reconciling the Roman Catholic religion with political innovation.

But let it not be imagined that, because the immediate danger is over, and because military power has, after a fierce struggle, prevailed in the principal capitals of Europe, that therefore the ultimate peril is past, and that men have only to sit down, under the shadow of their fig-tree, to cultivate the arts and enjoy the blessings of peace. Such is not the destiny of man in any, least of all in a revolutionary age. We are rather on the verge of an era similar to that deplored by the poet :

"Bella per Emathios plusquam civilia campos,

Jusque datum sceleri canimus, populumque

potentem

In sua victrici conversum viscera dextrâ ;
Cognatasque acies ; et rupto fœdera regni
Certatum totis concussi viribus orbis,
In commune nefas."*

Who can tell the immeasurable extent of misery and wretchedness, of destruction of property among the rich, and ruin of industry among the poor, that must take place before the fierce passions, now so generally awakened, are allayed-before the visions of a virtuous republic by Lamartine, or the dreams of communism by Louis Blanc and LedruRollin, or the insane ideas of the Frankfort enthusiasts have ceased to move mankind? The fire they have let loose will burn fiercely for centuries; it will alter the destiny of nations for ages; it will neither be quenched, like ordinary flames, by water, nor subdued, like the Greek fire, by vinegar blood alone will extinguish its fury. The coming convulsions may well be prefigured from the past, as they have been recently drawn by the hand of a master:-" All around us, the world is convulsed by the agonies of great nations; governments which lately seemed likely to stand during ages, have been on a sudden shaken and overthrown. The proudest capitals of western Europe have streamed with civil blood.

All evil passions-the thirst of gain and the thirst of vengeance-the antipathy of class to class, of race to race-have

* LUCAN, i. 1-6.

broken loose from the control of divine and human laws. Fear and anxiety have clouded the faces, and depressed the hearts of millions; trade has been suspended, and industry paralysed; the rich have become poor, and the poor poorer. Doctrines hostile to all sciences, to all arts, to all industry, to all domestic charity-doctrines which, if carried into effect, would in thirty years undo all that thirty centuries have done for mankind, and would make the fairest provinces of France or Germany as savage as Guiana or Patagonia-have been avowed from the tribune, and defended by the sword. Europe has been threatened with subjugation by barbarians, compared with whom the barbarians who marched under Attila or Alboin were enlightened and humane. The truest friends of the people have with deep sorrow owned, that interests more precious than any political privileges were in jeopardy, and that it might be necessary to sacrifice even liberty to save civilisation."t

It is now just a year since Mr Cobden announced, to an admiring and believing audience at Manchester, that the age of warfare had ceased; that the contests of nations had passed, like the age of the mastodon and the mammoth; that the steamengine had caused the arms to drop from her hands, and the interests of free trade extinguished the rivalries of nations; and that nothing now remained but to sell our ships of war, disband our troops, cut twenty millions off our taxation, and set ourselves unanimously to the great work of cheapening everything, and underselling foreign competitors in the market of the world. Scarcely were the words spoken, when conflicts more dire, battles more bloody, dissensions more inextinguishable than had ever arisen from the rivalry of kings, or the ambition of ministers, broke out in almost every country of Europe. The social supplanted the national passions. Within the bosom of society itself, the volcano had burst forth. It was no longer general that was matched against general, as in the wars of Marlborough, nor

nation that rose up against nation, as in those of Napoleon. The desire of robbery, the love of dominion, the lust of conquest, the passion for plunder, were directed to domestic acquisitions. Human iniquity reappeared in worse, because less suspected and more delusive colours. Robbery assumed the guise of philanthropy; spoliation was attempted, under colour of law; plunder was systematically set about, by means of legislative enactments. Revolution resumed its old policy-that of rousing the passions by the language of virtue, and directing them to the purposes of vice. The original devil was expelled; but straightway he returned with seven other devils, and the last state of the man was worse than the first. Society was armed against itself; the devastating passions burned in its own bosom; class rose against class, race against race, interest against interest. Capital fancied its interest was to be promoted by grinding down labour; labour, that its rights extended to the spoliation of capital. more attractive object than the rednction of a city, or the conquest of a province, was presented to indigent cupidity. Easier conquests than over rival industry were anticipated by moneyed selfishness. The spoliation of the rich at their own door-the division of the property of which they were jealous, became the dream of popular ambition; the beating down of their own labourers by free-trade, the forcible reduction of prices by a contraction of the currency-the great object of the commercial aristocracy. War reassumed its pristine ferocity. In the nineteenth century, the ruthless maxim-Væ victis! became the war-cry on both sides in the terrible civil war which burst forth in an age of general philanthropy. It may be conceived what passions must have been awakened, what terrors inspired, what indignation aroused by such projects. But though we have seen the commencement of the era of social conflicts, is there any man now alive who is likely to see its end?

