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FRANCE.—The project of the Questors for defining the right of the Assembly to call out the troops necessary for its protection, and to dis- pose of those troops by naming its own general over them, came to be discussed in the Assembly on Monday. The formal question was, whether or not the project should be brought under consideration. The assemblage of representatives and of strangers was unusually great ; and before the business began, earnest preliminary discussion was going on throughout the hall. The Ministers counted on the as- sistance of the Left generally ; but though the Left had at a preliminary meeting resolved to oppose the measure, the resolution was not that of the entire party ; and it was understood that Cavaignac, Dufaure, and others, in greater apprehension of treason to the Republic from the Em- pire than from the Monarchy, were inclined to support the Questors against the Executive. The Ministers were therefore apprehensive of de- feat ; and the momentous ulterior question in every mouth was, "Will the President of the Republic execute the resolution of the Questors if the Assembly pass it ?" His partisans asserted roundly that he would not : he would withhold publication of it, till he could issue with it and against it his own manifesto to the nation. The right of the Assembly to demand the force necessary for its defence was originally asserted on the 11th of May 1848, by a decree posted in the barracks by the Provisional Government before the Constituent As- sembly had been organized. The words of that decree were very gene. ral : they asserted the prerogative of the Assembly to call out the forces necessary for its defence' and they raised the inference that the Assembly should also marshal the troops so called out at its own will. When the Constitution was framed, the right thus asserted for the Assembly was formally but not very precisely embodied ; at least, the clauses on this subject do not give the Assembly the power to appoint its own separate general over the troops it may appropriate for its defence. The props. sition of the Questors—M. Raze, General Leflo, and another—defined the right in such a manner as to make the power of the Assembly over the national force original and direct, without the intervention of the War Office, and uncontrolled by the central Executive. The original propo- sition empowered the President of the Assembly to nominate the com- mander, or to delegate his power of nomination to the Questors ; but this feature was so plainly prompted by the personal vanity and ambition of M. Baze, that the Committee nominated by the Bureaux caused it to disappearabout a fortnight since.

The first words in the debate of Monday were spoken by M. Ferdinand Lasteyrie, a conciliator. He admitted that the proposition of the Questors was aggressive, and pro.. posed an order of the day motive, which would "assert the tights of the Assembly, but would do so with moderation." He proposed a resolution, that the Assembly, considering the Constitution to declare the decree of 11th May 1848 to be still in force, orders that decree to be posted up in the bar- The Minister of War, General St. Arnaud, declared that this was no- thing but the reproduction of the proposition of the Questors.

While the country was perfectly calm, the Questors proposed to deprive the Executive of all prerogative by transferring it to the Assembly, or by setting up in the Assembly a similar prerogative. The result would be the destruction of all discipline ; for how could the army act when two persons had the right to give it supreme orders ? The country looked with aston- ishment on the aggression, and the Assembly should repel both propositions.

No speaker followed the Minister at War for some minutes, and it seemed as if a division would be taken immediately; when General Leflo, one of the Questors, suddenly entered the tribune.

He earnestly and gravely insisted, that no feeling of hostility had origi- nated the proposition, only a desire to assert the independence of the As- sembly, by making its right clear. He, who had been so many years in the army, saw no probable injury to discipline in the double command ; while at least he could show, by a great example, that if such command had ex- isted under the old Chamber, the coup-de-main of 1848 would never have succeeded. The formal vote would not add to the incontestible right, but would give to that right a moral force.

The Assembly was now in commotion for nearly half an hour ; speak- ers rushing to the tribune, and descending on finding themselves totally disregarded ; agitated groups forming and re-forming on the floor of the hail; the leaders of parties addressing those around them with earnest tones and lively gestures. At last, M. Lasteyrie announced that he with- drew his order motive.

The President of the Assembly then read another order of the day me- five, by M. Broglie, M. Darn, and M. de Montakmbert—" that the As- sembly, considering that the Constitution asserting sufficiently the right of the Assembly, passes to the order of the day."

