class of its own sovereignty. And therefore was the revolution of 1848 a great blow to the principle of Constitutional Monarchy; or, at least, to all the popular theories about Constitutional Monarchy. For it proved that a Constitutional Monarchy cannot safely depend on the exclusive support of that class with which Constitutional Monarchy is inevitably most connected by the circumstances, as well as by the sentiments, of modern society. It cannot rest on the middle class alone. For its duration it must have with it classes that will brave a mob in support of the principle of monarchy, even though they may not approve of the monarch actually on the throne. There is no life in institutions longer than the life of a single man, if they depend, not on the value at which the community assesses the institutions themselves, but on the personal popularity of an individual.

It is commonly believed that a more timely and energetic employment of military force would have saved the monarchy. So far as it is possible for a distant and retrospective inquirer to form any opinion on such a point, I share this belief. But it is wholly immaterial to the subject and object of my present inquiry. Had the monarchy been so saved, its salvation would have been due to the energy of a man, not to the soundness of a system. And it is only with political systems that we are here concerned; not forgetting, of course, how greatly the natural effects of any political system are susceptible of modification by the influence of personal character.

Regarded intellectually and socially, that monarchy of Orleans was not a failure. Far from it. Never has France enjoyed a longer lease of that rational liberty, which consists in the management of public interests and affairs by the active co-operation of the nation with its government, and the general diffusion of political vitality. The reign, as we have seen, was characterized by an extraordinary display of intellectual vigour.

Voice and thought were free. It was the fault of the time, not of the monarchy, if freedom ran into license. Religion was respected, whilst science was encouraged, by the attitude of the government and the example of the Court. The members of the royal family were blameless in their lives, and rarely in any single family has so much intellect and intellectual culture been as felicitously united with so high a sense of civic duty.* Years of peace had been bestowed upon Europe, adding largely to the national prosperity of France. The wealth and industry of the nation had made great and steady progress, without so absorbing the national spirit in the prosecution of purely material interests as to lower the intellectual tone of it. The administration of justice was pure, and tempered by the known humanity of the sovereign.

Yet through the whole political tissue of the time there ran a thread of unreality, which snapped, at last, under the first strain of revolutionary pressure. This thread was woven, neither by the monarchy, nor yet by the bourgeoisie, considered as apart from each other. It was woven by the union of them both in the monarchy of the bourgeoisie, a fiction! For a middle class has not in itself the necessary elements of sovereignty. It is born satisfied, and can never attain to anything; not even to a starting-point. Its proper place in the community is that which its name implies, a middle one. Louis Philippe virtually said to the Bourgeoisie of France, "I am not a king; I am a paterfamilias, a man of business,-like yourselves." monarchy, therefore, was like an arch without a keystone. The keystone need not be of a different material from the other stones, bnt it must be always of a different shape; and, without it, no arch can stand.

His

*This was written many years ago. The conduct of the Princes of the House of Orleans, under many trying circumstances, has since then been such as to entitle them to the sincere respect of every impartia critic and every honourable gentleman.-L.

Far back in the past however, lie the inexorable first causes of this, as of all the other political failures of modern France. For the past may be good or bad; but, for well or ill, it will always be the fatal master of the future. The People and the Aristocracy are the two first conditions of any great and durable political structure. The third is the Dynasty, in which their traditions and interests are united. The dynasty may be extinguished by the sterility of at race, or the accidents of civil war; but it will always revive again in some form or other, either by importation or production, so long as the two primary conditions of national life are left. For they engender their complement. The people will always remain but a people which cannot produce an aristocracy is a plant without sap, a field without seed, an image of sterility.

In France Richelieu decapitated half the aristocracy, and Louis XIV. degraded the remainder into courtiers. Then, the people decapitated the dynasty, and remained alone-alone and infructuous. Having left itself nothing to unite with, it can engender

nothing but the germs of its own gradual exhaustion by barren emotions and abortive effort.

There are some causes which, in their overthrow, overwhelm their representatives. In a great earthquake the first thing to disappear are the lofty things-temples and palaces. It was not accorded to the revolution of 1848 to overthrow one of those causes.

Charles X. embarked at Cherbourg, surrounded by all the grandeurs of royalty. Louis Philippe fled from Paris in disguise. 1830 impeached the members of the "Ordonnances." 1848 did not deign to notice the king's subservient advisers. The bourgeoisie is never heroic and in the fall of the bourgeois monarchy there was no tragic incident. But it has left behind it some lessons still worth studying; and, if ever constitutional monarchy be again established in France, it must be upon some broader and safer foundation than the exclusive satisfaction of a middle class.