A

Experience has now completely de

monstrated the wisdom of the Allied powers, who placed the lawful monarchs of France on the throne in 1815, and the enormous error of the liberal party in France, which conspired with the republicans to overthrow the Bourbon dynasty in 1830. That fatal step has bequeathed a host of evils to Europe: it has loosened the authority of government in all countries; it has put the very existence of freedom in peril by the enormity of the calamities which it has brought in its train. All parties in France are now agreed that the period of the Restoration was the happiest, and the least corrupted, that has been known since the first Revolution. The republicans of the present day tell us, with a sigh, that the average budgets of the three last years of Charles X. were 900,000,000 francs, (£36,000,000 ;) that the expenditure was raised by Louis Philippe at once to 1500,000,000 francs, (£60,000,000 ;) and that under the Republic it will exceed 1800,000,000 francs, (£72,000,000.) There can be no doubt of the fact; and there can be as little, that if the Red Republicans had succeeded in the insurrection of June last, the annual expenditure would have increased to £100,000,000-or rather, a universal spoliation of property would have ensued. Louis Blanc has given the world, in his powerful historical work, a graphic picture of the universal corruption, selfishness, and immorality, in public and private life, which pervaded France during the reign of Louis Philippe.* Though drawn by the hand of a partisan, there can be no doubt that the picture is too faithful in most of its details, and exhibits an awful proof of the effects of a successful revolution. But the misery which Louis Blanc has so ably depicted, the corruptions he has brought to light, under the revolutionary monarchy, have b en multiplied fourfold by those which have prevailed during the last year in the republic established by Louis Blanc himself!

Paris, ever since the suppression of the great insurrection in June last, has been in such a state, that it is the most utter mockery to call it freedom.

In truth, it is nothing but the most unmitigated military despotism. A huge statue of liberty is placed in the National Assembly; but at every six paces bayonets are to be seen, to remind the bystanders of the rule of the sword. "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité," meet the eye at every turn in the streets; but the Champs Elysées, the Place de Grève, the Carrousel, and Place Vendôme, are crowded with soldiers; and the Champ de Mars is white with tents, to cover part of the 40,000 regular troops which form the ordinary garrison of Paris. Universal freedom of discussion has been proclaimed by the constitution; but dozens of journals have been suppressed by the authority of the dictator; and imprisonment notoriously hangs over the head of every one who indulges in the freedom of discussion, which in England and America is universal. The state of siege has been raised, after having continued four months; but the military preparations for another siege continue with unabated vigour on both sides. The constitution has been adopted by a great majority in the Assembly; but the forts are all armed, and prepared to rain down the tempest of death on the devoted city. Universal suffrage is established; but menacing crowds are in the streets, threatening any one who votes against their favourite candidates. The Faubourg St Antoine, during the late election, was in a frightful state of agitation; infantry, cavalry, and artillery, were traversing the streets in all directions; and conflicts not less bloody than those of June last were anticipated in the struggle for the presidency, and prevented only by the presence of ninety thousand soldiers in the capital: a force greater than that which fought on either side at Austerlitz or Jena. It is evident that republican institutions, in such a state of society, are a mere name; and that supreme despotic power is really invested in France, as in ancient Rome under the emperors, in the nominee of a victorious body of soldiery. The Prætorian guards will dispose of the French as they did of the Roman diadem; and ere long, gratuities to the troops will perhaps be the passport to power in Paris, as they were in the Eternal City.

