23 JANUARY 1864, Page 4

FRENCH LIBERTY AND LIBERALISM.

ACURIOUS compliment has been paid by the English press to the poignant wit and irritant ability of M. Thiers' speech. The great English organs,—the greatest of them, at least, and some of the minor ones,—are evidently alarmed, and trying to write him down, as a man dangerous to the Empire, who has the power, and probably the will, to ignite the excitable gunpowder intellect of France against the present regime. And the ground taken is at least curious for Englishmen. "After all," said the Times of Wednesday, " the machinery of parliamentary government and the responsibility of ministers are only means to an end—the means by which as, we believe, in England the welfare of the public is promoted by the collision of adverse opinions. But if all parliamentary govern- ment can do for France is . . . . to support the preposterous doctrines of protection, or even of prohibition, which disgraced her tariff up to 1860, we cannot greatly wonder that the French nation preferred the end to the means, actions without words, to words without actions." It is new doctrine in England that the principles of self-government are mere means to such ends as free trade. Hitherto it has been the fashion with us to say, when we see our colonies and the States which were once our colonies adopting the foolish doctrines of protection, that the child must learn to dread the fire by the old method of burning itself as it was unable to learn anything from the burns of other people, and that it is far more important to leave States as well as individuals the right to go wrong at their own expense, than to ensure them against going wrong. The one evil tends at least to cure itself; the other tends to aggravate itself. The nation which mulcts itself for a particular class must sooner or later find out the cause of the sore. The nation which is not allowed to blunder freely soon loses first the habit and then the power of self-management altogether. Such has been the good constitutional doctrine in England, which the humdrum Liberals have all their life been spending their energies on believing and preaching. Has it for any special reason absolutely no application to France ? Or, if it has, why is the Emperor to be encouraged in this country to silence the French Liberals simply because, though they hold wise views as to the means, they hold very erroneous ones as to the end, while the Emperor holds erroneous views as to the means and wise views as to the end. It is the first time that the proper and permanent organon of any kind of truth has been openly branded as insignificant in comparison with only one of the results attainable by the use of that organon? But is this a completely fair statement of the case ? As against the argument used,—certainly yes. But, perhaps, not as against the obscure impressions left upon us by the destructive genius of French eloquence and wit. Liberty we all admit,—and by liberty we mean real self-government,—to be of far higher importance than any one result of that government. But is there not something in the brilliant Voltairian genius of French oratory which tends to deprive the nation of this self-governing power rather than to con- tribute to it? In England no speech excites, far less over- excites, the people, which is not the able expression of some deeply rooted popular conviction. Oratory is with us the skilful appeal to feelings and thoughts already exist- ing, and you cannot by even the highest efforts of it make the people feel much more deeply for any appreciable time, though you may make them feel much more distinctly, than they would feel without it. Look at the effect of Mr. Bright's stirring and, in style at least, magnificent speeches on Reform three or four years ago. They only succeeded in making the people realize distinctly how very little they really cared about the matter. Oratory is with us a stimulant to think and a stimulant to judge, but it never, by its own force, over-excites our solid temperament. We are of dull grain, and the intel- lectual power of our highest orators at most only overcomes the natural iuertiaof the Englishman's mood. Hence sharp criticism is to us the sine qud non of intelligent self-government. Without it we should not know how to govern ourselves, and all our energy in that direction would be irregular and spasmodic. But in France the effect of intellectual criticism hostile to the existing Government must be said to be very different. There is no race in which the critical intellect has so much power over the sensations, so much power of creating instantaneously that state of the wishes and the will that craves passionately for a clean sweep of the existing abuses, —a state of feeling and purpose in no way built on, rather say expressly built of—the immediate past, and, therefore, little likely to endure into the future. The wit of the negative French criticism positively ignites the popular mind against the existing regime, produces a state of combustion which is chemically distinct, so to speak, from the evils and the grievances against the rough surface of which these Lucifer-matches of oratory are struck and kindled. It is not, by any means, exaggerating the truth to say that the French nation is often far less competent to decide upon the real remedy for these great evils and grievances after one of these brilliant speeches than it was before. The superficial intellect is so inflamed, is in so rapturous a state of exaltation over the ridicule-singed Government, that the passion of intellectual sportsmen, the ardour of the political chase, is apt to overwhelm and drown altogether the feeling which ought still to be uppermost, the true mode of destroying the evils and the grievances without destroying any elements of social order and stability. We do not say that this is so at present ; we do not think that M. Thiers' witty and moderate speeches in the least passed the bounds of the most temperate opposition. But we do think there are enough signs of that agony of French delight in the process of effective intellectual annihilation to constitute fair ground for the Emperor's evident uneasiness at the situation. If that intermittent fever should again take possession of French pulses, another coup d'etat could alone save the throne.

It seems to us, therefore, that there is some show of reason for saying that, though the power of self-government is infinitely more important than any one of its results, the genius of the French nation is not always assisted, is in some respects even embarrassed, in its efforts to learn the lesson of self-government, by the igniting power of the French wit over the French imagination. When M. Thiers says that the control exercised over the liberty of the press is like telling a secret to ten people, and entreating the eleventh to say nothing about it, he hints very wittily a very untrue esti- mate of the political effect of restricting the liberty of the press in France. It is there the instinct of journalists, as it is in every country, to find occasion for reproaching the Government, but the French journalists have far more power than those of any other country to put all reproaches, whether fundamentally false or fundamentally true, in a way which brings the Government into contempt. If all the keen intellects of French literature were employed, as they have been employed in times gone by, in emulating the keen satire of M. Thiers, we believe they would soon render the Imperial Government almost impossible ; and not only the Imperial Government, but almost any government which might govern France tamely well, but yet without many strokes of brilliant effect. The present law, which gives freedom to the French debates but draws a very marked boundary between the freedom of debating criticism and the freedom of newspaper criticism, no doubt prevents the accumulation of that intellec- tual electricity to which every new shock of French wit at the Government's expense contributes. We do not mean at all to palliate the shameful despotism of the French Home Office over the press, which is, like all despotisms, idly and gratuitously exercised ; but we do question whether the absolute liberty of discussion, which is useful and even essential here, amongst a people neither brilliant nor very sensitive to brilliance, would be compatible in France with any long-enduring form of government at all. The French intellect vibrates to negative touches which would not move us deeply at all. What is only a healthy stimulus to us is a dangerous excitement to the French. But true as this may be, no form of self-government can ever be gained without the power of free discussion, and we should say,—better a hundred times that a new experiment were tried in France every sixteen years than that the mind of France should ever grow unaccustomed to exert itself in this way. Gradually, no doubt, it will learn that this super- ficial brilliancy is, for purposes of real action, rather a mis- leading Will-o'-the-Wisp than a steady light, and become more used to estimate it at its real worth as a keen intellectual enjoyment, but not as a ground for destructive rage at all. Even now the popular influence of this kind of exquisitely witty and often false criticism is not what it was, and at every fresh political convulsion it diminishes in force. As France improves her knowledge of other nations she begins to see that wit is not the root of greatness, and the considerate- ness of the new school of politicians is greater than the consi- derateness of the old, who have, perhaps, lost in keenness what they have gained in reflectiveness. The Emperor will only have himself to thank if by drawing the reins too tight, as he is apparently disposed to do, he gives an artificial strength to the caustic power of the old Orleanist. There is excuse for his fears ; there would be no pity for his defeat if those fears lead him to strain rather than relax the bonds.