mosynary giving away of places, to selling them-from selling them for support to selling them for money-the step is short and easy.

Some important considerations have been suggested in mitigation of the culpability of Louis Philippe's Government in thus corrupting both the candidates and the constituency,-to which, though not pretending to admit their entire justice, we may give whatever weight they may, on due reflection, seem to deserve. It is questionable (it has been said) whether representative institutions among a corrupt and turbulent people, or a people from any other causes unfit for self-government, do not necessi tate bribery in some form. It was found so in Ireland: it was found so in those dark times of English history which elapsed from 1660-1760. The Government of July found representative institutions already established, and was obliged to rule through their instrumentality. The Ministers were in this position: a majority in the Chambers was essential to them, to the stability of their position, to the adequacy of their powers. This majority could not be secured, among an excitable and foolish people, by wise measures, by sound economy, by resolute behaviour; nor among a corrupt and venal people, by purity of administration, or steady preference of obscure and unprotected merit. They were the creation of a revolution, which their defeat might renew and perpetuate, and a renewal of which would be, to the last extent, disastrous to the country. They had, therefore, only two alternatives-either to distribute places with a view to the purchase of Parliamentary votes, to hand over appointments to deputies for the purchase in their turn of electoral suffrages; or to enlarge the franchise to such an extent as to render bribery impossible, and so throw themselves on the chance which the good sense and fitness for self-rule of the mass of the people might afford them. This they had not nerve enough or confidence enough to do; and who that knows the French people, and has seen their conduct on recent occasions, will venture to say that they were wrong?

If the French nation were fit for representative institutions, if it had the sagacity, the prudence, the virtues needed for selfgovernment, the latter ought to have been the course of the Administration of July; if it had not, (and who now will venture to pronounce that it had ?) the Administration had no choice but to command a majority by the only means open to them, viz., corruption. Representative institutions among a people unqualified for them can therefore only be worked by corruption, i.e., by distributing the appointments at the disposal of the State with a view to the purchase of Parliamentary or electoral support. What Government, even in England or America, still

Distribution of Patronage necessarily corrupt.

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less in France-what Government, in fact, in any country not autocratically ruled-could stand a month if all its appointments were distributed with regard to merit alone; if, for example, Lord Stanley refused office to Mr. Disraeli or Lord John Manners because they were less competent to its duties than obscurer men; if Lord Lonsdale or the Duke of Newcastle had all their recommendations treated with merited disregard; if the members for Manchester or London saw their protégés contemptuously and rigidly set aside in favour of abler but less protected men? If corruption essentially consists, as it undeniably does, in distributing the appointments and favours of the State otherwise than with a sole regard to merit and capacity-if any deviation from this exclusive rule be corruption in a greater or less degree, then it is clear that some degree of corruption is inherent and inevitable in all representative Governments, and that the extent to which it prevails will be in precise inverse proportion to the sagacity and self-denying virtue of the people, i.e., to the degree in which they can endure to see meritorious strangers preferred to less deserving friends. Where, in modern times, shall we find that blended humility and patriotism, which made the rejected candidate for the Lacedemonian Senate go home rejoicing, (perhaps with a touch of quiet sarcasm in his tone,) "that there were five hundred better men in Sparta than himself?" The people, therefore, and the institutions, not the rulers, are to blame for the amount of corruption which prevails. If they have the reins in their own hands, and yet cannot guide themselves, they must be governed by circuitous stratagems. instead of direct force-for governed ab extra they must be. It is the exclusive prerogative of an autocratic government to distribute appointments according to merit only. Corruption-i.e., appointments not exclusively according to desert, but with ulterior views, to purchase or reward parliamentary support—is the price which must be paid for free institutions among an imperfect people.

There is much truth in this plea; a plea which will be recognised as valid by each individual, in proportion as he is conversant with administrative life; but it does not affect our argument. For, whether the Government of France were excusable or not, the operation of the wholesale, systematic, and unblushing venality and scramble for place which prevailed, was equally indicative of, and destructive to, the morals of the community.

One result of all this-one of the saddest features of French national life, one of the darkest auguries for the future is the low estimation in which all public men are held; the absence of any great, salient, unstained statesman, whom all reverenced, whom all could trust, and whom all honest citizens were willing

to follow and obey; of any politician who, in times of trial, could influence and sway the people by the force of character alone. They are not only worse off than other nations, at similar crises of their history, they are worse off than themselves ever were before. They have not only no Pericles, no Hampden, no Washington; they have not even a Turgot, a Lafayette, or a Mirabeau. Three only of their public men have been long enough and prominently enough before the world to have made themselves a European reputation-Guizot, Thiers, and Lamartine. All of these men have been at the head of affairs in turn; all are writers and historians of high fame; all are men of unquestioned genius; and two of them at least are types of a class. Thiers is a Provençal by birth, with all the restless excitability, all the pétillante vivacity, all the quenchless fire, all the shrewd, intriguing sagacity of the south. He launched into the mixed career of literature and politics at a very early age, and a characteristic anecdote is related of his first successes. The Academy of Aix, his native town, proposed the Eloge de Vauvenargues as the subject of their yearly prize. Thiers sent in an essay (anonymous, as was the rule) which was of paramount merit; but it was suspected to be his, and as he and his patron had many enemies, the academic judges proposed to postpone the adjudication of the prize till the following year, on the ground of insufficient merit in all the rival essays. Some days were yet wanting to the period of final decision. Thiers instantly set to work, and produced with great rapidity another essay on the same text, which he sent in with the post-mark of a distant town. The first prize was instantly adjudged to this, and the second only to the original production; and when both turned out to be the work of the same envied author, the academicians looked foolish enough. Shortly after this youthful stratagem Thiers came to Paris, the great rendezvous for all French talent, and commenced life as a journalist-that line which in France so often leads to eminence and power. His clear, vivacious, and energetic style, and the singular vigour and frequent depth of his views, soon made him favourably known. His Histoire de la Révolution established his fame; and when, on the appointment of the Polignac Ministry in 1829, he (in conjunction with Mignet and Carrel) established the National newspaper, with the express object of upsetting them, and pleading the cause of legal and constitutional monarchy against them, he was one of the acknowledged leaders of public opinion in France. The settled aim and plan of the three friends is thus epigrammatically stated by M. de St. Beuve :-" Enfermer les Bourbons dans la Charte, dans la Constitution, fermer exactement les portes; ils sauteront immanquablement par la fenêtre." In seven months

