something of all, that he is disliked by all. The Legitimist cannot love or trust the son of a regicide; the Napoleonist the denouncer of their idol, and the detector of their projects; the Socialist the heel which crushed and crushes them still. The coterie has no hope of seducing, nor the club of intimidating. His very friends are without a faith; and where there is no faith there will be no works. France is not the country to be governed by negations. A man must be positive, a party, a working as well as a thinking reality, to be at all. Then Cavaignac stood alone; he knew not how to multiply himself in his ministers. They were not the emanations either of his intelligence or will; they had not even the merit of being good instruments. The general dearth of organizing and administrative power in all walks of the Revolution has been remarked. The moved depths have thrown up crude theories, fierce wishes, wild hopes, phantasms of all forms and hues; but little knowledge, less experience, few really state-creating or stateguiding men. His approximation to the Red Republic was mere seeming. Nothing could be found there. He had then to draw upon the past, the exploded, and, by the very necessities of the Republic, not through predilections of his own-was compelled to reactionise. The want of workmen, and the pressing nature of the work, left him no choice; the speeching and fighting phases, the liberty-tree planting, and open-air-fraternization epochs, were gone by. Nothing now remained but to build; but bricks were not to be made without straw. Assenting, but not supporting majorities, he began to feel could grant indemnity for the past, but were no guarantee for the future. Cavaignac dared to ask aid from the camp he had left behind him, and rescued, not his ministry, but the Assembly also, in spite of itself. His large majority on the appointment of Dufaure was a cri de cœur et de joie, at a deliverance from a danger which the Assembly scarcely knew until it was over. As to those other charges of maintaining a state of siege, and suppressing, rather than repressing, the press, they are a mere child's quarrel with means, while it desires ends. Doubtless it is dictatorship; but is not Cavaignac a dictator? Doubtless it is absolutism but can Paris yet bear freedom? The Parisians, not Cavaignac, have to solve the question: it is not his, but their own. dom, but order, is the actual first necessity of France. She must be protected from herself. A state of intermittent insurrection requires a provisional despotism. Every one knows that coercive measures are not the manière d'être of any civilized people; but still less is anarchy. The belief that all this disorder was purposely suffered, if not created, to render the existing tyranny inevitable; that it might have been prevented by timely measures, and an émeute punished would have saved an insurrection, is simply a confusion of two things altogether different,-free republicanism and absolute. monarchy. The monarch may prevent; the Republic must suffer and chastise. Vigour before exigency, not suspected but demonstrated, is deemed oppression. The people believe in no demonstration but that of the appearance of the evil itself. Where all authority is fact merely, and not right; where every man is people, and the people in all its sections infinitesimal sovereigns, what hope of permanence exists except through power, and what power but that to which all appeal,-physical? and what physical power is likely to Not free ; prosper but what is organized; and what so well organized as that which is held by the soldier-citizen,—firm in his calm, moderate in his force. Paris, and therefore France, for some time longer needs this military protectorate. She does not require a conqueror, but a chief; not a dethroner, but a preventer of anarchy. Conquerors, thank Heaven! are not to be had so easily in these days. They are not born, but made. Warriors cannot come without wars; wars are not possible without a full exchequer and a good cause. The maxim of Napoleon, that war supports itself, was true only of his wars, and of his only so long as they were synonymous with victories. Ask what he thought of that of Russia, or what Louis le Grand reaped from his glories in the Netherlands? A nation of paupers, it is true, may, if they be permitted, burst out into a nation of plunderers; but this need not be apprehended of France; her neighbours are not asleep, nor has she yet passed through the Gazette. On the contrary, the tendencies of nations,-and they are now rulers, not their governors, are every day more and more, of a necessity, pacific. On that side, therefore, France will not and cannot look for relief. She cannot throw the fury from her own bosom on that of her sister nations; she must master it within. Every other panacea has been tried, and each in its turn has failed. Thirteen or fourteen times has everything been changed; wheels, springs, balances; every state mechanician has been called into council; philosophers of pure reason, abstract politicians, poets independent of time and place, dreamers of constitutions à priori, all-to little purpose! The machine has remained machine; the statue continued statue: no one from Sieyes down has discovered the true Promethean fire. Why is this? All has been found but the essential. The real conditions have been wanting-caution, experience, patience; and for these again order and time. Whether a republic can present these conditions; whether France is yet, or ever will be a Republic; what