to his own personal ambition. To gratify

this ambition, and to assuage his thirst for power, he would govern France to-morrow, if it suited his purposes, as though he reigned in Morocco. The tyrant of the French people must be the enemy of every free people under the sun, and he cannot look on free institutions within a few miles of the French coast otherwise than with disgust, if not with dread. He may for a few weeks preserve as much of a republican system as shall sustain his authority, favour his ambition, or nourish his arrogance. But when the man who has extinguished the press, put down the Chambers, introduced the censorship both of books and journals -who does not even allow a feuilleton to be published which contains a quotation from Tacitus having reference to a tyrant, finds that his acts are denounced by tongue and by pen in England, he will begin to think that the existence of his own tyranny is incompatible with a free press and free institutions in this happy land.

M. Buonaparte has extinguished discussion and free speech, and annihilated liberty at home; but in the country of Molière and of Voltaire, of Chateaubriand, De Beranger, and Madame de Stael, he cannot kill ideas or prevent people from opening the book of history, or recurring to the records of the past. The worst of the Bourbons, with all their faults, never sought to murder the mind of the country. The mind, the intellect, the genius, the wisdom of France, are now proscribed-are in prison-or in exile. The profound lawyers, the parliamentary orators, the experienced administrators, the poets, the historians, the publicists, of a people renowned for their atticism, are all either ostracised or divorced from the service of the State. There is an impassable gulf between M. Buonaparte and the flite of the nation-between his government and men of honour. His conduct towards M. Molé, to M. de Remusat, to Cavaignac, to Changarnier, to Bedeau, to Leflo, to Oudinot, to Rulheires, and even to M. Thiers and M. Bazé, has been such not to speak of his conduct to the 210 deputies arrested like felons And thrust into gaol-that as George IV. snid of his uncle, after the murder of the Duc d'Enghein, 'All the

gentlemen in Europe-all the men of mind and intelligence, must be in array against a system supported only by bayonets, and by sheer, stupid brute force.' All the young and ardent, all the men of genius and spirit, all the salons, and the power of the salons in France is almost omnipotent,-are arrayed against the new despotism. Some of the noblest refusals of adhesion have proceeded from men of letters, such as Mignet, Alexandre Thomas, and Leon Faucher, a late minister. In the presence of such monstrous illegalities, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences met only to adjourn.

It is said that the French funds and French shares have risen. In the funds, the government has it nearly always in its powerto 'rigthe market,' as it is vulgarly called, by means of the twelve agents de change and the Jew brokers, in the interests of the Foulds and the Rothschilds.

The

day before the three days of July, 1830, the French funds were higher than they are now. The organs of the Elysée in England who point to the rise in the funds do not, however, tell us that so great is the demand for gold by strangers and natives departing the kingdom, that the agio upon it has risen to six, seven, and eight per cent. within a few days. It does not suit the fanatics of slavery to let this, or any other unpleasant truth, ooze out. It may be answered, that the government of M. Buonaparte is not slavery. By-and-by, at his own good pleasure, and of his own infinite bounty, he may generously accord to the nation a paid senate, nominated by him; and he may allow to be elected, by a suffrage à deux degrés, electors who will in turn elect the deputies also to be paid. Are, then, all the struggles of seventy years—are all the struggles of Mirabeau and Barnave -of Manuel and Foy-of Constant, and Perier, and Lamarque-of De Serres and Martignac-of Mauguin and Odillon Barrot, to end in this sham and this false pretence?

Is

the world going back again to the time of the 28 Floreal, an. 12, to the constitution of the 22 Frimaire, or to the Senatus Consultum of 1802? If so, then civilian France will have repression at home, and military France employment abroad.

Force will be everywhere undisguised, and tyranny everywhere audacious. It is impossible such a system can endure, for the excesses of free discussion, both of tongue and pen, are now so interwoven with the daily existence of Frenchmenthey are so inherent to his nature and habitudes, that he requires them as much as his café au lait, or his potage à la Julienne. For the base and abject homage paid by the servile, the imbecile, the sycophantic, to the false and faithless, I am prepared. The crest of the nation is now humbled.

Cruelty

and oppression excite no indignation -scandalous frauds no contemptgigantic treacheries no distrust. But a day of reckoning must soon come, when crime will be considered not the less crime because of its temporary success-when wickedness will be considered wickedness though united with power; and when the unconquerable will and the immortal hate' of a nation will find language and expression.

Against the people of France, fellow-countrymen, I have breathed not a word contemptuous or disparaging. It is for the people of France-it is on behalf of the edu cation and intellect of France, that I have raised my feeble voice. With France, like the generality of my countrymen, I desire a firm and compact alliance through good report and through evil report. But it is with free and constitutional France, with its Chambers sitting, and its press unrestricted, that I claim my country should be leagued in complete confidence and entire friendliness. If the nation in a moment of blindness, or hallucination, or under the pressure of a hard necessity, elect a stock or a stone, by all means let us acknowledge the symbol; but between acknowledgment and respect, or a cordial intercommunion, there is a wide dif ference. The interests of the English and French people, properly understood, are one and identical, and therefore we ought to make great sacrifices of opinion, of convenience, and even of small interests and petty prejudices, to maintain that alliance; but we are not bound as a nation (though we may, and ought, in any and every event to

fulfil all public obligations towards France) to subserve the personal projects of any man who has exhibited faithlessness and want of principle as elected head or self-imposed Dictator of that nation. What reliance can we place, for instance, on M. Buonaparte's solemn engagements with us, when we see how he has observed his most solemn and sworn engagements with his own country? Under the circumstances of his personal character and his newly acquired power, considering who and what are his public counsellors, and who his private council, advisers, and intimate friends-considering that the one is composed of the De Mornys, the St. Arnauds, and the De Maupas, and the other of Fialon, ex-clerk of a huissier calling himself De Persigny, of Bataille, a civil engineer of Briffault, an architect, and of Mocquard, a disbarred advocate-let us ask ourselves what guarantees have we that M. Buonaparte will not retain and extend by the sword a power which he has acquired by it? Elected for ten years, he will go for uncontrolled dominion, nor suffer on the frontiers of France the free Senate Chamber, press, and voice of Belgium, the free press and Chamber of Piedmont, and the free and neutral territory of Switzerland. England has ever been an inviolate asylum for strangers, for political refugees, for the oppressed of every age, of every nation, and of every clime. England is now within one hour and three-quarters of Calais and Boulogne, and the light of France cannot be extinguished for more than a time inconceivably short, so long as a spark of freedom remains in England. If, therefore, any man looks to uphold absolute power even for a twelvemonth in France, he must look on the corruption or destruction of England as a condition precedent to his success. It must be a necessary preliminary to any such project of devilish darkness and tyranny to deaden or to destroy, to drug into drowsy sleep, or to strike a deadly blow to our dear old country. When schemes of criminal ambition are brewing anywhere, fellow-countrymen, rest assured the day of danger, if not of battle, is approaching for England.