France is healed with smallpolitical scaidals and financial em= barrassments. The
question of the " lingots d'or " has created a triple scandal in the National Assembly. A was raised by inter- pellations respecting a measure suspending on behalf of a particu- lar adventurer the laws against lotteries, in order to sanction a lottery in which the prizes were to be Californian gold and the funds were to pay the passage of emigrants to California. The adventurer is a private individual, but Government appears to stand in some unexplained relation to him, and it is suspected that before the funds are paid for the emigrants they will be made to subserve the convenience of the Government.
In the course' of the debate, the opponents quoted-from what purported to be a report furnished to' the bureau of the Interior : Government totally repudiated -this- report, and declared that it had no existence! ' On which side, then, lies` this strange public falsehdod ? • This unanswered question is the second limb of the scandal.
The third limb consisted in the behaviour of the " majority " in the Assembly. It first rejected a Ministerial motion to pass to the order of the day 14 pure and simple "; and then, alarmed at the effects of its implied censure, several of its members proposed motions indirectly sanctioning the Ministerial scheme. M. Emile de Girardin at last moved the sarcastic resolution that "the majority, satisfied, passes to the order of the day." President Dupin—filith- fill servant of the Ministry--deolaied that he should not receive this amendment, becauiie it was insulting to the majority. Event- ually M. Kerdrel carried the ingeniously worded motion, that the National Assembly, confiding in the solicitude of the Government, passes to the order of the day." So the majority first bullies and then cringes.
Another scandal is of a personal kind. Having taken some offence at M. Carlier, Prefect of Police, M. Dupin struck his name out of the list of persons invited to a banquet for the President : nevertheless, M. Culler coolly appeared, took no notice of the hand offered by the embarrassed Dupm, but received as a matter of course the cordial gre.etings of the President and various Ministers. The great contretemps is the failure of the Government to raise a loan of 2,000,000 francs, chiefly in the Five per Cents and partly
intrie Three pen Cents. The adjudication was to have taken place on Monday ; but the' efilits for Wilk stocks- were a. tonsideadie fraction below the Ministerial minimum ; so that the loan came* nothing. The monetary commtnity, it war said, Watt been ii- iluene.ed by the fact that. the house of Rothschild made yin temitist A Socialist paper exclaims, with a true and naive sarcasm-6 La Republique est bon enfant apes tout!"