M. Cremieux now spoke from the tribune, on "the situation," as the general organ of the Mountain. He attacked the Moderates, as the per- petual violators of the Constitution ; and declared that his party had no fears from the President of the Republic. M. Vitet, the reporter of the Committee on he proposition declared that bad not the Minister of War now denied the right of the Assembly to call for troops directly, without application to the Minister of War, the Committee would have assented to the proposition of M. Lasteyrie ; but, after that denial, such a de- claration would not suffice ; for to admit the pretensions of the Govern- ment would be to place the Assembly in a secondary position. Colonel Charms, of the Mountain, now leaped up, and said that the denial of the right by the Minister would change his vote—to one for the Questors. At this intimation of open division among the Mountain, M. Thiers is said to have clapped his hands with delight. The regular debate was again suspended, and a score of speakers addressed each his own group on the floor : the bell of the President and the cries of the ushers were alike disregarded in the crisis of deliberation.

When the speaking was resumed, M. Michel of Bourges gave the weight of his eloquence and sarcasm against the Questors; and again seemed to reclaim the mass of the Left. But M. Vitet, violently attacked the Mountain for their union with the partisans of the Elysoe ; and then Colonel Charras, in revulsion, declared that as it was now again plain that the proposition was directed against the Opposition and the people, he would vote against the Questors. After more canvassing and group oratory on the floor, it was at last determined that the discussion be closed. But notwithstanding this determination, M. Thiers entered the tribune, with the desire of saying a few words to such as Colonel Charras. The endeavour was irregular ; but, against protests from indignant objectors, President Dupin let M. Thiers proceed; and at last M. Dupin got the for- mal leave of the Assembly for M. Thiers to speak. M. Thiers professed only to give explanations to Colonel Charms; but in fact he made a re- gular speech against the Minister of War and the doctrine of passive obedience which he lately inculcated in his first general order to the army. M. Thiers was met by a constant succession of interruptions; but seemed to feel that all was at a stake and that he must put forth a great effort. M. M ichel of Bourges shouted to his party against the snare which M. Thiers was setting for them ; M. Jules Fevre ejaculated sarcastic refer. ences to the nocturnal committee of safety extemporized by M. Thiers after the fatal division on the electoral law ; and from hundreds of other voices there arose such a cross-fire of voices, questions, and contemptuous mani- festations' that M. 'niers was at last fairly driven from the tribune. At this point victory seemed to lean towards the league of the Ministerialists the Mountain; and the probabilities in favour of the Ministry were in- creased by the effect which M. Jules Fevre produced in a short speceb, which at once denounced the passive obedience doctrine of the Minister of War, and effectively exposed the special and partisan drift of M. Thiers. But before going to a division, General Bodeau put a short and decisive question—" Is the decree of May 11, which was posted up in the bar- racks, still to be found in the barracks; or has it been withdrawn by the Government?" The Minister of War answered without eircumlocufiont from his seat—that 'when he came into office, he found of those few de- crees a small number still remaining in the barracks ; being asked if they should remain, and finding that they were a cause of difficulty, he gave orders for their removal, and saw his orders executed. At this announcement the Assembly seemed thunderstruck. M. Base, M. Cremieux, and others, rapidly dashed into the tribune, and as suddenly emerged from it ; the consultation-groups and the hubbub of conversation were again at their height ; M. Si/etcher, Colonel Charras, and M. Victor Hugo, were seen most passionately addressing those around them. It is said that the Moderates contemplated an impeachment of the Minister of War in- stanter, but that the Mountain would not join.

The Assembly proceeded to a division on the question that the propo- sition of the Questors be taken into consideration. The number present was 708: the Ayes were 300, and the Noes 408; so the proposition of the Questors was cast aside by a majmity of 108!

Since this second defeat of the Majority—for the slender preponderance on the electoral bill was deemed a defeat—public opinion has been almost wholly occupied with the future prospects of parties. The grave Journal des Dehats concurs in the general statement that the Majority is routed and disbanded ; and the Constitutionnel shouts in its glee as if the Empire were already proclaimed and accepted by all.

