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    caused by the resort of the men to " Socialist' * measures . Yes , the contest between capital and labour is inevitably coming , if it has not come . For our own part we view it with no fear , knowing well tha t it cannot fail to end in measures beneficial to both parties- ^ that it is only the struggle to attain , a better stage of existence for both ; but it is notVpnderful that those who enter into it in bitterness and bad

    faith , see with alarm a progress of events beyond their strength to resist . The men are now employing their savings and resources , not in passive idleness , but in production ; they meet discharge from employment with self-employment ; they take the business into their own hands ; and if they persevere , by that course they settle the dispute on their own terms . Meanwhile , capitalists have the fear of commercial death before their eyes , and are afraid .

    Commerce always views change with dismay , and here are two changes imminent—the change from peace to war , and that from the old antagonistic industry to concert ; but even those awestriking cases might be approached with less trepidation if we really had a Government * in lieu of the elderly tea-party that sits at the top of the empire , arid can ' t help itself . We have no Government ; we scarcely hope that Parliament can give us one ; and if either Ministers or their successors " appeal to the nation , " we have no hope that a new Parliament would give us a Government worthy of the name ; nay , we are not certain that the nation itself could do so .

    For it is scattered , divided , in a fit state to be mastered by any unscrupulous power that might choose to step in . Our aristocracy is not to blame for being too aristocratic- ^ -would it were more so , for then it might have some chivalry , some dignity ^ some sense of nationality . It is nothing . It furnishes the helpless gentlemen that call themselves statesmen , and have reduced English statesmanship to an organized helplessness . Our middle classywhat is it doing?—quarrelling ^ about " reforms , " splitting itself up into Manchester sections , and

    London sections ^ and courting rebuffs from the chief of the Helpless . It is arraying itself in this industrial dispute against the working class . The working classes , too , politically dead—the relics of their organizations rotting to pieces , their power of action sapped by universal mistrust , show no sign of vigour except in this industrial movement . Say not that we are railing when we enumerate these pieces of " old news " : they are deplorable facts , upon which it behoves us to fix our eyes until we can muster heart of grace and conquer them , forcing them to be no facts .

    What is the issue out of this national trifling ? Are we to look to Parliament , which is summoned for the 3 rd of February , " then to meet for the despatch of business " ? No ; we understand that farce . Are we to find a rescue in any mere " Liberal " agitation ? Are we to attain anything better , any mastery over ourselves and our own destiny , while we remain in " the rut" of used-up political devices ? Truly the world will not accommodate itself to our mechanical ways : Europe is heaving with immense movements , and England will not be

    spared . The day of danger will at last overtake us , and then we may become once more a nation , with a fresh unity and a new spirit ; but if we could arouse that spirit in ourselves beforehand , it would be all the happier for us . If there were any dozen men , just now , commanding the ear of the public , that could abandon the old stale fuss about " keeping out the Tories , " about Manchester squabbles , about " reforms " in all their varieties , about constituencies and candidates , about middle class and working class and all distinctions between them , about Gorhamites and Puseyites ,

    about Protection and Free-trade , —in short , about every subject that has been reduced to a pretext and a cant , and were really to " appeal to the nation , " declaring that henceforth they would trust solely and wholly to the entire nation , seeking for political measures the national sanction by means of national franchise , and for national security by arming the body of the nation for its own defencethat set of mqn would the nation recognize as a national party , and it would become a national power , with more vitality than lies in the worn out old " Parties in the State" which make Cabinets ,

    or prostituted Parliaments . Give us , " national franchise , " an armed nation , national allies , and God defend the right . But as a means to that end , give us a national partjr- ^ a party refusing to look any more at class distinctions , or sects , or degrees , and aoting only for the whole nation in the name of the whole .

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    THE CHURCH IN DISTRESS . People say the horizon is dark ; that there are breakers a-head , black clouds charged with lightnings above , and a roaring wind astern , driving the vessel of the State into the very jaws of destruction . It may be so . The vessel of the State is a very old and a very well-worn figure ; . but we suppose there is a vessel of the Church also , and though the question may be inconvenient , is she not in the same predicament ?

    In the same predicament ? Yes ; with the important difference that her crew are in a state of irreconcilable mutiny ; her rudder quite gone ; her course nowhither ; her " Articles " disputed ; " wise obedience" put out of joint by the aberrations of " private judgment "; one part of the crew constantly on _ the eve of deserting to the enemy , and anofjier doily threatening to take to the boats ; the

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    THE LAST NEW CONSTITUTION BY LOTJIS NAPOLEON BONAPARTE . The Neo-imperial Constitution , so graciously vouchsafed by the Saviour of France to a people reluctantly grateful for the obligation , will not have disappointed the majority of expectants , who were farsighted enough to expect— -nothing . They have fairly earned the proverbial blessedness of indifference . This precious document has just come to hand , as we were meditating on the boasted

    " political institutions" of the Empire ; institutions which , as we said last week , were based on the negation of all that constitutes the vital forces of a nation . By these " vital forces" we mean liberties , without which man individually , or man collectiyely , is incomplete ; we mean , tooi all tna * constitutes the intellectual and spiritual life of a nation—its genius , its virtue , its public morality , its intelligence , its arts , its letters , its political culture , its mental independence , its freedom of speech , of thought , of conscience .

    To . these political institutions , then , to this absolute negation of a nation ' s life , France , like a strong man blindfold and handcuffed , is tied and bound by her present deliverer , after all her struggles and convulsions , after the unripened hopes and unfulfilled , promises of thirty-seven years of imperfect constitutionalism . Into the social edifice of the Emperor , as the perfection of

    human wisdom , the " regenerated France" of 1789 is invited to seek peace and shelter in 1852 . As if this " social edifice" had not been tried and found wanting ; even when fresh from the hands of victory , adorned by glories , and consecrated by conquests ; sustained by an arm that had organized Democracy on the ruins of thrones , and had never known palsy nor decay till the source of its vitality was forgotten and betrayed .

