libels which the proposed law was meant to restrain, but the too sudden changes in public offices, and the fear of apprehended alterations in the constitution and the state of property. The soldiers, he said, feared for their honour and for their subsistence; and all ranks looked to the loyal fulfilment of the charter as the only source of security and protection. "Such," continued Marshal Macdonald," is the source of these disquietudes; and since we are acquainted with the remedy, let us not fail to apply it. Make laws conformable to this constitution; it is such only that France expects from you: she expects from you, gentlemen, the maintenance of that charter to which we have all sworn in that solemn sitting of the 4th of June; our oaths resounded throughout the kingdom, and in every part of Europe. Let us be faithful to them, as to our love for the sovereign, whom Providence and our wishes have given to us. What confidence will the French repose in us; what faith shall we display in acts and treaties; what opinion will foreigners entertain of us, if we now forget those oaths? Make it appear to the world, and prove to mankind, that you are French. men truly regenerated. For, recollect that it is the non-observance, that it is the violation of the laws, which, in our unhappy disturbances, have caused all the confusions of which France has so long been the victim. If you adopt this project, gentlemen, if you leap over this barrier, who shall secure us in future from new attacks? Who shall secure those benefits which are as generously promised as they are solemnly granted by that charter? And what but the liberty of the press shall apprise the king of the truth, the errors, and the faults into which his ministers may fall? Restrain it by severe laws, by the most heavy penalties; you will thus soften licentious

ness, vindictive resentments, seditious provocations, and you will be faithful to your oaths, in leaving us the liberty of speaking, of writing, and of printing. Such is my opinion; such are my unalterable principles. I demand the previous question on the project of the law."

Notwithstanding this opposition, the law upon the censorship and superintendance of the press, upon the votes being taken by ballot, was finally adopted by a majority of 137 white balls to 80 black ones. The friends of good order and rational freedom,― for the words are synonimous, though too often placed in opposition to each other,-regretted this measure. It was in vain, they said, to allege as an excuse, that the French were yet unfitted for the liberty of the press, or to argue from the analogy of an oculist, who does not permit the eyes of his patient, after a successful operation, to be exposed to the full blaze of day. They were of opinion, on the contrary, that the liberty of the press is not only necessary to secure freedom, but is the only effectual means of framing man's mind to understand and to enjoy it. They allowed, that the voice of clamorous and seditious pamphleteers might justly alarm government, and mislead, for a time, the governed. But they trusted in the omnipotence of truth, which at length is almost sure to prevail over all obstacles. They conceived that the formation of a public mind in France capable of understanding sound, and rejecting false reasoning, depended on free opportunity being given to the inhabitants of listening to both. The bigotted zeal, the folly, the partiality, the selfinterest of censors, has been shown by the history of literature in all countries where the office has subsisted; and it is certain that the very idea that a work must necessarily be subjected to the ordeal of their criti

cism, must restrain and overawe the genius of the author in the labours of composition, and operate as a discouragement to liberal and free investigation by its terrors, even before their power comes into actual exercise. Admitting the imminent evil and risk to the state of France, at this hazardous crisis, from the multiplicity of seditious libels, the advocates for the freedom of the press contended, it would have been better to subject those guilty of abusing the privilege to severe, or even capital punishment, than, under the pretext of anticipating and preventing their crimes, to put the light of nations under a censorial bushel. The inefficiency of such attempts, continued these reasoners, is equal to their impolicy. While there is a free press in Europe, the expressions of popular discontent will find their way to it, as water to its level; and nothing short of an universal state of war and non-intercourse, such as existed under Buonaparte, will prevent France from receiving from other countries, with an interest and curiosity enhanced by mystery and by prohibitions, those publications which are interdicted in her own.

Much hope was conceived, how ever, of the future affairs of France, from the open and manly manner in which the debate was carried on; and this was augmented by a circumstance which seemed to show that the opposition members who voted against the law had done so not on factious, but on national motives, and really wished to secure the freedom of the press, but not to encourage its licence. Ferru, Chamerot, Dentu, Roux, and other booksellers, had been active in dispersing a pamphlet, entitled, an "Extract from the Moniteur," reflecting upon the person of the king, the printer of which had concealed his name, and they had been committed to prison as dispersers of a libel. Encouraged, it may be, by

the animated speeches made in defence of the liberty of the press, these persons petitioned the Chamber, not only for liberty, but for authority to prosecute the persons who had oc casioned their imprisonment. The Chamber, by a great majority, found that their arrest was legal under the penal code, and that, being accused of a serious offence, the petitioners had no right to apply to the Chamber for protection, since their guilt or innocence would be ascertained in the proper court of justice. The reporter, in the name of the committee of petitions, declared that the members most zealous for the freedom of the press, were not less than their colleagues the declared enemies of those who should abuse it, for the purpose of creating trouble and disorder in the state.

The censors were, however, nominated, and put into office. Among their names we observe two of bad omen; those, namely, of Lemontey, formerly a deputy to the Legislative Assembly, who had been already a theatrical censor in the days of Buonaparte, and of Lacretelle, the historian of the Revolution, who had served his apprenticeship to the same trade, under the same imperial master. The Abbé Salgues, one of the editors of the Journal de Paris, whose pen had circled as regularly around the politi cal compass as if it had been plucked from the tail of the revolutionary weather-cock, was also named a censor, and afterwards showed how well he deserved the office, by the furious articles against the Bourbons, which he published in his journal immediately on the return of Buonaparte.

