A LETTER FROM PARIS. [Continued from last week's SPECTATOR.] THE
Carlists are mad ; here's the proof: they form a miserable and hopeless minority.. So do the English Tories, you will say, without being mad ; but I venture to contradict you. The difference between these two cases is obvious. Our minority is rich, and. though not in power ostensibly, still very powerful by means of occult influence. Who are the Court favourites ? Tories : who the Bishops disposing of Chureli patronage, including the Chancellor's? Tories, all but two: who the Lord-Lieutenants, Deputy-Lieutenants, and Magistrates? Tories, nine-tenths of them at least. Who are the Commissioners of Stamps, Excise, and Customs? who, as Under-Secretaries of State and chief clerks, really administer the Government? who commands the Army ? this fleet or that ? rules in this or that Colony? who are the East India Directors, Bank Directors, and masters of the Corpora- tions all over England, Scotland; and Ireland ? Stanch Tories for the most part. If you wanted a step in the Army or Navy for your son, or to be yourself Governor or Judge of a Colony, on which interest had you rather depend at the Horse-Guards, Admiralty, or Colonial Office ? which, I ask, Whig or Tory? Tory, to be sure : I appeal to FITZROY SOMERSET, BARROW, and HAY. Well then, though a mino- rity in Parliament, we are not miserable, like these Carlists, who, outcasts and vagabonds, want everr thing down to bread, Then, The cause of the Carlists is the restoration of government a la Bourbon ; not such government as took place between Waterloo and the Three Days ; for during those fifteen years the Court was ham- pered with a Charter. But pure Court government, such as poor Po-
LIGNAC would have established, expressed by the old Bourbon motto, " God, the King, and the Ladies,".—which means clergyMen, courtiers, and the courtiers' wives and daughters, living in a kind of promiscuous intercourse, and, for money got by taxes from a nation of villains, fawn- ing, begging, lying, cheating, betraying, fighting, and quarrelling with in-
conceivable perseverance—in one word, strumpetocracy. This the Carlists would revive, and the French hate above all things. You know the feeling of our Club towards JOSEPH HUME : well, such is the feeling
of the French towards the exiled family. Spaniards dislike foreigners,
and Englishmen equality; the Belgians hate the Dutch, and the Dutch bate the Belgians ; every nation has its peculiar antipathy—that of the
French is aversion to the Bourbons. The French are a credulous people and easily deceived, vain and open to flattery, frivolous and di- verted with trifles, patient of injury, submissive to authority, fond, one should think, of paying taxes, and very fond indeed of receiving them ; a nation (excluding the rabble) of place-holders and place-hunters,—a most manageable people, but upon one subject impracticable : they hate the Bourbons more than they love the produce of taxation. It is hard, therefore, to conceive the means by which Carlists should ever be in a majority. Accident may throw any man into the minority for a time ; but he who clings to a broken party appears to me fit for nothing but Bedlam ; wherefore, I contend that the Carlists are mad. But further proof occurs to me. Our Club, believing its newspapers, reckons as Carlists all Frenchmen who were attached to LEWIS the Eighteenth and CHARLES the Tenth. A more gross mistake was never made.
DE BROGUE was always a good Royalist ; GUIZOT emigrated to Ghent ; and TALLEYRAND, who coined the word legitimacy, represents in Eng- land the Three Days of July. Nearly all the partisans of the glorious Restoration are partisans of the glorious Revolution ; but as the mere names of these devoted Royalists, who are now devoted to the Charter a truth, would fill volumes, let us take the shorter way of proving the rule by the exception. Who are the Carlists ? Some old women, with whom fidelity is a religion ; a parcel of priests deprived of sweet power, and wild to be revenged on France for having separated Church and State ; the peasantry of one or two departments out of eighty-six, led by their priests, quite as ignorant and nearly as barbarous as New Zealanders ; a few men of ancient birth, blind with pride ; and finally, half a dozen persons of note, like CHATEAUBRIAND, clever and crotchety, who, eaten up with vanity, had rather suffer than be forgotten ; who always preferred singularity to power, who would support or betray any cause for the sake of seeing their own names in the newspapers. Such are the Carlists ; few, poor, faithful, eccentric, and, considering that LEWIS PHILIP would be happy to buy them all, raving mad, in my humble opinion. Here's an instance of their folly. They long to blow up LEWIS Pnrur and his Charter, and yet take pains to strengthen both. One main support of the present system is the nation's dread of a third restoration by means of foreign armies. As if to increase this dread, or at least maintain it—for it is already so great as to be laughable--the Carlists make a parade of ,;..k.: sympathy which the exiled Bourbons obtain from our friends in the North ; dwell on the mixture of scorn and alarm with which the Despotic Courts regard Revolutionary France ; count the hosts Which FREDERICK WILLIAM, METTERNICH, and NICHOLAS would be able to move, if the dear Duke were himself again, and contend that sooner or later the Three Powers must attack France to save themselves. Suppose that it were all true ; so much the better, say I, for the new Dynasty and Charter, which owe much to the threat, and would last for generations if it were executed. An attack from the Holy Alliance is precisely what LEWIS Pilule stands in need of; but wanting that, the prospect of it serves him admirably. The French have not forgotten the occupation of Paris, and turn pale when they . think of an invasion. To consolidate a young Government, there is no. I-thing like frightening the governed. Yet these foolish Carlists strive to keep up the national panic. If they will not injure LEWIS Plume by sincerely supporting him, why, at least, don't they say that the Northern ' Courts admire and love him ? why don't they praise him and the Char- ter, as they might easily do without abandoning their principles ? why, above all, don't they join him, not in earnest, like GUIZOT, DE BROGUE, or TALLEvitaNn—that would be asking too much—but in appearance, so as to Bourbonize the Charter, and render it unpopular ? Why, be- cause they are imbecile. Another chief stay of LEWIS PHILIP and his Charter is another spe- cies of fear suffered more or less by nearly all Frenchmen who can read ; I mean dread of popular power, of a second reign of terror. 