are the means, the experimentum crucis, by which she can best be interrogated; and who is the man to put the interrogatory, is about to be tried. The monarchists will of course desire to get one step nearer to a restoration, little embarrassing themselves about the men, provided they can advance the principle. The Red Republicans will aim to force an organ of the clubs and a creature of the barricades into the bureau as well as into the Assembly; it is a stride to the "restoration of man to earth,”—the "emancipation of conscience from law," and the millennium of "no family and no property." Between both stand the Republicans and the Republic; they ask a man of will and power, who can keep both colours, white and red, at bay. Is such a man yet found? Is such a man to be found? If found, will he be supported? In other words, is the Republic and its constitution one jot more than the Charte a verity? On the answer to this question depend Cavaignac's chances of success, and on his success, in great measure, the chances of a Republic. "WHAT a fuss there is about the turnips !" cried a musical knight of our acquaintance,—after a visit to some gentlemen farmers, who deplored the failing crop of this cattle-food,-his own agricultural knowledge and interest being bounded to the requisite supply of vegetables for the table. "What a fuss they make about them! for my part I don't care for turnips; I think carrots much better; and, for aught I see, there are enough for those who choose to pay for them." (Which by the way is the rational test in all matters of scarcity.) "What a brawling there is about them!" And, echo we, what a brawling is there about the hardness of the times! Of which, by a parity of reasoning with that of our sapient knight, we don't believe a word, since, for our part, we find everything very easy and comfortable; whatever we have a mind to pay for, comes as readily and plentifully as ever we remember things. And yet not to give credence to popular complaint from time to time touching this vital question would be wholly to discredit written authority, which, time out of mind, has had the pas of oral testimony. That which is in print must be true! is an axiom which the freedom and infallibility of the press has rendered indisputable; but then again, who can look through the columns of advertisements with which our daily and hebdomadal literature abound, wherein variety and abundance of all things merchantable are offered to us for little or nothing; elegancies, luxuries, all that can gladden and adorn this life; besides the needful, which, in unlimited sums of money is absolutely pressed upon us by generous and disinterested lenders, enabling us to purchase innumerable bargains, those pickpurses of our wives and daughters, "Wanted, because they may be bought— and which solicit us daily in every form :- who, we repeat, can see all these and believe that ruin and desolation are come upon us? Nay, can we withhold our confidence (and moreover admiration) in the manifold inventions and improvements which, regardless of expense, as we are assured, are devised for our comfort and convenience? Can we behold these still-beginning, never-ending evidences of our country's stamina, and not feel satisfied, malgré the (mis-) leading articles of our cherished paper (which it must be confessed sometimes "speak louder than advertisement"), foretelling the crush and dissolution of all mundane reliances, that England is still the most flourishing and well-to-do nation in Christendom? Why the very man who in the morning tells you that dearth and famine are the crying evils of the land we live in, will, on the selfsame day, spread you a table that shall groan under the weight of that plenty of which his pen has previously laboured to deny the existence ! Pass we over this, not irrelevant matter, and proceed to proofs that at this present period, things in general are particularly prosperous, and, to say the least, on an average with the good old times so vaunted by those to whom "Rien n'est beau que le vieux" and of whose superiority, entre nous, we entertain a very certain degree of scepticism, while in many respects we moderns are infinitely above them. Let us take a retrospective glance at the dull matter-of-fact days of old. When the early-to-rise and late-to-rest system of unlettered England's shopkeepers bound apprentices, to lean over their counters all day, and lie under them at night, nothing more was looked for, or indeed requisite, to the ready sale of their commodities, beyond those significant, tangible intimations of their respective métiers, displayed in their windows. Alas! for that single-minded, now exploded race! When dreamed they of early closing movements, who never stirred from their shop and its little back parlour of six feet by four (for with them there was measure in everything)? When thought they of "busying themselves in scull contending schools" and improving their minds? What cared they for letters? save and except those capital ones, the emblems of a flourishing trade, and initials of their house's prosperity, L. S. D., which made up the sum total of their learning's lore. The English trader needed then no tongue but his own; no "foreign lingo" to perplex his honest mind. Content to know nothing beyond his tradecraft, and only studied, like Norval, "to increase his store and keep his only son" (if he had one) "at home" with no higher aim "from early morn to dewy eve" than to open and close his ponderous shutters, and sprinkle the