further proved when we consider that, according to the official reports of the commissioners, whom the chief of the French state sent into the departments to see who of the political prisoners might be pardoned, many thousands were actually in prison at the time of the general election. Colonel Espinasse reports that in the departments of the Lot and Garonne, and the Eastern Pyrenees, there were 30,000 affiliated socialists, and in the department of the Hérault 60,000. In three departments alone 90,000 disaffected persons. If they voted, they must have been forced by the police to vote for the coup d'état; if they did not vote, what becomes of the given number of abstinents? But there is another fact which shows the falsification of the statement, either by actually falsifying the numbers, or by forcing people to give the desired vote, or by both.

Algeria is not so directly under the influence of the police, nor could the statement concerning that colony be so easily falsified. Accordingly, we have the following: Out of 68,000 voters (the army included) 50,000 abstained; 5,735 voted for L. N. Bonaparte, and 6,527 against him. Eighteen thousand only seem to have voted out of 68,000, not even 29 in 100..

I think this will sufficiently show how little reliance can be placed upon such a vote in a centralized country, and how futile it is to found any right or pretension upon it. Votes, without liberty of the press, have no meaning; votes, without liberty of the press, and with a vast standing army, itself possessing the right to vote, and considering itself above all law, have a sinister meaning; votes, without an unshackled press, with such an army, and with a compact body of officials, whose number, with those directly depending upon them, or upon government contracts, amounts to nearly a million, have no meaning, whether he who appeals to the people says that he leaves "the fate of France in the hands of the people," or not.

This paper was written, with the exception I have mentioned, after the vote on the coup d'état had been given. Since then, the plebiscitum, making Louis Napoleon emperor, has been added.

The vote of the people on the question: Shall, or shall not, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte assume the imperial crown? is officially stated to have been thus:

The number of electors inscribed in the departments, is. 9,843,076
The number of the land and naval forces.

360,352

This shows a very different result from the vote on the coup d'état. It gives twenty-five abstinents in a hundred; but there are other points not easily understood. Of thirty-one persons, one only voted No. This is a state of harmony to which people of the Anglican tribe, with all their calmer temper, we venture to say, have never yet attained. It is equally inexplicable, how, of a population, which, in 1851, amounted to 35,781,628, there can be, in the year 1852, as many as 10,203,428 authorized to vote, or males above twenty-one years old. The fourth part of 35,781,628 is only 8,945,407; and, if a fourth part is correct, there would be 1,253,021 unaccounted for. Nor can we forget, here, the immense number of persons, who, according to official reports, are at any given moment in the prisons of France. These, too, must be deducted.

I add, in conclusion, the statement of a Paris paper, which gives a different account, so far as that city is concerned. In Paris the number of abstinents were:

In 1848, for the presidential election

In 1851, for the ratification of the coup d'état, and the election
of the president for ten years
In 1852, for the imperial crown

0.25

0.20

0.14

Only about one-half as many abstained from voting, fas aut nefas, when the empire was to be re-established, as abstained in the excited times of the republic, when there were several candidates.8

8 On the 10th of December, 1848, when the first French president, for four years, was voted for:

-

There were polled

I do not believe that direct money-bribery exists in France to any great extent. Universal suffrage, it would seem, would preclude the possibility. But indirect bribery, by promises of promotion, or allowing shares in profitable undertakings, and, above all, intimidation, positive or indirect, I believe to have existed in the largest possible extent. We may certainly assume that every government officer, or person connected in some way with government, is worth his four or five votes at least-which he will direct as he in turn is directed to do by his superiors, or he loses his place. Then, we must take into account the influence of the priests in rural communities, or of the bishops in general. They openly exerted themselves, by word and letter, in favour of the present emperor.

APPENDIX II.

A PAPER ON THE ABUSE OF THE PARDONING POWER.

THIS paper was originally a report. I had been appointed by a meeting of the Friends of Prison Discipline, without being present, the chairman of a committee, which was requested to report to the next meeting on "The Pardoning Privilege and its Abuse." The following was the result of this appointment. The legislature of the State of New York did me the honour of publishing it as a document; but it was printed so incorrectly, the subject is of such vital interest to a people who desire to live under the supremacy of the law, and the abuse continues in many parts of our country to so alarming an extent, that I do not hesitate here to reproduce the paper.

The pardoning privilege consists in the authority partially or wholly to remit the penalty which, in the due and regular course of justice, has been inflicted for some offence. A pardon is always an act of frustrating that common justice, which has been established by law as the best means of protection; a nullification of

France contained, in the year 1846, 35,400,486 inhabitants; consequently, in 1848, there were about 9,000,000 of authorized voters; and 7,327,345 having voted, about 80 in 100 went to the poll, according to this statement. Yet it must be supposed that the eagerness to go to the ballot-box was, in that year, much greater than after the coup d'état.