Some attempt has been made to recover lost ground, by those politi- cians of the Moderate party who were least violent in their late counsels. In February last, a project of a law of internal administration—or, as we might interpret it, of a municipal corporation bill—was referred to a Committee. At that time there was no notion of making the bill a party measure; but the notion is now seized upon by the Moderates of taking up the franchise proposed in this measure for municipalities, and adopting it for a Parliamentary franchise of a somewhat more liberal character than that given by the electoral law of May 31. The municipal bill had made some distinction between natives and non-natives of communes, as to the length of domicile which should be exacted from each voter. The Mo- narchist majority of the Committee proposed that natives shall have been domiciled six months, but non-natives three years, to entitle them to vote, —a proposal deemed grossly unfair to the Republicans, as the native agricultural labourers of the communes are generally Monarchists, while the migratory artisans in them are generally Republicans. The Moun- taineers of the Committee refused to take part in the deliberations, after it was resolved to make political a bill originally intended to be purely municipal ; and the party of the Mountain has pursued the same policy in the debate on the bill, which commenced on Tuesday.

HasTovza.—Successive bulletins, within the last week or two, prepared us to expect the death of the King of Hanover, which took place on the morning of Tuesday the 18th. When King Ernest breathed his last, his son, his relatives and friends, were at his bedside ; and he carries with him to the crowded Herrenbausen tomb the respect of the people whom he was called to govern, and the affectionate personal regards of the citizens among whom he spent his later and kingly years. On a rapid view of the incidents of King Ernest's long life, it is seen that they throw themselves into three groups,—the events of his youth and young military manhood, as a British Prince ; those of his maturity, as a British Peer and politician ; and those of the last fifteen years of his life, as a German Sovereign.

Ernest Augustus, the fifth son of the British Sovereign George the Third, was born on the 5th of June 1771. He spent his infancy and early youth at Kew. Dr. Hughes, one of his tutors, half a century ago recorded the opinion that Prince Ernest was one of the best Latin scholars of his time, and in general a boy of great aptitude and mental, vigour. In 1786, Prince Ernest went with those two brothers who afterwards became Dukes of Sussex and Cambridge, to the University of Giittingen, attended by "governors, preceptors, and gentlemen." They pursued their studies under Meyer Heyne Less and Feder. "Anecdotes are still current in Gottingen story- books of the miseries which the solemn professors had to go through in train- ing the Princes; and as whipping-boys were obsolete, they no doubt suffered much." Leaving Gottingen in 1790, he selected the army for a career; he entered the Ninth Hanoverian Dragoons, and in three years became its Colonel. Of a powerful muscular frame, he seemed by nature qualified to be a soldier ; and of the extremest Tory political principles, it seemed as if a war against republicanism and the sovereignty of peoples was the very one for him to take a strenuous part in. At Tourney, in 1794, he commanded a brigade of cavalry ; and took such personal share in the conflict that he was wounded in the arm and lost an eye. In consequence of these wounds, he returned to Eng- land; but in a short time afterwards he was again in Germany, and again fightiug. A diurnal biographer relates an act of bodily prowess and courage performed by him at the celebrated sortie from Nimeguen. " Having broken his sabre in the fight, he was assailed by a French dragoon, who aimed a furious blow at the Prince's head. Prince Ernest parried the blow with the fragment of his blade ' ; threw his arms round the body of his assail- ant, lifted him from his horse—for he, like all his brothers, was a man of :Emt personal strength—and carried him a prisoner to the British quarters." the same writer states that he afterwards commanded (vicarially) the rear- guard of the British force in the retreat through Holland. He was left in command of the line " of demarcation" in Westphalia, till1795 ; when peace being made between Prussia and France, the army retired into Hanover From 1796 to 1799 we find the Prince at his father'il court in England. In 1799, he was created Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale in the Peerage of Great Britain and Earl of Armagh in the Peerage of Ireland; Parliament endowing him with 12,000/ a year. From this time to the close of the war in 1815, he was almost constantly and responsibly engaged as a soldier ; his residence in England being only at those brief intervals allowed to Europe by the hollow truces of Bonaparte and Pitt. Six continuous years he did stay at home ; and in that period he held the nominal command of the Severn and South-west Districts ; spending his time, however, in the metropolis. When the English were not bodily in the field, the Duke of Cumberland joined the Prussians. He was in the Prussian ranks at the battle of Leipsic. He does not appear to have been in the Peninsula, or to have served at all under Wellington. After the battle of Leipsie, he was allotted high com- mand in the forces which retook Hanover ; and at the peace which ensued on the downfall of Bonaparte, the Duke of Cumberland had attained the baton of the highest military command in the British service—his commission as Field-Marshal having been given him in 1813. The second epoch of his life commenced with his marriage, in 1815, to the Princess Frederica of Mecklenberg Strelitz ; and his return home, to take a permanent and active part in the domestic politics of his native country. The Princess he married was his own first cousin ; eminent for her personal beauty ; and she had already been twice a widow,—by divorce from her first husband, the Prince Louis of Prussia, and by surviving her second husband, a Prince of Selma Braunfels. Her marriage with the Duke of Cambridge had been projected, and the manner in which she broke off that project was so inconsistent with what her aunt the consort of George the Third thought right or delicate, that during the reign of the old King,