Nor have the social evils, which in France have followed in the wake of successful revolution, been less deplorable than the entire destruction of the rights of freemen and security of property which has ensued. To show that this statement is not overcharged, we extract from a noted liberal journal of Paris, La Reforme, of November 17, 1848, the following state

ment:

"Property, manufactures, and commerce are utterly destroyed in Paris. Of the population of that great city, the capital of France, there are 300,000 individuals wanting the necessaries of life. One half at least of those earned from 3f. to 5f. a day previous to the revolution, and occupied a number of houses in the faubourgs. The proprietors of those houses receiving no rent, and having taxes and other charges to pay, are reduced to nearly as deep distress as their tenants. In the centre of Paris, the same distress exists under another form. The large and sumptuous apartments of the fashionable quarters were occupied before the revolution by wealthy proprietors, or by persons holding lucrative employments in the public offices, or by extensive manufacturers; but nearly all those have disappeared, and the few who remain have insisted upon such a reduction of rent that the proprietor does not receive one-half of the amount to which he is entitled. Should a proprietor of house property endeavour to raise a sum of money by a first mortgage, to defray his most urgent expenses, he finds it impossible to do so, even at a most exorbitant rate of interest. Those who possess ready money refuse to part with it, either through fear, or because they expect to purchase house property when it must be sold at 50 per cent less than the value."-La Reforme, November 17, 1848.

It is certainly a most remarkable thing, in the history of the aberrations of the human mind, that a system of policy which has produced, and is producing, such disastrous results-and, above all, which is inflicting such deadly and irreparable wounds on the interests of the poor, and the cause of freedom throughout the world-should have been, during the last eighteen years, the object of unceasing eulogy by the liberal party on both sides of the Channel; and that the present disastrous state of affairs, both in this country and on the Con

tinent, is nothing more than the natural and inevitable result of the principles that party has everywhere laboured to establish. The revolution of 1830 was hailed with enthusiasm in this country by the whole liberal party the Irish are not more enamoured now of the revolution of 1848, than the Whigs were, eighteen years ago, of that of 1830. The liberal government of England did all in their power to spread far and wide the glorious example. Flanders was attacked-an English fleet and French army besieged Antwerp; and, by a coalition of the two powers, a revolutionary throne was established in Belgium, and the king of the Netherlands prevented from re-establishing the kingdom guaranteed to him by all the powers of Europe. The Quadruple Alliance was formed to revolutionise Spain and Portugal; a sanguinary civil war was nourished for long in both kingdoms; and at length, after years of frightful warfare, the legitimate monarch, and legal order of succession, were set aside in both countries; queens were put on the thrones of both instead of kings, and England enjoyed the satisfaction, for the diffusion of her revolutionary propagandism, of destroying the securities provided for the liberties of Europe by the treaty of Utrecht, and preparing a Spanish princess for the hand of a Bourbon prince.

Not content with this memorable and politic step, and even after the recent disasters of France were actually before their eyes, our rulers were so enamoured of revolutions, that they could not refrain from encouraging it in every small state within their reach. Lord Palmerston counseled the Pope, in a too celebrated letter, to plunge into the career which has terminated so fatally for himself and for Italy. Admiral Parker long prevented the Neapolitan force from embarking for Sicily, to do there what Lord Hardinge was nearly at the same time sent to do in Ireland. We beheld the Imperial standards with complacency driven behind the Mincio; but no sooner did Radetzky disperse the revolutionary army, and advance to Milan, than British and French diplomacy interfered to arrest his march, and save their revolutionary protégé,

the King of Piedmont, from the chastisement which his perfidious attack on Austria in the moment of her distress merited. The Ministerial journals are never weary of referring to the revolutions on the Continent as the cause of all the distress which has prevailed in England, since they broke out in last spring: they forget that it was England herself which first unfurled the standard of revolution, and that, if we are suffering under its effects, it is under the effects of our own measures and policy.

Strange and unaccountable as this perverted and diseased state of opinion, in a large part of the people of this country, undoubtedly is, it is easily explained when the state of society, and the channel into which political contests have run, are taken into consideration.

