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d'hommes possedent aujourd'hui les terres en France! Rendez en graces au ciel, dont la sagesse assure ainsi le repos des temps qui dorment encore dans les saintes obscurités de ses décrets. N'allez pas hâter les jours de la dissolution des empires par la puissance de quelques-uns, et le dénuement hideux du plus grand nombre. Voyez la lepre de la Grande-Bretagne-jetez les yeux sur ses deux millions de mendians, et aimez votre pays, tel qu'une puissance préservatrice la fait. Gémissez, si vous le voulez encore, sur les malheurs de notre révolution; mais au moins recueillez en le fruit. N'a-t-il pas été assez chèrement payé pour ne pas le fouler aux pieds? La coupe du bonheur et de la joie, après bien des peines, est presentée à beaucoup; il n'y a qu'une main méchante qui puisse repousser le vase et renverser la liqueur.

We shall certainly not undertake the defence of our poorlaws; they are the result of a humane but mistaken policy, grown into an intolerable abuse. Yet we must be permitted to observe, that there have been laws for the compulsory relief of the poor in all countries; and we find them at this moment in full operation in Switzerland. At Paris, however, the evil seems at its height; public documents show, that there are in that city considerably more than one hundred thousand individuals, or more than one-seventh of the whole population, who receive support from public charity; and it is, if possible, a still more appalling fact, that one-third of the inhabitants of that splendid and luxurious metropolis, dies in its hospitals. * The number of common beggars about the streets of Paris, and on the high roads of France, is beyond all comparison greater than with us.

Our elections, it is said, are corrupt.-It would be nearer the

352,913 dead 47,861

*The Rapport au Conseil General des Hospices, &c. &c. states the number of sick admitted into the different hospitals of Paris, in 10 years, from 1804 to 1814, to have been Those admitted into the different hospices during the same period

50,464 dead 12,577

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Another official rapport for the two last years, shows a great increase. 42,442 individuals have been admitted in the different hospitals and hospices of the capital in the year 1818. 7043 have died; and the total number of deaths at Paris has been 22,382. In 1819, 7,310 have died in the hospitals and hospices, out of a total number of deaths at Paris of 22,137.

The number of individuals more or less assisted at public expense at Paris, has been for the first period of 10 years, 104,000 annually; in 1818, the number was 108,742, including 17,217 foundlings.

truth to call them inconsistent, irregular and strange; and we are very far from saying that the system does not require improvement: yet when foreigners, who profess liberal opinions in politics, see such members as Mr Tierney, Mr Brougham, and Sir James Mackintosh, returned for boroughs in the immediate dependence of the high aristocracy, they might pause before they ventured to pass an indiscriminate censure upon anomalies that frequently lead to such results. Their own mode of elections has certainly not the rust of antiquity to plead in extenuation of any of its defects; yet we are told that Corsica, with less than forty electors, sends two members to the Chamber of Deputies, while Paris, with nine thousand electors, sends only eight; that the Department of the Basses Pyrenées, with less than four hundred electors, sends three members, while the Tarn, with more than 1200 electors, sends only two; and many other strange, but harmless irregularities, in the application of the law.

As to our mobs and riots, again, it is obvious to remark, that a people constantly agitated by the publication of all sorts of opinions, and among whom every demagogue is at liberty to fling his firebrand-a people fully aware of its own importance, naturally impatient of any superior, and laudably jealous of power-may run into excesses of which the ready slaves of any tyrant who shows them the point of a bayonet can have no notion. Artificers, too, long accustomed to a plentiful and luxurious mode of living, may become unruly and factious, when the sources of their enjoyments happen to be momentarily dried up, by events out of the power of man to control. If the latter had never known the indulgences of wealth, and the former never felt the pride of independence, they would bear their evils in silence, like the poor and the oppressed of other countries. Foreigners are apt to be misled by what they read in our newspapers, or hear from our own travellers. Complaints against the Government, and dismal forebodings about the loss of liberty, are nowhere so frequent and so loud as in those countries where there is on the whole the least reason for such appre→ hensions.

One half of the population of France are proprietors of the soil, while little more than one sixth of ours are so. We have already admitted this superiority of our neighbours over us, and wish the salutary measure of the restoration of cottages and garden ground, which have alınost disappeared, may be extensively adopted by our great landed proprietors, in order that the situation of their labourers may be assimilated to that of the French peasantry, as far as is desirable. It is, however, well worth observing, and every impartial observer acquainted with C

VOL. XXXIV. NO. 67.

the two countries will admit, that the respective dwellings of our agricultural labourers, and the French proprietors, form a striking contrast, in point of neatness and comfort, wholly in favour of the former. The difference, however, is easily explained: nearly the whole time of the English labourer's wife is dedicated to domestic employments; while the wife of the French proprietor labours with him in the fields: the latter, in looks and manners, might be taken for the servant of the former. The fact is, that the far greatest number of the French proprietors are not much better off than our labourer, the salutary feeling of property excepted. The further subdivision of that property, already so divided, threatens the most serious consequences; such as the total want of capital for any improvement-the total want of resources in years of scarcity-the difficulty of finding individuals with sufficient leisure, and in circumstances sufficiently independent, to accept offices of public trust without emolument, or for whom the emolument would not become the first and only object. The class of landed proprietors, thus lowered, will become more and more subordinate to the trading and manufacturing class, which will be at no very distant period the only governing class in France.

