that attack upon the press by which he forfeited his throne. The active intellects of the French nation, in immense preponderance—it is most deplorable that it should be so, but it is so-regard Christianity as a deception and a chimera; and their religious teachers must resemble the archbishop of Paris much more, and the bishop of Chartres much less than the great body of them do at present, before this sad error can be rectified. And so long as this is the case, any truckling to the priests, any favouritism towards them, any signs of an intention to re-impose upon the nation a system which its intellectual leaders believe to be a sham, will be resented as an insult. Christianity itself is a glorious truth as well as a great fact; but to the educated portion of the nation the substitution of priestly despotism in its place represents the system which Rousseau discredited, which D'Alembert, Helvetius, and Condorcet, and all the great literary names connected with the social and political changes of the 18th century, won their fame by contending with and overthrowing. The French may endure the restoration of the imperial despotism-never that of priestly sway. They may again come under the dominion of the Bastile-never under that of the Inquisition. Napoleon could scarcely commit a blunder which will more surely and more righteously combine against him all that is virulent and all that is selfish, all that is noble and all that is vicious, all that loves freedom and all that loves fame, all that loves truth and all that loves power, in the intellectual and social world of

Louis

France, than by holding out a hand of favour and alliance to the Jésuits. The army will despise him for it. The salons will ridicule and sneer at him for it. The press will hate him for it almost to a man. The stern Puritan Guizot, the unprincipled and brilliant Thiers, the learned, eloquent, and democratic historian Michelet, the richly gifted and artist-minded George Sand, the dignified and honoured philosopher Victor Cousin, even the disgracefully-popular ransacker of moral cesspools and obscene cloaca, Eugene Sue,— men who could join in nothing else, who have scarcely one other sentiment in common, would all unite in one wild cry of mingled scorn, indignation, and disgust at the ruler who could dream of replacing France under the broken crozier and the stained and tattered surplice of the priest.

Nor could the support of the clergy, thus dearly purchased as it must be, ever be relied on by Louis Napoleon. He can scarcely be weak enough to imagine that an organised hierarchy, whose head and centre is in Rome, can ever give faithful or cordial adherence to a man who has risen on the ruin and succeeded to the inheritance of anointed kings. He cannot believe that the servants of a Church whose first dogma, and whose pervading idea, is the supremacy of divine right, can in their hearts espouse a cause based on military usurpation, and sanctioned by an appeal to universal suffrage. He cannot flatter himself that the alliance between the child of popular sovereignty and the proclaimers of royal sacredness and inviolability, can

ever be more than a treacherous and hollow truce. He must know that, by the necessity of the case, the Catholic clergy—such of them at least as receive their impulse from Rome—are secret and zealous Legitimists; that they regard him only as a warmingpan; and that they propose to use him as the restorer of an edifice which, when ready, the old and rightful heirs are to inhabit,-as the instrument for the recovery of a patrimony which, as soon as it is secured against the common enemy, they intend to transfer to the legal owner. Knowing all this, we can scarcely suppose, however Louis Napoleon may coquet with the Jesuits for a temporary purpose, that he will commit the enormous blunder of calling them into his councils, or sharing with them his power.

We have said that we are not sanguine as to Louis Napoleon's success in the position which he has so violently and unwarrantably seized. The chapter of accidents is always too rich in France to induce us to venture on a prophecy. Our object in this Paper has been to trace the causes which have led to the catastrophe; to explain the reasons why we think the French nation may have been altogether on a wrong tack in their endeavour to naturalise a parliamentary government, to call attention to the irreconcilability of such government with the centralised and bureaucratic administration which is apparently so popular, and is certainly so fixed; and to show how the powers which are held by the President, may be wielded for the benefit of his country, if he be really

animated by a patriotic spirit, and gifted with adequate capacities.

Since this article was in type, the President has published his constitution and fulminated his decrees of banishment. The first we have no time nor space to criticise the latter we cannot pass over without the expression of our conviction that they are a great blunder, as well as a great crime. Such indiscriminate and illegal severity has alarmed and staggered his supporters, and enraged more than it has terrified his enemies. It is an indication and confession of weakness,--a wanton trampling upon legal forms, a menacing inauguration of a reign of terror. Already the murmurs of the Parisian salons have warned him of his mistake and his danger. Confiscation has now followed proscription, and the whole arsenal of tyranny seems to be opened.

III.

ENGLAND AS IT IS.1

THIS book is a somewhat undigested mass of valuable matter, interspersed occasionally with reflections of much interest, and observations of considerable originality. The author is unquestionably a man of talent ; he writes with vigour and smartness; he has taken pains in the collection of most of his materials; and his statistics are arranged with great care and managed with unusual skill. In this point he is much superior to his prototype and apparent master, Mr Alison. But his range of topics is too wide to allow of his doing justice to any one of them, and his book is disfigured with an unwieldy series of quotations from blue books, newspapers, and reviews; from publications that never had authority, and publications that have long been superseded. An enumeration of the heads of some of his chapters, will give an idea of the extent of ground which he careers over:-" Population;" "Occupations of the People;" "Taxation, Revenue, Expenditure;"

1 From the "Edinburgh Review," April 1851.

England as it is; Political, Social, and Industrial, in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century. By WILLIAM JOHNSTON, Barrister-atLaw. London: 1851.