The law for restraining the freedom of the press had been carried through with such difficulty, that the disaffected were rather encouraged than checked by it, and resorted to all expedients to elude it, with a certainty that in doing so they would have the public on their side. Mon

sieur Lecompte and his associate editors of a paper, called Le Censeur, in which the measures of government were severely animadverted upon, so soon as the law was passed, publicly announced their intention to convert their weekly, into a monthly publication, in order that the size might exceed twenty pages, and thereby escape the revision of the royal censors. The imperfection of the law being thus pointed out, many authors hastened to avail themselves of similar means of eluding it, and the pamphlets against government which used to appear separately were now strung on to each other, like the pieces of paper attached to the train of a kite, until, with a little assistance from the art of the printer, they were made to cover the number of pages necessary to evade the regulation Thus the ministers gained nothing by their encroachment on the charter, but the odium of having attempted it, and the ridicule of having done so to no purpose.

They were incautious enough to touch upon another point, on which the nation was sensitively jealous. This regarded the claims and property of the emigrants. An ordonnance of the king, made soon after his assuming the throne, had restored to these victims of loyalty of every description their rank as French subjects. Their wealth, their privileges, their importance, he could not restore, nor had be the means of checking their natural aspirations after the influence and honours from which they had fallen, The temper of the Chamber of Deputies towards them may be judged from the following minute incident. A

petition was presented from Nov 20 the Maire of Durnac, in the 1814. department of the Upper Vienne, on the subject of a sca dalous affair which occurred in his con.munal church on All-Saint's Day,

in

consequence, as the petition stated, of Monsieur de Blois, Seigneur of Durnac before his emigration, having required that the Sacristan should offer the consecrated bread to him, at the elevation of the Host, before presenting it to the Maire and the municipal body. Both parties seem to have insisted on their honorary pretensions with a clamour and violence very little edifying to the congregation, and the Maire esteemed the point of such consequence as to carry it by petition to the Chamber of Deputies. To give it, however, additional weight, he thought proper to generalize his complaints against the whole class to whom his competitor belonged. "It Appears," said the Maire of Durnac, "that the emigrants wish to treat France like a conquered country. They seem, in various parts, to place themselves above the constituted authorities, and to acknowledge no other laws but their pleasure."

The Chamber appointed these expressions to be expunged as calumnious, and the affair of precedence and of the riot was referred to the proper courts. But in the course of the debate, it was manifest that many of the members of the Chamber held the same suspicions with the Maire of Durnac, or at least endeavoured to instil them into others. Monsieur Dumoulard, a leading member of the opposition, treated this brawl as a matter of great gravity. "It was not," he admitted, "the business of the assembly to enter into little communal disputes; but at the same time, the government could not remain indiffe rent to a fact of this kind. It could not be dissembled that there existed a kind of dark and secret system, which tended to sow the seeds of discord and anarchy among the citizens, and to resuscita e pretensions incompatible with the laws. It was important to impress every class of French,

men with the great idea, that there was no safety for France, for the king, for every member or society, but in the maint nance of those principles on which were founded the laws protecting the whole."

This speech plainly intimated the sense entertained of those who called themselves Constitutionalists, (whose opinions, variously modified, pervaded the greater part of France) of danger to the constitution from the claims of the emigrants; and ought, therefore, to have put government upon their guard, and to have induced them either to postpone all discussions upon that delicate subject, or at once to take such determined measures as might silence at least, if it did not satisfy, all the parties concerned, and put the question at rest for ever. They seem, on the contrary, to have adopted a sort of compromising and vacillating policy, divided between their desire to do justice to the plundered royalists, whose case was truly severe, and their fear to innovate upon that article of the charter which sanctioned the sale of national domains.

In acknowledging the Bourbons' title to the throne, it was impossible in principle to deny that their faithful adherents, who had sustained exile and forfeiture merely for asserting that title, had been unjustly plunder. ed and proscribed. Those emigrants, therefore, whose estates still continued in the possession of the nation, were, in common justice, entitled to have them restored. A plan for this purpose was proposed to the Chamber of Deputies, by Monsieur Ferrand, and excited much attention. The pleading in favour of the emigrants' right to their own estates seemed unanswer-" able, while that of Louis XVIII. to the throne of France remained unquestioned. And, undoubtedly, those who were inimical to the claims of the emigrants, although they dared

not at the period speak their opinions, rested their reasons in point of right on the validity of the decrees against the Bourbons and their adherents. The admitted claims of this class of emigrants led naturally to the consideration of their less fortunate companions, whose property had not only been seized by the state, but disposed of to third parties, to whom it was guaranteed by the charter. Accordingly, their cause was pleaded by Monsieur Astorg, who openly declared his opinion, that those emigrants whose property was alienated beyond the possibility of restoration, were as well entitled to the consideration of the Chamber as those whose property was yet available. If their property had been sold, the state was in possession of the prices at which it had been bought, and was effectually benefitted to this extent; and they were, by the same rule which entitled their companions to claim their unsold possessions, creditors to the state for the value it had received for their lands. "It could not be dissembled," he observed," that by the abolition of the laws on emigration the emigrants resumed the rights natural and common to all Frenchmen. On the same principles of justice which decide in their favour the restoration of their unsold property, they ought to be considered as creditors of the state in respect of the sums which it has derived from the sale of their property. If the state applied these sums to its assistance in critical times, it was not the less their debtor. If financial difficulties prescribed the terrible resource of reducing the national debt by two-thirds, still one-third remained to the national creditors. If some such plan as that which he had proposed were not adopted, would not the emigrants have more reason to complain than all the other creditors of the public?"

This proposal called up Monsieur