shop-floor before his customers came down with their dust. This, reader, "was your husband!" But young England is another guess sort of a person from him of elder times. Plate-glass and pedantry have found their way into our shops and opened to us a more lucid insight to what was but the palpable obscure of other days. Increase of our national wealth has led to the increase of our national wants, and ultimately to the development of long-slumbering, national intellect and its concomitant refinement. Our man of trade has now a greater stock of money than he formerly boasted, consequently, a greater mind to spend it! Thus the purse and the primer are simultaneously opened with his eyes, to the actual necessity of selfimprovement. It follows then that in the Master-mercer, no longer nailed to his counter like the bad shilling of his day, we now behold the Master mind, which disdains, in propria persona, the sordid occupation of shopkeeping. No longer is he stationed behind his counter with a timid, sleekheaded apprentice at his elbow, with "shining morning face," aproned (and not unfrequently cuffed), with haply a provident row of minikins darned with precision on his sleeve. No longer is the "Till" the nucleus of the house's stamina, but in lieu of the master's eye (perchance in a fine phrenzy rolling), cognizant of the out-goings and incomings of his capital, we behold a plurality of young gentlemen, Byronians, with turned down collars, pale faces, and winning ways, taking place of the one; while a "cashier" towers loftily above the other, second only in dignity to the elegant superintendent, who, with measured step, and vigilant eye, parades the boutique and notes the entrée of each fair visitant, for whom he places seats with a bowing-grace that would excite the approval, if not the envy, of a Chesterfield. Everything is in fact changed; the very terms and titles of trade are become obsolete. Thus we have no longer shops, but establishments; no more shop-boys, but assistants, who have no longer masters, but employ ers; and, superseded as said employers are by this general reform, and released from personal attendance, what have they to do if not to fly to the same resource as their emancipated men, and take, as beseems them, the upper seats at the intellectual banquet so copiously and indiscriminately prepared; and as all presiding heads of families have, cum privilegio, the selection of the food of daintier quality to that of their dependents, it follows naturally, that while the subordinates are be-thumbing and dog's-earing their spelling-books, and labouring to reinstate or transpose their too long-misused H's, and converting their 's into W'sand vice versa―their superior of the upper form is majestically wielding his polyglott, and digging to the very roots of the tree of knowledge for the wherewithal to "amaze the (yet) unlearned, and make the learned smile," doubtless with pleased approval! Thus mind triumphs over mercery as over less tangible matter; and why not? Shopmen have souls! and genius can no longer be bound up by stay-tape and buckram; besides, "a bad education mars gentility;" wherefore an ambulatory, indefatigable schoolmaster is continually on his march of mental motion, treading upon the heels of ignorance, and sometimes in his haste and zeal, a little too much confounding classes. Mais, qu'importe? On looking over the "Farthing Post" (that first of newspapers !) set up by our thrifty forefathers, we find that the article Advertisement was "short and far between," a mere occasional nudge of the elbow to the idle dreamer of novelties, brief intimations of things not needful, yet necessary "to those whom Providence had blessed with affluence," the coveters of "le beau superflu," as a distinctive mark of their superior grade and good taste. But now, in these our better days, they are indicative of no less than our country's genius! The gorgeous George Robins, of illustrious memory, whose reputation was grounded upon his florid descriptions, would have been a stunning loss to diurnal literature, had he dropped his hammer thirty years ago. Time happily spared him for posterity's use and example, till his excursive mind and superlative diction spread their garish light over the fashionable colums of "the Post" they so adorned, and his spirit infused itself into the pens of his successors. "Too apt is study to be overshot; And while ambitiously it seeks to know, It doth forget to do the thing it ought." Not so our students of the nineteenth century. Now, not only the merchandise, but the merchants are assiduous in their respective callings and indefatigable in their efforts to secure our commendation and custom, not indeed as servile supplicants, but by the all-compelling force of intellect, all pervading intellect! And while in their multifarious claims upon our notice, and their tempting descriptions, we hanker after the commodities described, we actually long for an introduction to their accomplished vendors. Let us at once turn over the file of our chosen paper, and read one by one the long lines of advertisements, those veritable signs of The Times, which give more than presumptive evidence not only of the wealth, but the wisdom of young England. Previously, however, to the setting forth our more erudite samples, the lucubrations of our "learned Thebans," let us briefly touch upon the lighter specimens, the unstudied effects of Liberty and Fraternity, appeals rather to the reason than to the imagination, genuine hearty John Bull-isms, di |