LYTTON.

mous omission. With scarcely an exception, those who have tried their fortune have been successful. Had all the elections been protested, it seems that the Legislature might have involuntarily performed a feat like that of the conjuror who undertook to conclude his performance by jumping down his own throat and leaving his audience in total darkness. A deposed Parliament would have received from the Judges the report that the whole of it had ceased to exist. Bribery on a large scale has not been proved in more than two or three cases, though the imperfect character of the evidence, which stops short where a case sufficient to oust the respondent has been made, forbids us to assume that the whole extent of the evil has been brought to light. But it is clear that, with lax and untrustworthy tribunals, bad practices had become almost universal, which a stricter and more trustworthy tribunal is in a fair way to eradicate. To get an unbribed constituency into a polling booth is as essential to the working of free institutions as it is to get twelve honest men into a jury box; and the judges deserve the thanks of the country for the conscientious care, the impartiality, and the inflexibility with which they have administered the law. Besides the direct benefit, a good lesson in public morality has been most seasonably given to the people. A singular expression of laxity on this vital subject has been ascribed to no less a person than the Prime Minister of Ontario; but the reports differ, and it would not be easy to believe that Mr. Mowat had countenanced electoral corruption.

By the result of the Kingston election trial the author of the Pacific Railway Scandal and of the Riel intrigue, as well as of a general system of political corruption which would soon have poisoned the very life-blood of the nation, is consigned, we may fairly hope at least, to a period of much needed quarantine. It is a high proof of his tact and address that his party has been ready

the country, to his personal ambition; and he has unsparingly taken advantage of their devotion. But we must repeat what we said before: had he thought less of himself and more of his party, to say nothing of the country, his position would be far better than it is now. The door of moral rehabilitation and of possible return to power was open, but he passed it by, or rather closed it against himself. When the fatal evidence of his delinquencies in the Pacific Railway case came to light, chivalry and policy alike urged him to say: "Of this money not a cent has stuck to my hands ; in that respect I again protest that they are clean, and have always been so ; but I must own that, under the pressure of a desperate struggle for political existence, I have done in the interest of my party, which I regard as identical with the interest of the country, what I can neither justify myself nor call upon my colleagues and adherents to defend. And now my course is clear: I ask no advice of friends or followers when my own honour clearly points the way. I peremptorily resign, and leave my colleagues, who are unaffected by these disclosures, to do the best they can for the party and the country." This, as we have said before, was the road to sympathy, and the road to sympathy was the road to political restoration. Public morality would have been satisfied and might have relented. But the oracle which gives such counsels has no seat in Sir John Macdonald's breast. He clung desperately to office, and when he was torn from it by the just indignation of the country, he pulled down everything and everybody belonging to him in his fall. If he now departs, he will bequeath to us the happy legacy of exclusive Grit domination, which might have been averted if, at the fatal crisis, he could have thought of anything but himself.

A partial change seems to have come over

the feelings of the employing classes in England on the subject of emigration. A year ago, no topic could be more unpopular either with landowners or manufacturers; but it appears that Mr. Arch's movement has rendered the landowners, at all events, willing to deport some of the less submissive spirits to a happier land. Nevertheless, emigration to Canada falls below the mark of last year. We pointed out some time ago that the point had been reached at which, instead of regarding the Colonies with complacency as outlets for her surplus population, England must begin to regard them as competitors for labour essential to the increase of her own wealth. The fact could not be doubted by any one who had the opportunity of testing English opinion last spring.

This renders it more than ever desirable that we should take a rather more rational and comprehensive view of the subject. Our position at present is practically somewhat absurd. The Government and its agents are only doing their duty in pursuing with zeal and energy a traditional policy, to which they are always being urged by the country. But they are all the time pouring water into a cask with a hole in it. Allowing for great exaggeration in the reported numbers of French-Canadian emigrants to the United States, we fear that for two emigrants, whom at great expense and with much labour we bring over, we probably lose three. But little account is taken of the emigrants who are lost, because they are mainly withdrawn from manufactures, and agriculture is the Government's sole care. That agriculture for the present should be the chief care of Government is reasonable; that it should be the sole care is not. As we have often had occasion to remark, a great development of our manufactures may reasonably be expected in the future, and the relative importance of the two branches of industry may thus undergo a material change. Even at present the manufacturing interest is not so contemptible

as politicians, who draw their support exclusively from the farmers, choose to suppose. A manufacturer, who ventured to remonstrate against the provisions of the Reciprocity Treaty, was told that his order was a mere fraction of the community, and did not employ ten thousand people. There must be a population of at least double that number dependent on manufactures in Montreal alone. To enable the Canadian manufactures to compete successfully with the Americans for Canadian labour, if it can be done by a mere adjustment of the tariff, without imposing any duties for the purpose of protection, is surely at least as legitimate a mode of keeping up the numbers of our population as all this elaborate apparatus for alluring labourers from the other side of the Atlantic. It is at all events not to the principle of Free Trade that the advocates of the present system can appeal. Free Trade means letting everything alone and allowing nature absolutely to take her course; not making the manufacturer pay to import labour for the farmer, while he is being deprived of the same commodity himself.

Attention has also been called to the subject of the distribution of emigrants on their arrival, and not without good reason. The British farm labourer is at once the most ef ficient and the most helpless of mankind. In doing a hard day's work he has no rival; but he has lived in such a state of vassalage, and has been so accustomed to act mechanically under the guidance of his master, that power of self-guidance in him there is none. He must be taken to the actual place where he is to work, and shown the work he is to do; if it is work to which he is unaccustomed, his intelligence will require more than the average length of training to accommodate itself to the change. Moreover take what care you will-and we have no doubt that the Ontario Emigration office takes the greatest care-not a few will emigrate who had better have staid at home.