to be envied, even by that great and admirable nation called England. Heaven preserve me from saying a word of offence against a country which has been an inviolable refuge for the proscribed in all revolutions. For that nation has given us the most glorious model of human liberty, one in which the administration, holding itself at an equal distance from passions both above and below, is in my eyes the ideal of government. But there is in her grandeur something not so solid as the situation of France, who has her consumers at home, and whose market does not depend upon the peace of Europe. England has, on the contrary, a somewhat artificial existence, and the day may come when she will find no purchasers for her productions, which exceed her own requirements tenfold. "That little island,' said Fox, 'embraces the whole world.' Yes! but in doing so, it is vulnerable every where." M. Thiers' speech was received with loud cheers from the Protectionists.

M. Forcade de la Roquette, late Minister of the Interior, replied seriatim to the statements of M. Thiers, denied the accuracy of his figures, and combatted the results which he deduced from them. He attributed the depression prevailing in the French cotton trade to the American War and the centralization of the manufacture, and brought forward an array of statistics in reply to those quoted by M. Thiers. He supported the inquiry, however, feeling assured that a complete justification of the treaties of commerce would result from it. M. Thiers rejoined, impugning in his turn M. Forcade de la Roquette's figures, and the Chamber agreed to the investigation demanded.

Farther than this the Chamber was not prepared to go; for when, in the following week, the question of the condemnation of the treaties was put to the vote, 211 deputies opposed the motion, against 32 who supported it. Before the close of the debate M. Ollivier made a speech which not only carried the Chamber with him, but obtained the warmest approval from the political journals of different parties.

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The Rochefort affair was not the only outbreak of popular insubordination which signalized the month of January. M. Schneider, President of the Corps Législatif, was proprietor and manager of the very large steel and iron foundries and machine factories at Creuzot, employing somewhere about 10,000 hands. Some proposition relative to the benefit fund of the establishment, made by the resident manager, occasioned a strike among the workmen, and several turbulent meetings were held. A fitter in the machine department, named Assy, who had taken an active part against the management of the works, was discharged in consequence, and at his instigation the strike was decided on. He was supplied with funds from trade societies in Paris and London; and one of the writers in the Marseillaise hastened to Creuzot and encouraged the disappointed workmen. A military force of upwards of 3000 men was sent down by Government, some arrests were made, and the strike was abandoned

Seventy hands were dismissed. M. Schneider, who had gone to the scene of action, returned to resume his presidential functions in Paris. There was a renewal of this strike during the last week of March, when again the President of the Corps Législatif had to go to Creuzot and confront the difficulties of the situation. The chronic state of excitement at this and other great industrial centres of France, during the early half of this year, was connected in some way, which the authorities could not trace, with foreign agencies; and the International Working Men's Society, which extended its ramifications from Geneva to Moscow, from Paris to Vienna, and to Stettin, was suspected of practising more active means of attaining its ends than it professed to recognize.

Meanwhile a new law securing liberty of the Press was announced, giving a fresh token of the reforming spirit of the Ministry. On this subject M. Ollivier addressed a circular to the Procureurs Généraux. He informed them that every class of public sentiment was now to be allowed its free expression, no matter how daring or apparently objectionable the form of such expression might be. Exception was only to be made in the case of insult to the Emperor personally, or apologies for crimes, or incentives to breaches of the law, or attempts to seduce soldiers, especially, from their duty, and these cases were to be submitted to the decision of a jury. Henceforth, said the Minister, the control of a healthy public opinion was the one safeguard to which Government was to look, and which it would be well for the nation in every way to cultivate.

On February 19th M. Jules Favre, a member of the Left Opposition, and one of the Paris Deputies, fulfilled his long-announced intention of addressing the Corps Législatif on the subject of internal politics. He denied that the reforms now in progress were due to the Emperor's initiative. He pointed out that every fresh election since 1852 had increased the number of votes adverse to the Imperial Government. He demanded to know the policy of the new Cabinet. While personal power existed, he said, the authority of Parliament was a semblance, not a reality; the cord was round its neck, and might be tightened at any moment by the sovereign will. Press offences were to be remitted to the decision of a jury. Why not political offences? M. Favre then proceeded to condemn the recent action of Government in the arrest of M. Rochefort; expressed his utter disbelief in the supposed conspiracy, and urged that political meetings should be allowed to take their course. The relations of the Ministry to the representatives, he said, were unsatisfactory. The constitution of the Chamber he complained of as having been tampered with at the late elections, and maintained that a new representation of the country ought to be called for.

