THE CANTILLON QUESTION.
AT the close of last week, Lord Palmerston gave an unqualified contradiction to Mr. Stirling's recapitulation of the Cantillon af- fair ; and by the confident manner in which he repeated the statement on his brief, he was able, with the assistance of the House of Commons, to " put down " Mr. Stirling. In a Note next morning, we expressed a doubt how far the statement was a genuine answer, or a case of categorical special-pleading; and a pamphlet since published by Mr. Stirling gives the data on which he spoke. The pamphlet consists of Mr. Stirling's speech on Friday the 12th, with extracts from the Moniteur of 12th, lath, 14th, and 15th May 1819 ; a codicil of Napoleon's will, from Scott's Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, [undisputed, and corrobo- rated by other journals] ; extracts from a medical report in Les Derniers .31-omens do Napoleon ; extracts from the Moniteur of 14th August 1853, 16th August 1854, and 6th May 1855. These last papers contain a report of the Commission charged to examine the questions relating to the execution of the will of the Emperor Napoleon I ; a report by M. Aehille Fould, Minister of State, on the report of the Commission, laying down the prin- ciples on Which a public grant of money [8,000,000 francs] should be set apart for the purpose ; and a report from M. Fould to the Emperor, stating that the Commission had " terminated its labours." The Commissioners considered various modes in which they should treat the representatives and especially the widows of legatees, concluding to make no differences in the case of widows. They give a table of all the legacies ; showing some which have been paid, and others which have been unpaid, par- tially or altogether. " tinder the head of " Amount of Legacy " there is this entry—" The Stib-Officer Cantillon, 10,000 francs" ; and in the next column, under the head " Sums received in capital and interest, 10,354 francs." In conclusion, the report says—" Thus, thanks to the initiative piously taken by your Majesty, thirty-four years after the death of the Emperor, his last wishes in favour of his faithful servants and his glorious com- panions in arms have received their consecration." And this report by M. Fould bears the Imperial sign-manual, "Approved,
lion."
This is the case as it has been extracted by Mr. Stirling from the official documents ; but it must be confessed that the counter- explanation is equally supported by those documents, though it could not have been readily drawn from them without the assist- ance of a hint. The legacies were paid in what we may call three efforts,—one, long anterior to the appointment of the Commission in 1853 ; the second, after the grant of eight million francs ; the third, on a supplemental grant, somewhat exceeding 700,000 francs, necessary to make good the whole claims. Now, on a first reading of the report, it might be supposed that Napoleon's legacy bad been already paid under the authority of the Commissioners, and that some twenty-three other legacies remained for treatment from the supplemental grant, in what we have called the third effort. It happened, however, that some part of the legacies in Napoleon's codicil was chargeable upon property in the hands of M. Lafitte ; and it would appear that when the Commission sat Cantillon had already been paid in full. The case, we repeat, is still involved in obscurity, and no explanation on the part of the French Government looks like the simple truth. An at- tempt was lately made to show that the residuary payment to Cantillon had been refused : the report in the Montteur makes it look as if he had been satisfied. -Lord Palmerston said that the reason for the refusal was Napoleon's aberration of mind: the French papers do not corroborate that statement. Of one point there can be' no doubt—that the publication in the Moniteur of 6th May 1855 was calculated to make the French believe that Cantillon had received his legacy with interest.
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