1

legal justice. It is the only power in modern politics, in which the supremacy of the law is acknowledged as the primary condition of liberty, that can be compared in any degree to the veto of the ancient tribune. It is an irregular power, depending upon irresponsible individual will. We ought, therefore, clearly to be convinced of its necessity; and if this can be proved, we ought to inquire whether so extraordinary a power must not be guarded by proper limitations, especially if it should be found that it is liable to be seriously and even alarmingly abused.

In order to understand more fully the whole subject, it will not be amiss if we endeavour to obtain a view of the origin of this power, and to see why it is that everywhere we find it as an attribute of the chief executive power; whether this fact must be attributed to any inherent characteristics, or to incidental circum

stances.

When all government is yet mixed up with the family relations, and the individual views of the ruler alone prevail, he pardons, as a matter of course, whenever he sees proper and feels impelled so to do; but developed despotism over extensive states takes a different view. Fear of insecurity and suspicion of disobedience to the commands of the despot often lead the ruler to fence himself in with a strict prohibition of applications for pardon. That which a wise people does for virtuous purposes by a constitution, namely,

1 An inaccuracy of terms has in the case of the veto power created much confusion. The ancient tribune had the privilege of vetoing, and a so-called vetoing power being ascribed to the chief magistrate of modern constitutional States, people are apt to confound the two, and attack or defend them on common grounds. Yet the two have nothing in common. The Roman tribune had a real veto. He could prohibit an entire law, or a single operation of it; he could stop the building of a public fabric, or veto an officer from doing his duty, or a general from leaving Rome for the army. But the modern veto has nothing to do with the law once passed; it amounts to nothing more than the withholding of one necessary ingredient to pass a bill into a law. In governments where the crown has the concurrent or sole initiative, either house, whose consent is necessary in order to make a law, may be said to have the veto power against the crown with the same propriety with which we call the power, in our president, of withholding his approval, a vetoing power. The president can never interrupt the operation of a law once made a law. In the case of pardoning, however, the power actually amounts to a tribunal There the executive, or whoever may possess the pardoning privilege, actually stops the ordinary operation of the law. A man has been laboriously tried and sentenced according to the course minutely laid down by the law, and another power steps in, not according to a prescribed course or process of law, but by a pure privilege left to his own individual judgment, and says: I prohibit; and the due and regular course of law is interrupted accordingly. This is vetoing power.

veto.

the establishing, in calm times, of rules of action for impassioned periods, distrusting their own power of resisting undue impulses, and thus limiting their power, the despot does from fear of his own weakness, and therefore limits his own absolute power that he may not be entrapped into a pardon of disobedience. Chardin2 tells us that in his time it was, in Persia, highly penal to sue for pardon for one's self or for another person; the same was a capital offence under the Roman emperors-at least under the tyrants among them, who form the great majority of the fearful list. Still it is clear that the last and highest power, the real sovereign (not only the supreme) power, must include the power of pardoning. As in Athens the assembled people had the right of remitting penalties,3 so does the civil law acknowledge the privilege in the emperor who was supposed to be the sovereign, and acknowledged as the source of all law. Christianity confirmed these views. The mercy of the Deity is one of its chief dogmas; mercy, therefore, came also to be considered as one of the choicest attributes of the ruler, who on the one hand was held to be the vicegerent of God, and on the other the sovereign source of law and justice; nor can it be denied that, in times when laws were yet in a very disordered state, the attribute of mercy in the ruler, and the right of pardoning flowing from it, was of great importance, and, upon the whole, probably of great benefit to the people. The fact that the pardoning power necessarily originated with the sovereign power, and that the rulers were considered the sovereigns, is the reason why, when jurists came to treat of the subject, they invariably presented it as an attribute indelibly inhering in the crown. The monarch alone was considered the indisputable dispenser of pardon; and this again is the historical reason why we have always granted the pardoning privilege to the chief executive, because he stands, if any one visibly does, in the place of the monarch of other nations; forgetting that the monarch had the pardoning power not because he is the chief executive, but because he was considered the sovereign-the self-sufficient power from which all others flow; while with us the governor or president has but a delegated power and limited sphere of action, which by no means implies that we must necessarily or naturally delegate, along with the executive power, also the pardoning authority.

Although the pardoning power has always existed, and has been 2 Voyage en Perse. London, 1686—1715.

3 Demosthenes against Timocrates.