Spain pacified, France not having yet prepared another emeute, Belgium
steps forward to amuse Europe with a small essay in revo- lution. It was not happily conceived : the conspirators, who tam- pered with theatrical properties, and proposed to convert cannon used in the "Siege of Constantine." at Tivoli Gardens into veri- table arms of war, suffered themselves to be discovered before their plot was mature,—if ever it would have been so ; for while the "ramifications" of the conspiracy are said to extend throughout the chief towns of the kingdom, each successive discovery only seems the more to expose the poverty of the conspirators' re- sources. A cannon or two here, a little gunpowder there—rumours that men were seen casting balls, and the undoubted detection of an empty house with chairs, tables, and a fire in one room, where people had met or were about to meet—are the kind of disclosures made by the police in their search after the traitors ; who seem to be adventurers of all sorts. One thing alone is made out by the fruitless attempt,—that Belgium, in common with great part of Europe, is internally so disordered that every senseless vagabond who chooses to identify himself with some popular discontent can put its Government to the odious trouble of resorting to force for keeping order. The discontent which is abroad in Western Europe is as aimless as it is violent : a half-idiotical discharged soldier shoots at a French Prince from some mixed motives of Republican enthusiasm and mortified paternity at not being able to procure a formal register of a bastard's birth : that scene is succeeded by a convulsion in the Peninsula, of which the object was to place a bad woman and unsuccessful minister in that power which she
could never retain : and now in Belgium, some gi er- haps Chartist ?) discontent, some lingering if and much speculation in the soldier of fort lay a mine to explode in all its cities—for Europe seems to be undergoing a long fit of
