ERRORS OF THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT. A couple of thousand years hence some learned commentator upon the French Revolution will explain that the Government was called Provisional, as to provision-all was its first vocation. Undeniably many of the measures of the Provisional Government have borne too close a resemblance to the political economy of Jack Cade; but we are disposed to make great allowance for the purchase of the restoration of order even at the price of sound principles. De Retz remarks that there are conjunctures in which the only choice is one of faults, and on the overthrow of the monarchy the leaders of the Revolution probably felt that to calm the people, and to get them again under the hold of authority, was worth a train of future embarrassments. For the tranquillity they so procured, they will have to pay heavy interest; but protracted anarchy might have been far dearer. It were a puerile pedantry to be severely critical upon economic errors in the wreck of a state (however pregnant with evil those errors may be), supposing the option to have been between them and the incomparably mightier mischief of a state of anarchy. The excuses for appeasing expedients do not, however, extend to violation of faith. "Be just before you're generous," says the maxim; and the Republican Government should at least have taken care of justice after generosity, which it has not done in the case of the savings banks deposits, the holders of which had a claim to their own, prior to that of the borrowers of small loans to the redemption of pledges at the expense of the community. The financial difficulties bequeathed by the late profligate Government to the Republic are enormous, it is true; but incomparably of more moment should have been considered any deviation from strict faith, which begets the most fatal of all difficulties in finance, and the most cruel, as well as the most dangerous of robberies, is that of robbing the poor's-box. | voir you may draw water from the pipes, or you may knock a hole in the bottom and let it pour through; but if you do the latter you must not be surprised to find that the supply fails in the regular channels. The essay is but another version of the goose and the golden eggs. It is a hard necessity of the social fabric that it must have a foundation, and that the foundation must bear the main weight of the burden. Revolution cannot produce a system like that of our globe, having no fixed upward and downward parts, but all turning on a centre. The quadrature of the circle is an easy problem compared with rounding the social system. The financial errors of the Provisional Government have, however, startled us much less than some others; first, a declaration that, as the Revolution was the work of the laboring classes, it should be shaped for their benefit, an avowal of injustice to the rest of the community, and sinning against the declared rule of equality; secondly, the circular of M. Ledru Rollin, advising the Provincial Commissioners that their powers are unlimited, absolved from all responsibility except to conscience, and should be exercised so as to control the elections; thirdly, the manifesto of the Minister of Instruction, in which the heads of academies are directed: "The great error against which the inhabitants of our agricultural districts must be guarded is this, that in order to be a representative it is necessary either to enjoy the advantages of education or the gifts of fortune. As far as education is concerned, it is clear that an honest peasant, possessed of good sense and experience, will represent the interests of his class in the assembly of the nation infinitely better than a rich and educated citizen having no experience of rural life, or blinded by interests at variance with those of the bulk of the peasantry. As to fortune, the remuneration (indemnité) which will be assigned to all the members of the Assembly will suffice for the maintenance of the very poorest." The faults we have witnessed, excepting the last, must work out their correction in practice. The problem to be solved is to make the pressure And yet in the very same document we find it on the stones at the bottom of the social fabric no declared that the conflict which lies before France heavier than the pressure on those of the top. is not now, as in '93, with the Foreign invader. It is as if legislation were to annul the principle but with Ignorance- and Ignorance, according of gravitation. Half-industry is to be put on full to M. Carnot, is to be combated by representapay. Capital is to be content to dispense with tives without the advantages of education! As profits. The experiment will end in the discov- for the peasantry, so much relied on by the Minery that "you cannot have your cake and eatisters, they may possess honesty, and experience, your cake." Industry cannot prey on capital too, of a limited kind, like that of a horse in a and have capital to support it. With a reser-mill, but a more