be happy "-is by no means confined to the socialist schemers or the operative classes. It pervades ranks far above them, more especially those members of the bourgeoisie who have entered the liberal professions without any means or qualifications except natural aptitude and intellectual culture; the advocates, surgeons, artists journalists, and men of letters. These are described by one who knows them well as the section of French society whose material condition is the most unsatisfactory and incongruous, while the influence they exert on the fortunes of the country is the most powerful. Their life is a combination of revolting contrasts, a feverish and perpetual struggle. Their cultivated intellect, their excited fancy, raise them every moment to a dazzling height, and show them in dreams all the felicities and grandeurs of the earth; while their waking hours "must stoop to strive with misery at the door," and be passed in conflict with the anxieties and humiliations of actual indigence or uncertain remuneration. They live in daily contact with men, their superiors in power and wealth, their equals or inferiors in character, in talent, or in cultivation; and the comparison disgusts them with inequalities of fortune, and the gradations of the social hierarchy. Their ambition, everywhere excited, and everywhere crushed back, finding in society as constituted, no clear field, no adequate recompense, no prizes satisfying to their wants or glorious enough for their conceptions, sets itself to the task of reconstructing society afresh, after the pattern of their dreams. From this class are furnished the chiefs of the socialist and revolutionary movements;-men whose desires are at war with their destiny; and who in place of chastening and moderating the former, would refashion and reverse the latter. There is yet another class, swayed by loftier motives, but pulling in the same direction. These are perhaps the most formidable of all, because their enthusiasm is of a more unselfish order, and flows from a purer spring. These are men of high powers and a fine order of mind, with little faith, or at most only a mystical and dreamy one, in God or in futurity, but overflowing with generous sympathies and worshipping a high ideal,-shocked and pained with the miseries they see around them, and confident in their capability of cure. They are a sort of political Werthers, profoundly disgusted with the actual condition of the world; the lofty melancholy, inseparable from noble minds, broods darkly over their spirits; an indescribable sadness -- "Deepens the murmur of the falling floods ;"they are disenchanted with life, and hold it cheap, for it realises none of their youthful visions; they deem that this world ought to be a paradise, and believe it might be made such; and, feeling existence to be not worth having, unless the whole face of things can be renewed, and the entire arrangements of society changed, they are prepared to encounter anything, and to inflict anything, for the promotion of such change. Hence obstacles do not deter them—sacri fices do not appal them-personal danger is absolutely beneath their consideration-and both in France and Germany we have seen them mount the barricades and fight in the streets with a contempt of death which was utterly amazing, and seemed to have nothing in common either with the vaunting heroism of the French soldier, or the systematic and stubborn courage of the English, or the hardy indifference of the Russian. France has martyrs still-martyrs as willing and enthusiastic as ever-but their cause is no longer that of old. Instead of martyrs who suffered death for freedom, for country, for religion, for devotion to the moral law, we have men ready to encounter martyrdom for objects scarcely worthy of the sacrifice, for the exigencies of the passions, for the conquest of material felicity, for the realisation of an earthly paradise. The degree to which this universal and insatiable thirst for present and immediate enjoyment, and the schemes, associations, and ambitions to which it gives rise, must complicate the difficulties of any government formed at a time when such desires and such attempts at their realisation are rife, must be obvious at a glance. One special point which even aggravates these difficulties, we shall have to recur to presently. Side by side with the absence of religion in France -partly as a consequence, partly as a co-existing effect of remoter causes, there prevailed a deep-seated torpor and perversion of moral principle. We do not mean that there was not much virtue, much simple honesty, much conscientious adherence to the dictates of the moral sense, still to be found in many classes of the people, among the unsophisticated peasantry of the interior, among the scanty and scattered rural gentry who lived on their estates, and even among the artisan class of the cities. But a profound and mean immorality had spread its poisonous influence deep and wide through nearly all those ranks which, either directly or indirectly, act upon the government, and give the tone to the national character and the direction to the national policy. So obvious was this painful truth, that it escaped neither foreigner nor native;—it led to a general and frequently expressed, though vague expectation, that some great catastrophe must be at hand; it was dimly felt that nearly all those warning signs-those mystic letters on the wall-by which Providence intimates approaching change, were visible on the face of French society; and we well remember that one individual, thoroughly conversant with that society in all its circles, distinctly predicted the revolution of February more than a year before it occurred, not on the ground of any political symptoms or necessities, but solely from the corruption of morals and manners which pervaded the higher and middle classes,—the politicians, the writers, the commercial men, the artists, the circles of fashion-all alike. License in all that concerned the relations between the sexes was no novelty in France-in this respect the profligacy of the Regency and the Directory could not be surpassed, and indeed was not approached. But the high and scrupulous, though sometimes fantastic and inconsistent. sense of honour, which formerly distinguished the French gentleman, seemed to be gone; his regard for truth and even pecuniary integrity was deplorably weakened; the "mire of dirty ways," whether in political life or in speculative business, no longer instinctively revolted his finer susceptibilities;—that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt stain like a wound, which inspired valour, while it mitigated ferocity," had died away under the demoralising influence of the repeated social convulsions of the last sixty years. When religion has become an empty garment, and piety a faded sentiment, and loyalty extinct from want of nourishment, and when strict moral rules have thus lost their fixity and their sanctions, the spirit of a gentleman may for a time, in some measure, supply their place; but if this also has died out, the last barrier to the overflow of the twin vices of licentiousness and barbarity is swept away. The extent to which this spirit was extinguished was not known to the world till the filthy intrigues connected with the Spanish marriages (since so remorselessly laid bare by the publication of Louis Philippe's private letters), and the suicide of the diplomatic tool concerned in them, the Count de Bresson, out of pure disgust at the dirt he had been dragged through,-first exposed a degree of low turpitude, for which even France was scarcely prepared. |