and the development of the intellectual and moral powers. Material welfare they value indeed, but they pursue it with a moderate and restrained desire. To the ignorant and the sensual, happiness consists in physical enjoyment and the possession of the good things of life. The paradise of the religious man is laid in a future and spiritual world; that of the unbeliever-practical or theoretic-in some earthly Eden. On the belief or disbelief in the immortality of the soul, will practically depend both the nature and the locality of the heaven we desire. Now the French-that is, that active and energetic portion of them which gives the tone to the whole people-repudiate the doctrine of a future life, and yet are vehement aspirants after enjoyment. They are well described by one of themselves as "passionnés pour le bonheur matériel." The effect of the disbelief in a future world is, of course, not only to turn all their desires and efforts after happiness upon this, but to make their conception of the happiness of this life essentially and exclusively earthly, and to cause them to pursue it with the impatience, the hurry, the snatching avidity of men who feel that now or never is their time, that every moment that elapses before their object is grasped is a portion of bliss lost to them for ever. Those who, however dissatisfied with their portion of this world's goods, still, like the majority—a decreasing majority we fear—of our English working-classes, retain some belief in a future life, can strive after the improvement of their earthly lot with a more deliberate and less angry haste; for if they fail, their happiness is not denied, but only postponed to a more distant and a better day. "To them there never came the thought That this their life was meant to be "Sublimely they endure each ill As a plain fact, whose right or wrong "Willing, from first to last, to take The mysteries of our life as given; Its thirst in an undoubted heaven." But if this earth is indeed all, then no time is to be lost, no excuse or delay is to be listened to. It is natural, it is logical, it is inevitable for those who hold this dreary creed to scout as insults those cautions as to the danger of going too fast, those maxims of wisdom which would assure us that social wellbeing is a plant of slow growth, that we must be satisfied with small and rare in Passion for Material Wellbeing. 15 stalments of amelioration, that we must be content to sow the seed in this generation, and leave our children, or our children's children, to reap the fruit. These indisputable truths sound like cruel mockery to the man who, suffering under actual and severe privations, regards a future existence as the dream of the poet, or the invention of the priest. The immeasurable and impatient appetite for material felicity which is now one of the distinctive traits of French society, and which is the legitimate offspring of her irreligion, is beyond question the deepest and most dangerous malady which the state physician has to deal with; for the Frenchman is not only logical, but always ready and anxious to translate his logic into practice. If our lot is to be worked out, and our nature to receive its full development on earth, we must set to work at once, at all hazards, and in spite of all obstacles, to construct that present paradise which is to be our only one. One of the historians of the recent Revolution, Daniel Sterne, has the following just remark: -"S'il est vrai de dire que le socialisme semble au premier abord une extension du principe de fraternité, apporté au monde par Jésus-Christ, il est en même temps et surtout une réaction contre le dogne essentiel du Christianisme, la Chute et l'Expiation. On pourrait, je crois, avec plus de justesse, considérer le socialisme comme une tentative pour matérialiser et immédiatiser, si l'on peut parler ainsi, la vie future et le paradis spirituel des Chrétiens." Hence those Socialist and Communistic schemes, those plans for the re-organization of society on a new and improved footing, which have taken such a strong hold on the imagination and affection of the French prolétaires. Hence the eagerness and ready credulity with which they listen to any orators or theorists who promise them, by some royal road, some magic change, the wellbeing which they believe to be both attainable and their due. Hence, too, that daring, unscrupulous, unrelenting impetuosity, with which these social iconoclasts emulate the fanaticism of religious sectaries, and drive their car of triumph over ranks and institutions, over principalities and powers, over all the rich legacies and pathetic associations of the past, as remorselessly as did the daughter of Servius over the scarce lifeless body of her father. pro This passion for material wellbeing-this "haste to 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 fessions 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 condi tion 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 re-fashion 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 realizes 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-sacrifices 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 Corruption of Manners. 17 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 realization 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 realization 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 VOL. XV. NO. XXIX. B 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 demoralizing 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. Then followed in quick succession the trial and conviction of a cabinet minister and a general officer for dishonesty and peculation in their official capacities, and the awful tragedy of the Duke de Choiseul-Praslin, a member of the highest nobility in France-the murder of his wife as an obstacle to his illegitimate desires, and his own subsequent suicide in prison. When, finally, a statesman and philosopher, as high in rank and reputation as Guizot, expressed little surprise and no horror at the corrupt malversation of his former colleague M. Teste, and even consented to soil his lips in public with a quasilie, in order to defend the duplicity of his master, a sort of shudder ran through the better circles of Europe,-a perception that the measure of iniquity was full, and that the time of retribution must be at hand. It was as if the book had been closed, and the awful fiat had gone forth: "Ephraim is joined unto idols: let him alone." "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; he that is filthy, let him be filthy still behold, I come quickly, to give to every man according as his work shall be !" The prevalent immorality showed itself to the French themselves in many minute symptoms which were unobservable by other nations, in the looseness of domestic ties, in the grasping |