backward, and benighted, and bigoted class of men does not exist on the face of the earth; they are the mere creatures of routine and custom; and faulty as our peasantry and small farmers are, they are civilized, enlightened, enterprising, and skilled, compared with their brethren in France. But M. Carnot's lessons are strangely inconsistent. In one breath he pronounces education unnecessary; in the next he declares that upon public instruction devolves the task of protecting the nation against the domestic ignorance which is its only foe. He then proclaims that France wants new men, as the implements must change with the work in hand; and to wind up, he invites the instructional authorities to present them selves as the new men, and to come forth as candidates, albeit they must be presumed to have for their recommendation that very education which we have seen so deprecated as a qualification. The postulate that France wants new men, as the implements must change with the work in hand, seems to us to proceed upon a false analogy of a very puerile kind. "Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat." M. Carnot's colleague, M. Lamartine, has, in his eloquent history of the Girondins, noted the great error of throwing the revolution into the What would be thought of the argument that a ship, because she is new, and about to put to sea in a storm, should be manned by a new, untried, and inexperienced crew? What France wants is not men who are new to public affairs and public business, but men versed in public affairs and public business, who have the faculty of adaptation to new circumstances, and who, frankly accepting the Revolution for better for worse, will apply themselves strenuously to make the best of the form of government adopted, according to its genius, not attempting to hamper it with what belongs to monarchy on the one hand, nor, on the other, suffering the highest power to fall to the hands of the lowest station and intelligence. As Bayle says, in homely illustration, Make your choice of a round or square table, according to your uses; but if your option be the round, do not require of it the properties peculiar to the square. The people who have preferred the Republic want representatives of the experience which can distinguish between the wreck of the government cast away, and the essentials of any and every form of government whatever. The arduous task is not for men new to affairs, but for trained minds applicable to new affairs. There is no work that calls for more experience than innovation; the great desideratum is to hold the requisite experience hands of new men in '91. clear of any prejudice for a past arrangement of things, in contriving the new. But M. Lamartine, in his " History of the Girondins," has so well exposed the very faults which his colleagues are now repeating, that the best comment is that to be found in his own eloquent words. He says of the Legislative Assembly of '91, composed mainly of youth, “The Government fell from high into the hands of the inexperience or the passions of a new people. From its first sitting was felt the shock, the disordered oscillations of a power without traditions, and without counterpoise, which seeks steadiness in its own wisdom, and, vibrating from outrage to repentance, wounds itself with the weapon placed in its hand." The cause of the youthful inexperienced composition was the previous Constituent Assembly's impolitic self-disqualification in an enactment rendering its members ineligible. M. Lamartine remarks upon this most forcibly; and the reflections equally apply to the present project of giving power to youth and inexperience, and even to utter ignorance: "This act of renouncement, which resembled the heroism of disinterestedness, was in reality the sacrifice of the country-it was the ostracism of the superiorities, and the assured triumph of mediocrity. A nation, however rich it may be in genius and virtue, possesses no unlimited number of great citizens. Nature is avaricious of superiorities. The social conditions necessary to form a public man rarely meet. Intelligence, enlightenment, virtue, character, independence, leisure, fortune, acquired consideration, and devotion, all these are seldom united in one person. A whole community cannot be decapitated with impunity. Nations are like their soils, - after having turned over the vegetable earth, there is found the gravel; and it is sterile." 