20 DECEMBER 1851, Page 10

"An Englishman," who " has been much mixed up with

French parties and French politics," has favoured the Times with an admirable letter of three columns on "Louis Napoleon and his Policy. The fol- lowing descriptive passages are valuable for the clearness with which they draw distinctions too much forgotten by many in England. " If ever a party has been hardly treated by writers of all claims in.this oountry, it is that of the modern French Repubhcans. They comprise great portion of the courage and the larger part of the principle of the na- tion. Come what may, it will survive ; and whatever dynasty or despotism is fated to rule, France will always have to count with It. After the oppro- brium lavished upon those Republicans, what crime have they committed ? Did the Revolution of 1848 massacre peaceful citizens, pour yollies of mus- ketry and grape into the mansions of the Boulevards, shoot its prisoners in oold blood, and organize a reign of terror ? It did nothing of all this : font suffered Louis Philippe to escape; it left its worst enemy, Thiers, unharmed; it abolished the punishment of death for treason ; and it held out a more cordial hand to England than we had ever grasped before, or, ,perhaps, are likely to grasp again. Will National Guards under the new regime be per- mitted to fill excursion-trains to London ; or will another Lord Mayor and a posse of Aldermen intrust themselves to the 'sabre and the vote,' which now reign at the Hetet de Vile? The Republic did one other act of magnani- mity—struck off the proscription of the Bonapartes, for which they have re- warded it. "I do not defend the extravagances of Socialism, but Socialists and Re- publicans are not convertible terms; and be the former what they .may, their errors are those of imperfect reasoning, which time, the exercise of political rights, experience, and reason itself, would correct. And it must not be forgotten, that a market has been made of the fears of Frenchmen, and of the ignorance of Englishmen, in the denunciation of the Socialists. Was it proposed to diminish the duties on consumption, to reduce the army, to organize anything like a tax on property, to modify the harsh bankruptcy laws, to attempt a poor-law—to imitate, in fact, that legislation which almost all parties here approve of—and the hue and cry of 'Socialism' was in- stantly got up against the unfortunate Republicans. Had Sir Robert Peel been in the rench Legislature, he would certainly have been hunted down as the worst of Socialists. Socialism, in fact, has been, and is at this very moment, the raw head and bloody bones' of those in power, raised to terrify the timid and the ignorant into voting away their liberties. "I do not and cannot defend the majority of the National Assembly. Their sympathies were always against the Republic—their policy to under- mine and overthrow it. Louis hapoleon and they were in partnership; and from the moment of his election they combined to crush Republican feeling, to harass and oppress the Republicans themselves, and by every artifice, calumny, and violence, to render them contemptible and odious. Together they planned and executed the expedition to Rome ; together they consigned to beggary and ruin the primary teachers, and committed education to the ,Jesuits; together they degraded the University, and subjected it to those same Jesuits ; together they burked universal suffrage, of which they both were born, because, disgusted with their reactionary measures, the electors of Paris had given a vote against them ; together they postponed the laws on the communal organization, the municipal bodies, and the National Guard, and falsified in them the elective principle; together they practised all sorts of illegalities, sanctioning the worst abuse of preventive arrests, arbitrary imprisonments, sham plots, and police conspiracies; together they displayed the grossest partiality in allowing or prohibiting the sale of journals in the streets; together they passed the law on signatures to entrap and Crush the journalists ; and together they kept whole departments of France in the state of siege for nearly three years on the most flimsy of pretences. Let the majority look back and ask itself for whose profit it forgot its duties, out- raged justice, and violated the constitution which it invokes in vain."