and while Queen Charlotte was the arbitress of court etiquette, the Duchess of Cumberland was never admitted to the Royal circle, though every family influence both home and foreign, and even Ministerial interference, was powerfully moved by the Duke. The personal obstacles were not removed till the Prince Regent became George the Fourth. During the University life of the Duke, and during his subsequent military career, public fame had condemned him as a man of unrefined pleasures and of degmded vices ; and his unpopularity was so general, and so strongly felt, that Parliament acted on it—when a bill was introduced in the first year after his marriage to increase Ins allowance from 12,000/. to 18,0001., it was thrown out on a second reading. The popular feeling against him was raised to the height of positive hatred in the year 1810, by an event the natural mystery of which was exaggerated and vindictively perverted by heated partisanship—the fatal episode of the valet Sellis. A biographical notice in the Morning Chronicle fairly recalls the almost forgotten history. "In the month of June 1810, a valet of his Royal Highness, named Sellis, was found with his throat cut in a bedroom at some distance from the Royal Duke's apartments in St. James's Palace ; and, as the circumstance of course excited a considerable degree of attention, a minute investi,,eation of it immediately took place. The Coroner sum- moned a jury, and one of the most full and minute investigations upon re- cord was gone into for the purpose of ascertaining the real circumstances under which Sellis had met his death. The result was a verdict by the Jury of (felo de se) upon the body of the unfortunate man. But, after the transaction had proceeded thus far, rumours got abroad that Sellis had fallen not by his own hand but by that of his master ; and from that time forward his Royal Highness continued incessantly to be made the victim of the most outrageous calumnies. On one occasion these rumours assumed such a shape, in the columns of a paper called the Independent Whig, that the then Attorney- General, Sir Vieary Gibbs, thought it fit that they should be noticed, and he accordingly filed an ex-officio information against that paper. Neither that - proceeding, however, nor the long interval which elapsed between 1810 and 1832, had satisfied the malignity of the private and personal enemies of the Royal Duke. In a work published in the month of March 1832, written by a person named Phillips, and entitled Authentic Records of the Royal Family during the last Seventy Years, all the rumours which had been in circulation for two-and-twenty years were revived, and put into a plausible shape. The book was composed with no ordinary degree of bitterness ; and its language and the facts adduced showed that it was the production of a person endowed with no common powers and talents; the libel itself being introduced in a mode evincing considerable ingenuity. The case against the Duke (as upon the evidence adduced in the inquest) was taken first ; and then the writer referred to and produced the evidence of a witness not examined on the original inquiry, for the purpose of showing that, if he had been so examined, his testimony would have had the effect of completely altering the decision of the jury. For the libels contained in this publication his Royal Highness tiled a criminal informa- tion against the author, and he himself appeared in the witness-box in the Court of King's Bench. He there explained the whole transaction to the Jury ; narrating how he had been attacked in bed by a person armed with a sabre, from which he received several blows across the head, the scars of which he exhibited to the Jury—bow he had leaped upon the floor—and how, after wounding him in the thigh, the assassin had fled. Sellis was found in his own room, with his throat cut and the door locked : one of the versions of the libel stated that the key had been pushed into the room be- neath the door, so as to try to make it appear that it had been fastened from the inside! A verdict of guilty was almost instantly returned by the Jury against the libeller." It should be added, that at this trial the foreman of the Coroner's Jury who made the inquest in 1810, Francis Place, the once famous "Radical tailor" of Charing Cross, bore witness that the inquest had been carefully and searchingly conducted, and that its conclusions were in strict conformity with the evidence. The well-known hostility of Mr. Place to the Duke's politics gave all the more weight to his testimony, and the slander had already lost all public belief before it fell out of the public memory. "In 1818, when allowances were made for the Dukes of Clarence and Cambridge, a claim was put in for the Duke of Cumberland : but the pro- • posal again failed, in consequence of too much (10,000/. a year additional) having been asked for the Duke of Clarence. In 1819, however, the per- sistent Duke succeeded ; and in a general scramble, consequent upon the re- port of a Select Committee, he obtained the coveted income. This was in- creased afterwards, as the Royal brothers died off, to 21,000/. a year. That sum the Duke of Cumberland continued to receive after he had ascended the Hanoverian throne ; and that amount the British public gains by his death."