66 And what was the working of the assembly so composed of youth and inexperience, of the best of whom the best that could be said, was, that they knew how to speak and how to die, but not how to guide and act? Let us again hear their historian: Faithless to the constitution, refusing its support to the monarchy, timid in the face of the republic, it had neither plan, nor policy, nor daring. It gave all parties the right to despise it. Ella tira le gouvernement au sort, et jeta la France au hasard.” M. Lamartine has set the beacons of his brilliant intelligence upon all the faults of the revolution, to which there is a propensity to return, if not an actual return, under his administration. Upon the interference with work, wages, and prices, he observes that, "It is to seize upon all the liberties of the transactions of commerce, of enterprise, and of labor, which exist only upon liberty. It is to put the hand of the State between all the buyers and all the sellers, all the work-people and all the proprietors of the Republic. Such a law can bring about nothing but the disappearance of capital, the cessation of industry, the languor of all the circulation, the ruin of all. It is the nature of things that makes the price of all commodities of the first necessity, not the law. To order a laborer to give his corn, or a baker to give his bread below the price that those commodities cost, is to order the one no more to sow, the other no more to knead." Admirably observes the Constitutionel upon the subject of M. Ledru Rollin's circular : "To declare that the commissaries of the government have unlimited powers, that they are invested with the sovereignty of the people, that and that they subordinate all to what is called they have no other judge but their conscience, public safety; to exclude from the elections those men who were not republicans before February 22; that is to say, the immense majority of the nation; to consider the elections not as the free and city work of the nation, but as the work of the prefects; to endeavour to place the it not doing with more violence, and on a larger country under the empire of universal terror; is scale, what was so often and so energetically blamed in the former government? If the education of the nation is not complete, as it is pretended, why have universal suffrage? If the nation is not endowed with common-sense, and with the intelligence necessary to choose for her As for M. Ledru Rollin's circular respecting the elections, no Bourbon ever issued a more despotic mandate. If such a decree could have been allowed effect, the ceremonies of election would have been sheer mockery, for the nation was to be permitted to exercise no opinion but the one in favor of the Republic entertained by the Minister of the Interior. What would have been thought of a monarch's proclamation, set-self, without being guided by the inspirations of ting forth that his appointed commissioners had unbounded power to dispose of all functionaries adverse to the Court views for an approaching election? It is the part of the Provisional Government to take the suffrages of the country as to the form of government, and not in any way or degree to bias the choice. The Republic, as it ad interim exists, is a bold hypothesis. It is for the nation to establish it or not, according to its free judgment. The insolent attempt tyrannically to bear down opposition, and to coerce opinion, has encountered a speedy and spirited opposition, which has compelled the government to disavow the part of its colleague; and upon this occasion again we are tempted to draw upon M. Lamartine's brilliant stores of reflection : "There is for the people, as for individuals, an instinct of preservation which warns and checks them, under the empire even of passions the most rash, on the brink of the dangers into which they are about to precipitate themselves. They seem to draw back at the sight of the abyss whither they were rushing. These intermittent stages of the human passions are short and fugitive, but they give the time for events, for returns to wisdom, and for the opportunities of statesmen. They are the moments which they watch to seize the hesitating spirits, and to bring them back by the rebounds of the passions which had carried them to excess." The historian proceeds to say that on the 25th June, '91, France had one of those fits of penitence which save a people-il ne lui manqua qu'un homme d'état. Sincerely do we trust that the statesman will not be wanting in the crisis of the revolt of intelligence and order against the establishment of a Jacquerie. fear, why then have called upon her to pronounce upon her own future? The republican form of government presupposes the political intelligence of the nation; the former government declared that the country was not sufficiently enlightened to be endowed with larger reforms; sufficiently enlightened to be put into possession the new government declares the country to be of the rights of universal voting; liberty the most complete is the natural consequence of the latter opinion, as corruption was the of the former. consequence "We would still hope that the circular of M. Ledru Rollin has been ill comprehended. Ledru Rollin; but we have always considered "We have often differed in opinion with M. him to be a liberal. He most certainly has not wished to place under the dictatorial authority of the commissaries, his agents, the army, the tribunals, even the immovable magistracy, the direction of the elections, to usurp at once the power of his colleagues of the Provisional Government, and the