TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE EMPEROR'S SPEECH.
nEmperor's speech differs curiously from the Queen's. ong, argumentative, and well written, full of those oracular and almost mystic sentences in which its author delights, it contains a programme and suggests a policy. The programme is armed peace, the policy to extend personal liberty without conceding any additional measure of political freedom. The Empire, the Emperor repeats in new and more diluted words, is peace. He maintained neutrality during the recent struggle on the Baltic, and framed the Convention with Italy as a "work of reconciliation," has subdued insur- rection in Algeria without needless severity, and is bringing all foreign expeditions rapidly to a close. French forces have evacuated China ; the fleet suffices for the establishments in Cambodia; the Algerine garrison has been reduced ; the Mexican expedition is returning ; the army which occupies Rome " will soon be withdrawn;" and the Emperor, his mind full of the proof-sheets of La Vie de Caesar, exclaims in a pas- sage which, but for his occupation, would be unintelligibly flowery, " Closing the Temple of War, we may with pride inscribe upon a new triumphal arch these words :—' To the glory of the French armies, for the victories achieved in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in Japan, and in America.'" But though the Temple of Janus is at some still far distant period to be closed, the legions are not disbanded. On the contrary, the military power of France, the number of men whom she maintains ready for instant action beyond her frontiers, is in- creased by the whole strength of the battalions which the Em- peror is summoning from beyond seas. At the beginning of 1864 there were in Mexico, in Rome, on the China Sea, and in Cambodia upwards of sixty thousand veteran French soldiers, and their return places at the disposal of the Minister of War an army nearly as great as that which fought at Magenta. France, with 470,000 men round her colours, a reserve of 130,000, and the limitless resource of the conscription, con- tains a moveable army amply provided, thoroughly armed, and accustomed to active service of at least 150,000 men. With such an army encamped among the most military race of the Continent, at the disposal of a man able beyond his rivals, secret and audacious beyond all precedent, who shook Europe one fine morning with ten words uttered at a reception, and who has a dynasty to consolidate, Europe cannot disarm. It could not even if Napoleon had no allies, but as he himself says iu the most brilliant passage of his speech, " The pro- visional and precarious state of affairs in Italy which excited so much alarm will soon terminate. It is no longer the scattered members of the Italian nation seeking to connect themselves by feeble links to a small State situated at the foot of the Alps ; it is a great country which rises above local prejudices, despising the ebullitions of unreflecting agitations—which boldly transfers its capital to the centre of the Peninsula, and places it in the midst of the Apennines, as in an impregnable citadel." And this nation thus powerful and daring is for all purposes of Continental war Napoleon's trust worthy ally. He is as against all Central and Eastern Europe sovereign of two nations, and while he keeps them in their present state of armed and watchful preparation, the Continent, crushed as it is with debts, burdened as it is by conscriptions, may well pause before by disarming it leaves to an Emperor of the French the disposal of its destiny. The Emperor threatens no war, hints at no new expedition, menaces no great sovereign, bat he reduces no force, encourages no disarmament, does nothing to ter- minate the wretched system under which Europe spends 100,000,0001. a year upon defences, and keeps two mil- lions of her best children in barracks occupied only in learning how to kill effectively. The Empire is still peace —in a camp.
At home the policy of the Emperor of the French is some- what more satisfactory. He does not indeed take, or promise to take, off the fetters of thought, to give back to the most vivacious of nations the right of free speech, or free assembly, or free and orderly resistance, to suffer men to open schools without the permission of the State, or allow the benevolent to organize charity independent of police supervision. Still less does he intend to restore to the nation its right to direct its own policy, frame its own restrictions, decide on its own objects, or regulate the pace at which it desires material progress to advance. But he does propose to liberate the individual so far as he can do it without conceding any freedom of remonstrance or resistance against his own decrees. The Navigation Laws are to be swept away, and everybody permitted to ship goods with the foreigner or with the French- man according to his own judgment on the terms each may offer. The right of association for the better employment of capital is to be extended, and the much greater right of association for securing the returns due to labour "lies at the Emperor's heart." The communes, which individually are powerless against the State or its Head, are to obtain increased independence in their internal affairs,—to be able, for example,, to build bridges, repair dykes, open water-courses, or mend local roads without applying for permission to Paris. Even- the Councils-General, which manage departments, are to re- ceive new powers, though these will, we fear, be jealously restricted, and fall very far short of those wielded by our own quarter sessions. The power of preventive arrest which is exercised by the police all over Continental Europe, and gives opportunity for the most irritating kind of petty oppression, is.
to be limited by the law of bail, and the creditors' privilege of arresting the debtor, a privilege which has worried legis- lators ever since the foundation of credit, which puzzled. Moses just as much as it now puzzles Lord Westbury, is to be totally swept away. Primary instruction, without which no man in modern society is free, for no man has the use of' his powers, is to be widely extended, perhaps, though this is not hinted in the speech, to be made universal. Finally, the power of the priesthood as an organization is to be still im- peded and limited by that of the civil law. This touches the State and its Head as well as the individual, and the Emperor is therefore somewhat more distinct than in other parts of his harangue. He describes the immense influence exercised by the clergymen even beyond their ministry on education, on the elections, on the action of the Senate, and then, with that.
odd desire to link himself with the historic Bourbons which once induced him to describe the Prince Imperial in Bourbon phrase as " Enfant de France," he declares it " his duty to. maintain intact the rights of the civil power, which since the days of St. Louis no Sovereign in France has ever abandoned."
The priesthood is to be " surrounded with respect and defer- ence," but to obey the law—a little remark we commend to the attention of English Archbishops when they next discuss canons repealed by Parliament. They may have it said to themselves some day in harsher accents than those of the Emperor. • The promises made are many, and are all good. We who. think that the State in England does too little for material improvement are not even disposed to quarrel with the promise, or, as many will deem it, the threat, that the Em- peror will press on " the rapid completion of the railway system, of the canals, of the roads," " employing on public works the resources of the State," even should the process be a little too rapid for the " healthy economy of the finances."
The Emperor says he is not about to raise loans, and if he can really force means of communication—as one forces asparagus—by selling the State forests, why railways, and roads, and bridges, may be worth more to the nation than the preservation of its trees. But through all these promises, liberal as they sound, and beneficial as their realization would be, there still shines the Napoleonic idea—that the true system' for mankind is wise and enlightened despotism. France is to.
be covered with railways and fringed with harbours, to enjoy a vast commerce and employ a growing mercantile marine, to be filled with an educated people and to influence by every means, except thought, all the nations of the world. Frenchmen are to be individually as free as laws can make them, free to. plant, and to build, and to grow rich, and to do or leave undone everything which tends to physical well-being. Each atom is relieved of shackles, at liberty to do anything except unite with, or persuade, or coerce, or influence other similar atoms. Indeed even organization is to be free, provided only it does not extend beyond the primary cell,—the isolated, powerless, though still living commune. But over-all higher organ- isms, over politics, and religion, and thought, the Emperor admits that he must still reign supreme. France as France can have no life except in him—the Emperor, the single initiative, the sole executive, the unique legislator, and before all the solitary freeman among thirty-five millions of men. He may not wish for this position, he is known often to weary of his own monopoly of political life, but the situa- tion he has created is still inexorable. He must still be Caesar Augustus, and though he may have a higher ideal, a dream of some future condition of affairs in which a free Sovereign shall guide the destinies of a free State by intelli- gence instead of coercion, still, as he says, " an Utopia is to welfare what illusion is to truth." Now Napoleon's Utopia is a perfected Ccesariam.
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