Against all the measures of political reform and religious tolerance which distinguished the second and third decades of the 'present century, he op- posed himself with sternness. As early as 1808, he presented a petition from the Corporation of Dublin against the Catholic claims ; and in 1829 he came home from Berlin for the express purpose of using his last efforts against the passing of a measure which would, as he thought, fundamentally shake the Protestant constitution. He declared to Lord Eldon in reference to the Catholic Emancipation Bill—" For me, will act as I believe my sainted father would wish me to act ; and that is, to oppose to the utmost the dangerous measure, and to withlraw all confidence from the dangerous men who are forcing it through Parliament. How my father would act were he again on the throne, and in possession of all his powers, you and I, Lord Eldon, know well : he would kick them out of his Cabinet, with a no- tice that not one of them need ever think of coming back." The Duke op- posed the Reform Bill of 1831-2 with equal decision. In the later years of the Duke's residence in England, the national aver- sion changed its character to somewhat of a political dread. Towards the latter part of the reign of William the Fourth, the successive deaths of the Princess Charlotte and of the elder brothers of the Duke of Cumberland had left only the present Queen, as daughter of the Duke of Kent, to intervene between the Duke of Cumberland and the crown. Already the prospect of his legitimate succession vexed and disturbed the body of the people, when a political party proclaimed its discovery that the Duke was plotting treason,

and conspiring to alter the succession to the crown in his own favour and to

the disherison of the Princess Victoria. The history of this political episode has been condensed, by an unfriendly pen, as follows. "The report of Mr. flume's Select Committee on the Orange conspiracy' is still within the re- collection of most of our readers; and although the dispassionate considera- tion of time has led to a very general conviction that the Duke of Cumber- land was ignorant of half the mad nonsense and treason which were talked in secret and written in cipher in his name, and as if with his sanction and concurrence, it is still impossible to avoid believing that his own solemn de- nial of all knowledge of the transactions of the illegal society, of which he was the chief, was, in the spirit in which the repudiation was to be taken, untrue, and that from first to last his conduct was unworthy and unwise. Harsher words it would be indecorous now to use ; but such words give but a faint idea of the hurricane of public indignation which followed the Parliamentary exposure of the extraordinary conspiracy, to which the Duke of Cumberland, contrary to all the laws which should have governed him as a prince of the blood and as a citizen, had lent his name. In this instance he reached the climax of his evil reputation ; and his wonted