sovereignty of the nation. He has not wished to say, the State is myself!' Every one in France at the present moment enumerates his rights, and wishes to preserve them. We are not placed, thank God, in the alternative between anarchy or the dictatorship, in all the energy of the word. Between these two we have the republic and liberty. France will keep to them.". Examiner. LAMARTINE. or his agents assuming unlimited and revolutionary authority, and turning every mairie and every department upside down. The crime lay in his saying that this should be done, and that his agents had a right to do it. The French are a people of singular suscepti- | There was no voice raised against the Minister bilities, and attach, in too many instances, much more importance to the form than to the reality. The citizens of Paris held aloof, a fortnight back, and allowed the populace to overthrow not only a monarchy erected by the citizens, but also to install in its place a government consisting either of operatives, or of persons directly representing them. The bourgeoisie looked quietly on, whilst the class below them broke into the hall of the legislature, and shattered, along with the throne, all the institutions founded in 1815 and 1830. This French worship of phrase and respect of form, is the great secret of the immense popularity of Lamartine. Not even in Mirabeau were democratic sentiments and spirit concentrated in so gentlemanly a form. In Lamartine all the ideas of the very latest popular philosophy are to be found, expressed with the oldest traditional courtesy. His manifestos and addresses never offend the tasteful, or alarm the timid. In Lamartine the middle class put faith. And yet there is not one who has a more thorough contempt for the bourgeoisie as a ruling class than he. He expresses this sentiment over and over again in his "Girondins;" in which both Mirabeau and Robespierre, the representatives of the noblesse and people, find more favor in his eyes than Lafayette, the hero of the bour Strange to say, the very lowest classes, the armed bands, show more respect for Lamartine than for his colleagues. When they crowded into the Hôtel de Ville on the first day's sitting of the Provisional Government, they listened to his voice when they disregarded the injunctions of their own nominees. And this forms one of the great sources of hope at present. The good citizens said nothing. Nor did they say any thing when the entire class of functionaries was changed, nor when the banks were stopped and credit suspended, nor when wealthy foreigners were driven from the capital, nor when universal suffrage was promulgated. None of these things stirred the citizens of Paris. But when the Provisional Government risked the further bold step of interfering with the shakos and pompons of the uniform of the National Guard when it decreed in the spirit of repub-geoisie. lican levelling, that the grenadier's cap offended against the great law of equality; and when they threatened to deprive the tall citizen, not of his head, but of his head-dress, then the Parisian rebelled. The National Guard got up, first a club, and then an émeute. All National Guards of grenadier or light companies gave each other rendezvous before the Hotel de Ville, and resolved to take it and the Provisional Government by storm. The popular bands of Ledru Rollin were, however, ready, and refused passage to the National Guard. The consequence was a fearful scene in the interior of the seat of magistracy, the Moderates reproaching Ledru Rollin, and demanding his resignation, he declining to take any such step, but making a move to appeal from the window to the people. Mutual threats and recriminations took place, pistols were presented. But the honest men and the rogues have agreed on peace for the moment, Ledru Rollin insisting on the abrogation of the grenadier bonnet-à-poil. In short, it is to be feared that the representative of the mob had the best of the conflict. It is ludicrous that so serious a scene should have arisen out of such a trifle as the prohibition of grenadiers' caps. The remonstrances against Ledru Rollin's famous circular are of the same nature. The gross oppression inculcated in it, if not so distinctly expressed, might have been tolerated. It is evident that the general taste repudiates any return even to the forms of the old Republic. The attempt to replace Monsieur by Citoyen has utterly failed. Since that, the decree abolishing titles of honor has failed also. Aristocracy and its modes all ran away in affright in 1793, or were trodden into republican mud beneath the scaffold. But gentlemanly feelings and habits are now those not of a class, but of almost a whole people, and the whole people refuse to abandon them. M. Dupont de l'Eure may preside over the palace of the Luxembourg, and install the operatives in the Peers' seats; but not a soul comes to pay court to old Dupont. The temple of the Republican Juggernaut has not a votary, whilst that of fashionable Republicanism in