Count Napoleon Daru, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, undertook to reply to this onslaught upon the Government. "It is not true," he declared, "that France is any longer under a dictatorial rule. She is past that; she is free." Great applause followed this

declaration. "It is order and liberty," he said, "that France desires, not the excesses of a revolution." The Cabinet had never been in more complete accord within itself. It wished for peace abroad and peace at home. It desired to give France an honest, free, pacific government. It had electoral and municipal laws to bring forward: measures regarding the press, measures to promote decentralization, to abolish the so-called law of public safety; it had its Budget to submit to the Chamber. Count Daru's speech was a success for the Government. On a division 236 votes were

recorded for Ministers, only 18 against them.

About ten days afterwards an interpellation was made by Jules Favre and other deputies of the Left regarding official candidatures to the Chamber. During the progress of the discussion the Ministry disavowed all sympathy with the system, and censured the electoral proceedings under the régime of personal government. M. Granier de Cassagnac appealed in vain for some acknowledgment of the service of those who had raised the edifice which the present Cabinet was called upon to crown; but M. Ollivier persisted in his condemnation of the past. Shouts and insults followed from the Extreme Right, who saw their own re-election imperilled. During the confusion that prevailed M. Pinard essayed to effect a compromise, suggesting an order of the day to the effect that "a prudent and measured intervention on the part of the Government in elections was, in certain cases, a political necessity." It was however of no use; M. Ernest Picard withdrew his motion, and the order of the day, pur et simple, was carried by 185 votes to 56. The effect of this division was to separate the Cabinet entirely from the party of the Extreme Right, which had sat on the Ministerial benches since the first revival of Parliamentary Government under the Second Empire.

In other matters likewise the liberal Opposition made it their endeavour to urge Ministers forward, and prevent them from stagnating under the influence of office. They desired to have a new electoral law passed, more fairly expressive of the nation's mind than that hitherto in force; they demanded a more popular mode of choosing Mayors; they aimed at gaining for the Corps Législatif the right of controlling the year's expenditure; the right of voting the details of the Budget; the right of sanctioning or refusing to sanction declarations of war and of martial law.

The great excitement of the month of March was the trial of Prince Pierre Bonaparte, before the High Court of Justice, assembled at Tours, on the 21st. The day on which the sittings commenced the whole town was crowded; spectators gathered upon the Grande Place and in the Rue Royale, and the streets wore the aspect of a fête day. Inside the Palais de Justice every place was occupied long before the trial commenced. The proceedings began with a charge to the jury from the President of the Court, M. Glandaz. Then came the reading of the indictment, the exhibition of the pièces de conviction, the documents, pistols, sword-stick, plans, &c., which

bore upon the crime committed. The Prince was examined in the usual fashion of French prisoners on trial, and required to give categorical answers to the questions of fact addressed to him. He gave his version of the story as we have before related it, and was then confronted with the witnesses for the prosecution. One of the first of these was Fonvielle, who declared that the Prince, after treating his visitors with scurrilous abuse, first struck Victor Noir in the face, and then shot him; and that he, Fonvielle, did not attempt to draw his own pistol till afterwards. In the absence of corroborative evidence it seemed impossible to decide whose veracity was most to be depended upon, Fonvielle's or the Prince's. M. Pascal Grousset and Rochefort were brought from prison in the custody of gens d'armes to give evidence for the prosecution; but they did not add to the force of the case against the accused; and perhaps the virulence with which they took occasion to insult him rather tended to lessen the animus of the public in his disfavour. On Wednesday, the third day of the trial, some altercation having arisen between the prisoner and Victor Noir's counsel, a momentary confusion took place, during which Fonvielle sprang upon his bench, exclaiming vehemently, "You are an assassin, Pierre Bonaparte, for you have basely assassinated my friend, Victor Noir;" and cries of "Death to him!" were heard, which however Fonvielle denied having himself uttered. For this contempt of court he was sentenced to ten days' imprisonment. The trial lasted till Sunday the 27th, when M. Grandperret, the Public Prosecutor, replied to the prisoner's counsel, and President Glandaz summed up the case. The jury retired an hour and a quarter for deliberation, and then brought in a verdict of" Not guilty." M. Laurier, counsel for the Noir family, demanded 40007. damages, with the costs of the suit; but the sum was reduced to 10007. by award of the Court. Prince Pierre Bonaparte was immediately released.