The general application of the principle of the division of labour, and the rapid improvements of machines, may have multiplied the produce of our industry faster than the reduced markets of the world required, and encouraged our manufac turing population beyond the safe and permanent means of subsistence. The system of large farms, preferable undoubtedly on the score of net proceeds, may also have repressed our rural population too suddenly; but the same spirit which led to the excessive application of wholesome principles, will infallibly correct the abuse of them. We think ourselves warranted in saying, that most of the abuses and troublesome results of our institutions, may be traced directly to some principle of exuberant vigour shooting beyond the mark; they are the price we pay for overbalancing advantages-the wrong side of a good government; and the reasoning of those who condemn them on that account, would prove, if admitted, that a bad government is the best!

The Constituent Assembly wanted to give France a monarchy without intermediate powers-a Royal democracy-the very name implying a false conception of the thing. A republic followed of course; and what republic, every body knows! The same idea is still afloat in the same heads in France. Those among them who tolerate a constitutional aristocracy, maintain that the Chamber of Peers is that aristocracy. These Peers have been

chosen at different times on the spur of the occasion, for the sake of their individual votes in the Chamber-some from the old nobility, some from the new ;-the poorest for life onlythe richest (those who can secure ten thousand francs a year, by a settlement on real estate, or in the funds, to their posterity) for ever. Those who were Senators under Bonaparte, retain their salary of 24,000 franks a year (1000l. Sterling); the others have had smaller pensions assigned to them, more or less as pleased the King. Most of them live obscurely at Paris; very few are known out of that capital, or have any interest or influence in the country; and we are persuaded that the constitutional fine cloak, hat and plume, à la Henri IV., might be shifted to the heads and shoulders of any other set of worthy old gentlemen, without the nation finding out that the actors in this dramatic representation of an aristocracy had been changed. The peerage has been defined the legal and privileged representation of the natural aristocracy of the country without pri vileges; but if the latter do not exist in the country, the peerage represents nothing. Aristocrats without an aristocracy, the peers of France are a mere fiction of the law.

The natural aristocracy of a country cannot be created by laws; for confidence is not a legal privilege, but must be won fairly from the good will of those who have it to grant. Individuals in affluent circumstances, residing habitually on their estates in the country, and devoting their time without remuneration to the service of their fellow-citizens, in the municipal and provincial administration-on juries-as justices of the peace-supplying the poor with work, and the rich with amusement affording advice and protection to all in inferior condition-liberal in their private transactions with their neighbours-able and willing to defend the rights of the people on all occasions; those, and those only, are the natural aristocracy of a free country: And their claims as candidates for the popular branch of the Legislature, are not weaker, in a political point of view, for being founded principally on mere personal gratitude: For, of all the motives by which votes can be determined in any country, this is perhaps, on the whole, the least exceptionable, and the most beneficial in its consequences. Such an aristocracy, far from alarming the pride of the people, affords it a continual gratification. It is not obnoxious, for it does not govern. Continually recruited from the people, by the accession of the great and the good, or at least of the skilful and fortunate, this popular aristocracy is indebted, for its weight with the Crown, to its influence over the people, and, for its influence over the people, to a friendly in

tercourse with them. Instead of rebuilding it thus from the foundation, the friends of an aristocracy, in France, begin from the third storey :-no wonder if it should not stand.

A judicious organization of municipal and departmental administration, would tend to establish, in the great mass of the people of France, hitherto so loose and unconnected, that mutual correspondence of parts, and aggregation of interests, which can alone give solidity and duration to liberal institutions. -People who are not trusted with the administration of the internal affairs of their own village, and are under perpetual guardianship for their most trifling concerns, can scarcely be deemed competent to choose the deputies who are to legislate for the whole nation.

When the feudal nobility ceased to be an object of dread under Louis XIV., the commons began to excite some jealousy, and the doctrines of the Reformation, which subjected church authority to popular scrutiny, served as a warning to political rulers. The institution of intendans of provinces, or rather the extension of their powers, by which that of corporations and municipal administrators was abridged, preceded, by two years, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But the municipal offices of maires, conseillers, echevins, capitouls, &c. &c., did not cease to be elective by the communes till 1771, when government suddenly assumed the right of disposing of them for money, unless where the towns or communes redeemed their right by pur chase. Things remained in that situation-till the Revolution, suppressing all existing institutions, substituted to these venal officers new ones elected by every man paying taxes to the amount of three days' labour. The municipality of Paris, elected in this manner, and composed of 147 members, presided by the Mayor, was destined to act a notorious part in the worst times of the Revolution: But the Convention, dreading even the aristocracy of the democracy, soon deprived the municipal magistrates in the provinces of the local administration. It was afterwards restored to them for a while, to disappear again before the system of universal centralization established by Bonaparte -in whose time it remained a dead letter in the code, explained away, as all his laws were, by the supposed interests of his despotism. The smallest want of the smallest commune was referred to the central power.-The repairs of a bridge, for example, across a brook in a remote village, required the following preliminary steps. 1. There was a petition to the mayor; 2. The mayor applied to the sub-prefet; 3. He obtained of the prefet permission for the municipal council to assemble; 4. The municipal council being assembled, appointed commissaries, (ex

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