Lamartine's residence is thronged. And were he to give a fête, all Paris would rush to it, and worship in its brilliancy another of the meilleur des Républiques. — Examiner. LETTER FROM PARIS. trustful, a sullen look,- half-contemptuous and half-defying. With a sneer at the corners of his mouth, and his hands in his pockets (empty,hungry monitors!) - the shopkeeper looked at the living triumph of the Republic as it stalked past his door, looked cold and unrejoicing. For some days past, it has been generally be- | a sense of recent conquest; on the other a dislieved that the elections would be postponed. The Provisional Government, however, remains firm to its purpose, unshaken by remonstrance; and remonstrances have certainly a dangerous significance when tendered by nearly two hundred thousand men. Lamartine, however, was equal to the occasion; and soothed and swayed the human mass wedged about the Hotel de Ville, as it were an individual man. In the solemn history of human nature, never were human words of more awful import than those of the minister on Friday last. A single syllable falling on the combustible materials about him, and Paris might have been a city of desolation. Lamartine felt the terror of the moment, and turned it into triumph by the sweetness of self-possession, and the witchery of eloquence. He "sprinkled cool patience" on the fermenting multitude; and made the gathering of defiance a meeting of holiday. It was more than suspected by the laboring classes that the bourgeoisie was playing fast-andloose with the Republic. The National Guards, striking for the preservation of some trumpery top-knot distinction, abolished by the government - gathered about, or rather menaced the ministers. Peaceable men as they were, they had on the Thursday come without their arms. They carried their belts only -- pacific pipe-clay! The next day, however, they threatened to return with cold iron and the ready arguments lodging in a cartridge-box. The next day! The threat sped through the city-carried from club to club, like news of warfare borne by Indian - and the next morning, two hundred thousand men rose-silently, like clouds of dew from the earth to meet the promised visitors. It was hard odds; and the bourgeoisie retired to the shop, or to dominos at the café. runners, As the never-ending line of workmen wound through the streets, it was most instructive to observe their comportment contrasted by the bearing of the shopkeepers. The procession had returned from the Hotel de Ville, soothed and made hopeful by the eloquence of Lamartine; and in good time he had spoken, for there was mischief in the multitude, quickened in their first belief of coldness and procrastination on the part of the Government. The workmen were in excellent humor; yet now and then they and the shopkeepers would "whet their eyes" upon one another. There was on one side an occasional glance of self-assured strength, The procession, by the way, was further dignified by the presence of a neophyte priesthood. The Irish College had, on that day, assembled to address the Government. And it has been given as their apology the students had become accidentally mixed with the workmen. Truly, they bore the mishap with Christian sweetness. For arm-in-arm with blouses, they walked along, with a lightness of step and a brightness of eye, ― very creditable to the courage of men in difficulties. Who, now, shall say that in this procession was not hatched the future spirit that shall coo, another Dove of Ardagh — that from this "accidental" meeting was not whelped another tawny lion of the fold of Judah? The determination of the Government to proceed to the elections on the day originally appointed seems to have produced a greater degree of public calm since Friday last. M. LedruRollin has eaten somewhat of his leek; and though he takes to his individual triumph the great demonstration of Friday last though he well knows that he has arrayed, pacifically arrayed the masses devoted to the Republic against the bourgeoisie, who in the bigotry of the counter, are still fain to associate paramount royalty with successful shopkeeping, — LedruRollin is, nevertheless, rebuked for his nascent despotism, by the common-sense and common patriotism of the country. It is true, he began his address as Acres would begin his letter, "with a damme." But, then, with later policy, he has sharpened his penknife and scratched it out." Nor do the people respond to the grave mistake of M. Carnot - the first error, as LedruRollin's was the second, of the Government, that ignorance sits as well upon a law-maker as the most perfect education. It is not only necessary that a man should be knowing in soils and grasses; wise in the breed of sheep and crossing of cattle, to construct the polity of a nation. Arcadia is not necessarily the best region for the growth of legislators. M. Carnot made a mistake: but the error has not deceived the people. The Minister took off his bonnet to popular ignorance; but the erroneous rever |