audacity, in the face of the popular sentence, availed him little, for the con- demnation VMS sanctioned and engrossed by a formal Parliamentary resolu- tion. At one time it will be remembered, there was a very decided inclina- tion in the House of Commons, during the development of the insane con- spiracy, to send the Duke of Cumberland, the Bishop of Salisbury, (who was the Chaplain to the association,) Lord Kenyon, Colonel Fairman, and others, before the Central Criminal Court, to take their trials for a criminal offence : and had the documents been forthcoming which were supposed to be in ex- istence, and of the full purport of which the Duke had probably not been aware, the results might have been even more serious than they were. As it was, the Duke of Cumberland escaped with an indirect censure from the House of Commons. He withdrew (rein the society; the society was sup- pressed ; and Orangeism, in its dangerous shape, became a matter of history." The nation is now more impartially ready to believe the excuse then made for him by his friends, that he was the victim of the fanatic Colonel Faiirrnan. It was with a sense of relief, and almost with a sense of gratitude, that on the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne, the nation learned that the first British Peer who swore allegiance to her was her uncle, the Duke of Cum- berland; who, by the same event which made her Queen of England, had himself, under the Salique law, become King of Hanover. He and the English people gladly parted company when he set out for his Continental dominions, in 1837. The last epoch of the late King of Hanover's life forms a minute section of European history. Our readers are aware, that in a few months after he reached Hanover, he revoked the freer constitution which his brother and predecessor had granted about the time of the revolutions of France and Belgium hi 1830; that his people murmured, and rioted, and the professors of his famed University of Gottingen resigned en masse; but that he dra- gooned his people effectually, and reduced his University to order by expul- sions which have permanently degraded it (rein its former supremacy among the German Universities ; that the Germanic Diet interfered ; that the King, in 1840, volunteered a constitution, containing nearly all the guarantees which the moderate Liberals of his capital had de- manded; and that this constitution has been faithfully observed. It is also more easily remembered, that the genuine son of George the Third was preserved by his dogged bravery from the panic and constitution-fever which seized all the German Sovereigns in the troubles of 1848; and that the King of Hanover, by his English honour, and the constitutional educa- tion which he used to boast that he had received through thirty years' expe- rience in the British House of Peers, was preserved from that despotic re- action, attended by universal prostration of character, which has been spread- ing over Europe in the last two years. Some portion of the good odour in which the late King died has been ascribed, however, to the fact that "King Ernest and prosperity were concurrent" in Hanover. "Hence the affectionate consideration with which always the Hanoverians would speak of, and perhaps blame, unser alter KOnig.' They would not see the austere and un-German reserves of his court, and they would not no- tice the stiff and very English hauteur with which he acknowledged their existence on public occasions. His manners were very different from those of his easy, smiling predecessor ; but the inhabitants of the capital very quickly recovered all that. He did not meddle in small matters with the citizens, and the citizens could afford to laugh at his patriarchal obtrusiveness in arranging all the private aftliirs of his military officers. His reserve saved him, no doubt, from many mistakes; and his anxiety about his hobby, the army, left his Ministers at peace; which they turned to ac- count. All who hare ever resided in Hanover bear witness to the result—his decided popularity; and perhaps the rejoicings in his capital on his successive birthdays were as genuine tributes of good-will as sovereign ever received from subjects."

The late King is succeeded by his only surviving child, George Frederick; an amiable prince, of considerable accomplishments, but who labours under the calamitous visitation of total blindness. On this account, the late King left his paternal directions, which the son will no doubt carry out, that twelve counsellors be sworn to attend perpetu- ally in rotation of twos, for reading over to him, slowly and audibly, every state document, and for attesting his signature.

INDIA..—The overland mail from Bombay on the 17th October has brought no news of the least interest. In the absence of facts, the papers circulate and speculate upon a rumour that Lord Dalhousie has a pro- ject for creating a new Presidency of Lahore, and for transferring the su- preme government from Calcutta to Simla.

THE AUSTRALIAN CALIFORNIA.—The Indian mail has extended to a somewhat later date the accounts from the Bathurst gold region ; the pa- pers reach to the middle of August. The most remarkable facts are the ' peaceable and orderly behaviour of the miners, the discovery of gold in divers new regions, and the upturning in the Turon diggings of a larger mass of ore than had previously been discovered in the world. A lump of auriferous quartz which weighed nearly three hundredweight, and when crushed by the tomahawk yielded gold weighing 102 pounds 9 ounces 5 pennyweights, had been discovered by a Mr. Suttor, and was valued to him at about four thousand pounds sterling.