The Liberal party at Paris were both surprised and disappointed at the result of the trial. The so-called "Irreconcileables" were especially bitter, and accused Government of having arranged the whole affair beforehand in their remarks. The Marseillaise came out with the following announcement, in type of nearly an inch high, upon its front page:-" Pierre Bonaparte is acquitted; Victor Noir is in the tomb; Ulric de Fonvielle is in prison; Pascal Grousset is in the same case; Henri Rochefort also; as well as Millière, Rigault, Bazire, Dereure. Pierre Bonaparte is acquitted!"

The Ministry of M. Ollivier was fighting its way, with no very consistent or satisfactory result, between Liberal impulses and reactionary tendencies, trying to keep well with the Emperor and yet to justify its popular character; embarrassed with vague controversies as to the scope and limits of the new Constitution, which nobody seemed to understand; pushed from behind by the advocates of democratic progress, yet not daring to do more than meet in a tentative or evasive way the demands of the moment as they arose. A difference of opinion between the chief of the Cabinet and the

Minister of Foreign Affairs (Count Daru) was said to exist at this time as to the desirableness of sending an ambassador extraordinary to Rome to watch the proceedings of the Council, and to protest against the declaration of the Pope's infallibility. Count Daru pressed the point eagerly, and had a long argumentative communication from Cardinal Antonelli in reply. It was decided finally that no special envoy should be sent, but that the existing ambassador at Rome, the Marquis de Banneville, should represent the French Government at the Council. But these were points about which the "Left" did not trouble itself greatly. There was one, and perhaps only one statesman in Paris at this time, to whom the Council and its affairs were matters of absorbing and vital interest. The preceding week there had appeared in print a most eloquent letter from Count Montalembert, the long-recognized champion of Liberal Catholicism in France, deprecating the course which the Papacy was pursuing, and avowing his sympathy with the independent line of sentiment and reasoning advocated by the German bishops of the Coblentz address. On the morning of Sunday, the 13th of March, Montalembert's tongue and pen were silenced for ever. He had been suffering long from a painful malady, but his death was sudden at the last. He had attained the age of sixty.

Meanwhile the Emperor, who found it convenient to have a popular Minister in the foreground, was preparing a policy of his own, which was calculated for purposes apparently quite unsuspected by M. Ollivier. A letter addressed to the Premier, on the 21st of March, broke at once into the tangled maze of political compromises, with a definite proposition of preparing a Senatus Consultum for the ratification of the late constitutional changes by the Senate. The text of the letter was as follows:

"TUILERIES, March 21.

"Monsieur le Ministre,-I think it is opportune, under the present circumstances, to adopt all the reforms claimed by the Constitutional Government of the empire, in order to put an end to the immoderate desire for change which has seized on certain minds, and which disquiets public opinion and creates instability. Amongst these reforms I place in the first rank those which affect the Constitution and the prerogatives of the Senate. The Constitution of 1852 was intended, above all things, to confer on the Government the means of re-establishing authority and order. It had necessarily to remain susceptible of improvement so long as the state of the country should not permit the establishment of public liberty on solid foundations; but at the present time, when successive transformations have led to the creation of a constitutional system in harmony with the basis of the plebiscitum, it is important to restore to the domain of the law every thing that is more especially of a legislative order, to give a definite character to the last reforms, to place the Constitution beyond all controversy, and to invite the Senate-that great body which comprises so much intelligence to lend a more efficacious co-operation to the new