many people, for to regard money as such is an idle unsolidity, which, while it has the disadvantage of being commonplace, wants the balancing advantage of being true,-while France possesses, we say, a warlike people, it is wanting now, as in the days of Napoleon, and at every former period of its history, in the wealth necessary to purchase their service. Its rulers, therefore, in order to raise those great armies on which the power and character of the nation depend, must always appeal to its warlike sympathies; and the armies thus formed are, in consequence, what armies, in at least the same degree, are nowhere else in Europe,-merely armed portions of the people,-most formidable, as all modern history has shown, for purposes of foreign aggression, but in the hands of a despot, unless like Napoleon, the idol of the soldiery, dangerous chiefly to himself. This apparently simple, but in reality profound principle, on which all the French Revolutions have hinged, and which Louis Philippe, untaught by experience, so entirely forgot, was enunciated for the first time by Sir James Mackintosh, when the seventy thousand soldiers brought by Louis XVI. to invest the "Legislature and capital of France, felt that they were citizens, and the fabric of despotism fell to the ground." "It was the apprehension of Montesquieu," said the philosopher, "that the spirit of increasing armies would terminate in converting Europe into an immense camp, in changing our artizans and cultivators into military savages, and reviving the age of Attila and Genghis. Events are our preceptors, and France has taught us that this evil contains in itself its own remedy and limit. A domestic army cannot be increased without increasing the number of its ties with the people, and of the channels by which popular sentiment may enter it. Every man that is added to the army is a new link that unites it to the nation. If all citizens were compelled to become soldiers, all soldiers must of necessity adopt the feelings of citi

zens; and the despots cannot increase their army without admitting into it a greater number of men interested to destroy them. A small army may have sentiments different from the great body of the people, and no interest in common with them; but a numerous soldiery cannot. This is the barrier which nature has opposed to the increase of armies. They cannot be numerous enough to enslave the people without becoming the people itself." It was on the unseen rock so skilfully marked out here that Louis XVI., Charles X., and Louis Philippe, made shipwreck in turn, and that led to the error of our contemporaries. They took note of the hundred thousand men and the eighteen fortresses, but not of the all-influential principle which, in the Revolution of last week, rendered them of no avail.

It

Events have exhibited the influence of the second French Revolution on this country as, in the main, wholesome. furnished the moving power through which Parliamentary reform was carried, and the representation of the empire placed on a broader and firmer basis than at any former period. It formed the primary cause of the abolition of slavery in our colonies; destroyed monopoly in the East Indies; reorganized our municipal corporations; and, above all, gave to the people a standing-room virtually, though not nominally, legislative, through which, in the character of a league such as that which carried the great free-trade question, they can constitute themselves into a kind of outer chamber, whose decisions, if there be in reality a clamant case to give union and energy to their exertions, the two inner chambers must ultimately be content to register. And if, after all, it did

not do more, it is only because all merely external reforms, whether political or personal, are in their nature unsatisfactory, and because men can only be made happier by being made wiser and better. It was through the inherent justice of the second French Revolution, be it remembered, and the

great moderation manifested in turning it to account, that this amount of good was produced. Never, on the other hand, was there an event less friendly to the progress of civilization and to the true rights of man than the first French Revolution. Its atrocities, through the violent re-action to which they led, served to prop up every existing abuse, by rendering whatever professed to be the cause of reform suspected and unpopular. It was Robespierre and his colleagues, more than any set of men the world ever saw, that imparted to the cause of a blind, undiscriminating Conservatism, not merely the character of sound policy, but also of justice. They arrayed the moral sense of mankind against their measures in the mass; and hence many an antagonist abuse was suffered to exist, which would otherwise have been singled out and swept away. The general war, too, in which the Revolution terminated, and which was so peculiarly marked by the rise of one of the greatest military despots the world ever saw, militated against the progress of the species, and nowhere more powerfully than in Britain. The general effect of the first French Revolution was as disastrous as that of the second was favourable. But what is to be the character and tendency of the third? We have our serious misgivings and fears. It is no doubt well for our country that, since the revolutionists have been successful, Louis Philippe should have been so decidedly in the wrong. Had he fallen five years ago by an assassin, and had Paris, in the distraction consequent on the event, been overmastered by the mob, the case would have been different: the sympathies of the British people would have been with the king and his family; Toryism would have profited in consequence, and Tory councils would have acquired a dangerous ascendancy. But there will be, in the existing state of the case, little British sympathy on the side of Louis Philippe. The policy of the later years of his reign has belied the promise of its opening, and

he falls enveloped in the weakness inherent in whatever is palpably selfish and unjust. Still there is much cause for fear. There may be yet a re-action in France in favour of wiser heads and more moderate measures; but, for the present at least, the destinies of the country and the peace of Europe seem to be in the hands of an unthinking and reckless mob.

To what are we to attribute the singularly mistaken policy of Louis Philippe during the last few years, so unlike, in at least the degree of sagacity which it evinced, that of the earlier portion of his reign? "Forget," said Napoleon, in urging one of his generals to exert all the energy of his more vigorous days," forget that you are fifty." Has the ex-king of the French been unable to forget that he is considerably turned of seventy? Has that peculiarly solid understanding for which in his more vigorous years the man was so remarkable, been gradually giving way during the last few years of his life; and are we to recognise in the gross imprudence— to give it no harsher name—which led to the present catastrophe, as in his shameless attempts to aggrandize his family in Spain, and his homologation as national of the revoltingly unjust assault on Tahiti, the signs of a decaying intellect, no longer able to control, as formerly, the selfish instincts of his nature, constitutionally very strong? And is this wise and brave man to be regarded as forming one illustrious example more of that class of the wise and brave so well described by Johnson ?

"In life's last scene what prodigies surprise!

Fears of the brave and follies of the wise.

From Marlb'rough's eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires, a driveller and a show."

Certainly the latter scenes of the drama of his reign, to whatever they owe their peculiarity of character, read a fearful lesson. By virtually ceasing to be-what the title conferred

on him exclusively recognised—" King of the French," and by setting himself, on the effete principles of the ancient regime, to be a king on but his own behalf and that of his family, he has ceased to be a king at all. It is noticeable, too, that he should have fallen a victim to a spirit evoked, indirectly at least, by that second French Revolution to which he owed his throne. Save for that Revolution, and its more immediate consequences, the Anti-Corn-Law League of Richard Cobden would have been altogether an impracticability, even in Britain. It was in order to prevent any such quiet but powerful combination of the British merchant from thwarting his plans in France, that the monarch's illjudged stand against the reform banquet was so uncompromisingly taken. He resolved that no French league formed on the model of that of Britain should give law to him; and to that rash determination the third French Revolution owes its origin.-March 1, 1848.

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.

"TRUST not," says an ancient English writer, "to the haleness of an old man's appearance, however stout and hearty he seem. He is a goodly tree, but hollow within, and decayed at the roots, and ready to fall with the first blast of wind." The country has received a startling illustration of that enhanced uncertainty of tenure by which men hold their lives when they have passed the indicated term, and "fallen due to nature," in the death of one of the most extraordinary men of modern times. A goodly but ancient tree has sud