the work was done-the coup d'état was struck; and Thiers was the prominent actor both in that public protestation against the legality of the Ordinances, which commenced the Revolution of July, and in those intrigues which completed it by placing the Duke of Orleans on the throne. Since that date he has been the most noted politician of France-sometimes in office-sometimes in opposition-sometimes, as in February 1848, bending to the popular storm, and disappearing under the waves-again, as in May, reappearing on the surface, as active and prominent as ever, as soon as the deluge was beginning to subside. Next to M. Guizot, he is unquestionably the statesman of the greatest genius and the most practical ability in France; subtle, indefatigable; a brilliant orator, an inveterate intriguer; skilled in all the arts by which men obtain power; restrained by no delicate scruples from using it as his egotism may suggest; alike unprincipled as a minister, and untruthful as an historian; boundless in the aspirations, and far from nice in the instruments, of his ambition; inspiring admiration in every one, but confidence in no Still he is one of the few leading men in France who have a clear perception of what that country needs, and can bear; and if his character had been as high as his talents are vast, he might now have been almost omnipotent.

one.

Guizot is a statesman of a different sort, gifted, perhaps, with a less vivid genius, but with a character of more solid excellence and an intellect of a much loftier order. He earned his rank by many years of labour in the paths of history and philosophy before he entered the miry and thorny ways of politics, and both as a diplomatist and a minister has shewn himself equal to every crisis. Clear, systematic, and undoubting in his opinions, and pertinacious in the promotion of them; stern, cold, and unbending in his manners, with something of the Puritan and much of the Stoic in the formation of his mind, fitted by nature rather for the professor's chair than the turbulent arena of the senate, but equal to either fortune;" earnestly devoted to the pursuit of truth in philosophic matters, but not always scrupulously adhering to it in the labyrinth of political intrigue; taught by history and knowledge of contemporaneous life to look upon his countrymen with a degree of mistrust and contempt, which his ministerial career too often shewed; watching their follies with more of lofty disdain than of melancholy pity, oftener with a sardonic smile than with a Christian sigh, and meeting the most hostile and stormy opposition with a cold and haughty imperturbability; he was, perhaps, the most suitable, but was certainly the most unpopular ruler that France could have had. The stern front which he constantly opposed to any extension of the popular power or privileges, his resolute hostility to the liberalism of the

day, was much blamed at the time, and has since been regarded by some as the proximate cause of the Revolution of February, though scarcely, we think, with justice. We are too well aware of the prodigious and unseen obstacles which public men have to encounter, and of the incalculable difficulty of arriving at a just estimate of their conduct in any peculiar circumstances, which is inevitable to all who are not behind the scenes, to be much disposed to condemn the conduct of M. Guizot, on this head, from 1840 to 1848. It was evidently pursued on system, and subsequent events dispose us to think that it may very possibly have been judicious. He seems to have been convinced that the French were not ripe for larger liberties or a wider franchise, and to have resolved to let the education of many years of constitutional monarchy pass over their head before granting them more; and when we remember that the Parliamentary reforms of M. Thiers were as promptly and scornfully thrust aside by the leaders of the February Revolution, as the conservative policy of his predecessor, we greatly incline to think M. Guizot may have been right. At all events, he acted on a plan, and from conviction; and if his master had trusted him with sufficient confidence, and had displayed half his nerve, the convulsion which agitated and upset all Europe might, we believe, have been easily compressed within the limits of a Parisian émeute. It is worthy of remark that the three Governments which succeeded, the Provisional Government, the Dictatorship of Cavaignac, and National Assembly, have all found, or thought, themselves obliged to be far more sternly repressive than ever M. Guizot was. His two works, published since his fall, on "Democracy in France," and on "The Causes of the Success of the English Revolution," display a profound knowledge of the foibles, the wants, and the perils of his countrymen, such as no other French statesman has shewn. If he were again at the head of affairs, the experience of the last two years would, we believe, be found to have rendered the French far more competent to appreciate his merits, and more disposed to submit to his rule. A popular statesman he can never be.

Lamartine was made to be the idol of the French because he was the embodiment of all their more brilliant and superficial qualities. But he was utterly devoid of statesmanlike capacity. His mind and character were essentially and exclusively poetic; for power and effect as an orator he was unrivalled; and his "Histoire des Girondins" is one of the most splendid and ornate narratives extant in the world. He had much of the hero about him; he was a man of fine sentiments, of noble impulses, of generous emotions, of a courage worthy of Bayard, and greater perhaps than even Bayard would have shewn in civil struggles.