In truth, our present errors are the direct consequence of our former wisdom; our present weakness, of our former strength; our present misery, of our former prosperity.

In the feudal ages, and over the whole Asiatic world at the present time, the contests of parties are carried on for individuals. No change of national policy, or of the system of internal government, is contemplated on either side. It is for one prince or another prince, for one sultaun or another sultaun, that men draw their swords. "Under which King, Bezonian?-speak or die!" is there the watchword of all civil conflict. It was the same in this country during the feudal ages, and down to a very recent period. No man in the civil wars between Stephen and Henry II., or of the Plantagenet princes, or in the wars of the Roses, contemplated or desired any change of government or policy in the conflict in which they were engaged. The one party struck for the Red, the other for the White Rose. Great civil and social interests were at issue in the conflict; but the people cared little or nothing for these. The contest between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians was a great feud between two clans which divided the state; and the attachment to their chiefs was the blind devotion of the Highlanders to the Pretender.

The Reformation, which first brought the dearest objects of thought and interest home to all classes, made

a great change in this respect, and substituted in large proportion general questions for the adherence to particular men, or fidelity to particular families. Still, however, the old and natural instinct of the human race to attach themselves to men, not things, continued, in a great degree, to influence the minds of the people, and as many buckled on their armour for the man as the cause. The old Cavaliers, who periled life and lands in defence of Charles I., were as much influenced by attachment to the dignified monarch, who is immortalised in the canvass of Vandyke, as by the feelings of hereditary loyalty; and the iron bands which overthrew their ranks at Marston Moor, were as devoted to Cromwell as the tenth legion to Cæsar, or the Old Guard to Napoleon. In truth, such individual influences are so strongly founded in human nature, that they will continue to the end of the world, from whatever cause a contest may have arisen, as soon as it has continued for a certain time, and will always stand forth in prominent importance when a social has turned into a military conflict, and the perils and animosities of war have endeared their leaders to the soldiers on either side. The Vendeans soon became devoted to Henri Larochjaquelein, the Republicans to Napoleon; and in our own times, the great social conflict of the nineteenth century has been determined by the fidelity of the Austrian soldiers to Radetzky, of the French to Cavaignac, of the German to Windischgratz.

But in the British empire, for a century past, it has been thoroughly understood, by men of sense of all parties, that a change of dynasty is out of the question, and that there is no reform worth contending for in the state, which is not to be effected by the means which the constitution itself has provided. This conviction, long impressed upon the nation, and interwoven as it were with the very framework of the British mind, having come to coincide with the passions incident to party divisions in a free state, has in process of time produced the strange and tortuous policy which, for above a quarter of a century, has now been followed in this country by the government, and lauded

Or

to the skies by the whole liberal party on the Continent. Deprived of the watchwords of men, the parties have come to assume those of things. ganic or social change have become the war-cry of faction, instead of change of dynasty. The nation is no longer drenched with blood by armies fighting for the Red or the White Rose, by parties striving for the mastery between the Stuart and Hanover families, but it was not less thoroughly divided by the cry of "The bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill," at one time, and that of "Free-trade and cheap corn" at another. Social change, alterations of policy, have thus come to be the great objects which divide the nation; and, as it is ever the policy of Opposition to represent the conduct of Government as erroneous, it follows, as a necessary consequence, that the main efforts of the party opposed to administration always have been, since the suppression of the Rebellion in 1745, to effect, when in opposition, a change in general opinion, and, when in power, to carry that change into effect by a change of policy. The old law of nature is still in operation. Action and reaction rule mankind; and in the efforts of parties mutually to supplant each other in power, a foundation is laid for an entire change of policy at stated periods, and an alteration, as great as from night to day, in the opinions and policy of the ruling party in the same state at different times.

The old policy of England-that policy under which, in the words of Macaulay, "The authority of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never known before; under which form, the auspicious union of order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example; under which our country, from a state of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European powers; under which her opulence and martial glory grew together; under which, by wise and resolute good faith, was gradually established a public credit, fruitful of marvels which, to the statesmen of any former age, would have appeared incredible; under which a gigantic