    We defer to more mature consideration a more thorough sifting of these new " conditions of Government" which , as " at the commencement of this century , " " under analogous circumstances " ( to quote the text ) , are to " strengthen tottering society , and to raise France to a lofty degree of prosperity and grandeur . " For the present we are content to cull from a heap of sophisms , a few of the most mendacious disfigurements of reason , and of history .

    M . Louis Napoleon " has not the pretension of substituting a personal theory for the experience of centuries . " The Monarchy of eight hundred years was then , it seems , " the personal theory , " and the Empire of eleven years was the " experience of centuries . " So again , when the present M . Bonaparte sought in the past the examples that might T > est be followed , what men had given them , and what benefits had resulted , he is imperially using the plural for the singular ; for the men and the examples , and the benefits are , purely and simply , " my Uncle , " and nothing else .

    When he talks of the " prosperity and grandeur to which France was raised by the Empire , we ask to what period of the Empire does he refer ? To the retreat from Moscow , or to the occupation of Paris ? " I have taken as models those institutions which , instead of vanishing at the first breath of popular agitation , were only overturned by the might of all Europe coalesced ugainst us . "

    It is true that the institutions of the Empire-Vere destroyed by the allied armies ; but born of war , how long would they have lived in times of peace I In the next paragraph we are asked why France , which , for fifty years , has " made progress" in virtue alone of Napoleonic institutions , should not readopt them . Here is the confession that France has made progress during this half century , of which only the first fifteen years enjoyed the blessings of the Consulate and the Empire ; the remaining thirty-five years having been sacrificed to your much-abused constitutional regime .

    Then follows a resume of that disastrous centralization which the Emperor consolidated and developed ; and under which , as under an Upas , all efforts at self-government have languished , and all independence faded . In eulogizing this vast engine of corruption and servility , 'M . Louis Napoleon too faithfully points out the secret of his own domination—the causes and the cure . Let France well ponder on that same centralization , with its army of functionaries—in every house a slave of Government , if not a epy .

    " Wherefore , since they have the same origin , should not his political inatitutions have the same chance of duration ?" Only from the heated brain of the monomaniac

    of Strasburg and Boulogne could such an inquiry have sprung . In 1804 , Napoleon did but reknit , under a revolutionary form , that despotism of Louis XIV ., in which the King was the State . It was only a brief paroxysm that had separated the France of the Empire , from the Frailce , of the lettres de cachet and of the Bastille . But this' chance inheritor of the Imperial institutions has to wipe out from the mind of the France of torday the " fond records " of more than thirty years of a more or less liberal and constitutional peace . The difference is immense .

    The rest of the draft , indeed the entire composition , is but an official reproduction ofthe pamphlet on " Revision , " which appeared a day or two before the coup d ' e ' tat , and of the refined and truthful lucubrations of that congenial historian M . Granier de Cassagnac . The Constitution is , in fact , as we announced some weeks since in our Letters from Paris it would be , the Constitution of the Year VIII . The Senate , which is to be the depository of the fundamental part and of the public liberties , " will be composed of members riamerf for life by the President . " Their functions , as befits their

    high calling , will be gratuitous . "However , the President may grant a salary not exceeding thirty thousand francs . " So much for the dignity and virtue of the Senate : so much for its independence . Does the sentence we have italicized require comment ? The Senate will rival its infamous prototype in servility , faithlessness , and degradation . The legislative corps is to hold the pursestrings , and to accept or reject , without initiation of its own , and without the power of enforcing amendments , the

    measures of the Government , with closed doors and deliberations unpublished—save in the pliant Moniteur . The projects of laws are drawn up and discussed by the Council of State , nominated , presided Over , and always revocable by the President . A Chamber of Mutes , a Senate of Satellites , a Council of Mercenaries , such are to be the bulwarks of the political institutions under which France is again to become united and society strengthened . Such is the blessed result of Napoleonic ideas !

    To be sure—the last appeal to the people ( under proper conditions of preliminary massacres , whole sale incarcerations , sufficient deportations to the torrid zone ) is ' still acknowledged . If you ever again desire a change , O ungrateful and inconstant French People ! there still remain for you— - "the vote and the sabre . '

    The last paragraph of this splendid document ( destined to be as immortal as its predecessors ) has a solemnity worthy of the occasion and of its pious and gentle author . It has been thought worthy of the largest type by the sympathizing Globe , Of course , the words that fall from the pen of that punctual observer of oaths , M . Louis Bonaparte , are strong as Holy Writ . "

    " May the sanction which you have given to my efforts be blessed by Heaven ! Then—Peace wiia BE ASSURED AT HOME AND ABROAD , MY ABDBNT HOPES win . bb fulfilled ( mes vceux scront combtes ) , my MISSION WILL BE ACCOMPLISHED . " Louis NapoiiEon Bonaparte . " The best commentary on these memorable words is the signature affixed . There was a time when the mission of M . Louis Bonaparte was said to be

    the Frontier of the Rhine and the avenging of Waterloo ! Has he changed his mind , with his army of assassins , general led by marauders , at his back ? It is difficult to say where his own chief danger lies—in peace or in war . He seems as fatally condemned to the one as to the other . In either case we may , without the gift of prophecy , be permitted to predict that the second edition of the Constitution of the Year VIII . will be the briefest in duration—even of French constitutions .

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Jan. 17, 1852, page 56, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1918/page/12/