'This apprehension, though altogether delusive, is pardonable in the French, whose imagination runs away with their reason when any thing reminds them of 1793. Oh, that we had had a ROBESPIERRE in England! But I must not anticipate. Take the fact as I state it, and tell me what you think of the Carlists, when I add that they call for primary assemblies elected by universal suffrage. You don't believe me ; but, to convince you, I enclose some numbers of the Gazette de France. It is plain, seeing how much the present generation of Frenchmen are influenced by fear, that the Carlists ought to repre- sent Lsavis PHILIP and his Charter as tending to anarchy, to class him with LAFAYETTE, and his Charter with the Convention : whereas they declaim against the electoral monopoly,. and demand universal suffrage, as if on purpose to share the unpopularity of the Republicans. Besides, what chance would they have with democratic elections ? I put this question to one of them who knows England : he answered—" With am feeling is all in all ; we act on the same principle as guided your friend Lord BLANDFORD, when, out of spite to WELLINGTON, on ac- count of Catholic relief, he turned Radical Reformer." They are mad, dear friends of the Club ; and the ink I have spent on them would be wasted, but that, as you Will learn in time, their folly points out one sway of serving our cause. Now for the Republicans. These wretches remind me of our Benthamites : they profess to seek the happiness of the many; the mass, the millions, by means of self- government, cheap government, and what not? for I want patience to enumerate their preposterous schemes. Democracy even for a day is impossible in France : let us thank the Giver of all Good ! Out of evil good cometh. That abominable law which at the death of a Frenchman divides his property equally amongst his children, has had one most gratifying result : it has cut up the soil of France into about ten millions of separate holdings, and brought the rural popula- tion to so miserable a state, that universal suffrage, the essence of Democracy, is altogether out of the question. Some of the Carlists who call for universal suffrage, seriously believe that, if the Chamber of Deputies were returned by all France, it would represent the Priests and restore the Bourbons. I do not agree with them ; but the existence of such a notion shows the degraded condition of the agricultural class in this country. They are near about upon a par with the wild peasantry of Ireland ; a race of cottiers, each working for himself in solitude, producing little more than a bare subsistence, cut off from the world, over-worked, necessarily ignorant and subject to his priest, the only intelligent being with whom he associates ; a savage in every thing but name. This is a fair description of at least half of the rural population ; in the course of another generation the law of division will have converted five-sixths of them into stupid paupers. I acknowledge that, in its first operation, that law had a most democratic tendency ; indeed, one should think that a permanent democracy is impossible without some such law. Further, there can be no doubt that, for a time, this law tended to make the mass independent and insolent, giving to millions, who would otherwise have been servants, the pride of property and the strongest motives to industry and prudence ; whence a vast increase in the whole produce of agriculture, and, whilst the stimulus lasted, the least subservient, the most unbearable set of farmers in Europe. But the evil was of short duration ; for two reasons, to explain which I must, asking pardon, give you a few lines of political economy. First, whatever the increase of produce from greater industry, the increase of population is sure to beat it in the long run. Secondly, as respects labour and produce, two and two do not always make four on the contrary, they sometimes make three, or one. Two greyhounds running together, will kill more hares in a day than four running separately will kill in a week. In like manner, ten labourers working in concert on the same farm, will raise more food than fifty isolated workmen, cultivating the same extent of land as the ten work- men, but in fifty separate batches. The law of division, though it en- courage industry, becomes, after a while, unfavourable to production ; from the moment, that is, when it has the effect of isolating each la- bourer, so as to prevent that combination of power, without which pro- duce cannot bear a large proportion to the number of hands employed. Let us take an example. Pierre le Blanc, who but for the law of division would have been a soldier or a footman, gets a small farm, which, because it is his, he turns into a garden, assisted by his sons, and when more bands are wanted, by hired labourers. He thus obtains an ample provision for his family : you can fancy the fellow's disgust-. ing independence of mind. But he has four sons, and when he dies the farm is divided amongst them. They all work as hard as their father, that is like galley-slaves, for is not the land their own ? But they are all married also, and the farm which maintained one family in abundance will but just keep four families alive. For, not only is a fourth much less than the whole, but the four farms which were one, being now cultivated by four solitary work- men without any combination of power, the produce raised on them is less than that of the single farm on which the father and his sons used to work in concert, besides having assistance when required. Thus, then, instead of one family at ease, holding up their heads, caring for no man, and having leisure to pick up some political infor- mation, there are four families in a state of uneasiness, if not poverty,
constantly engaged in a struggle to fill the pot, without time to stuff their heads with political notions, ignorant, humble, discontented with this world, and therefore attentive to the priest, who holds the keys of the next; excellent subjects, as I am a Conservative. These are the creatures to whom LAFAYETTE and his crew would give the power of self.government. Upon my word, the Carlists are less un- reasonable than the Republicans in proposing universal suffrage.
[To be continued.]
Previous page
