terror-the dread of punishment according to the will of one man, without law or judgment. But the government of Britain allows the heart to find its own corrective within itself; and has not attempted to attain a pernicious simplicity, which cannot coexist with liberty. Natura suis armis victa,' is the faithful legend of all our institutions; and we look for rest in the just balance and equilibrium of contending forces, not in their destruction. We conceive the whole science of liberty and legislation to consist in applying the laws, by which the human creature may remain quiescent in the midst of conflicting impulses, as the great centre of our solar system, amid the attractions which solicit him in every direction.

The vivifying principle and the soul of our whole system is publicity; and this alone is a strong presumption in its favour. The only motives which a nation can have for laying bare its imperfections, unless we suppose it sunk below all earthly degradation, and then it could not be free, are sincerity, a love of truth and horror of deceit, a consciousness of imperfection, a wish and a power to become better, a decided will to meet the coming evil, and not to shrink from the painful operation of inquiry. Let those who censure us, then, for having exposed to public view the least attractive parts of the human character, look to the consequences with an unprejudiced eye; and they will learn to appreciate a people disgraced by fewer historical crimes and less general immorality than could be found at this moment in Europe, or perhaps in history. They will see the nation that has resolved the grandest political problem, which He, whose will it is that human creatures should be happiest in society, could leave possible to the ingenuity' of finite beings-with the smallest original means to compass the greatest ends of wealth, power, knowledge, liberty, virtue and happiness.

A reasonable hope might have been formed, during the last twenty-five years, that the country in which so much rational prosperity exists, would become better known to foreigners, and, above all, to Frenchmen. More than one hundred thousand of the latter visited us. Among them some were birds of passage; others remained with us. They who were our friends and free, enjoyed the amplest opportunities of learning what they pleased among us. But they were exiles and unfortunate. Their minds upon their dulces Argos.' Our successes were painful to them, our reverses brought them despair. Even our beneficence, though bestowed without ostentation, was galling to them; and when the last band of the emigrants came to us, they who had lingered in every other part of Europe, until impending death had

were bent

driven them to this hospitable shore, where the cries of the wretched are never heard in vain, they received, with reluctance, a bounty, in which they at last felt they should not have so long delayed to trust. Yet, in the great number who came here late or early, it might have been expected that at least one or two would have taken advantage of their residence, to study a country which had so long been, at least, the rival of their own, and the object of their envy and aversion. But they remained attached to their own habits, regretting their delicious Paris-ludum Paridemque--and the Opera which made it dear to them—and returned home without carrying back a single idea that might be useful. The list of those who studied our laws, institutions and government; who even deigned to learn our language, or thought that, in any point of worthiness, we deserved their attention, would be small indeed. Yet, the emigrants, beyond any comparison, were, if not the most philosophical, the most honourable portion of the French population.

The author of the volumes before us was eminently distinguished for his attachment to the cause of the Bourbons: and his loyalty is the more meritorious, as he does not belong to the class in which royalism is a duty. In his rambles he visited many countries, and was alternately busied in diplomatic negociations and* commercial speculations. His success in the latter has been, at least, equivocal; and thence it is most probable that the voice of rumour pointed him out as likely to be named minister of the French finances. But France, not finding any person among her own children worthy to be placed at the head of her treasury, at last had recourse to her old method of calling in a foreigner, M. Corvetto, once a pettyfogging lawyer in his native Genoa; then its betrayer; then a director of the Ligurian Republic; then count of the imperial manufactory, and counsellor of state to Buonaparte; and, finally, by a natural progression, minister of finance to Lewis XVIII.

M. Rubichon, however, is not without talent. He has the complete mind of a Frenchman; quickness of perception, incapacity of induction, vanity, inerrability, and the presumption common to his countrymen, that, because France is France, and he is a Frenchman, every thing there must be right, and all the rest of the world wrong. He is one of those, who, the more they advance, go the more astray. The work he has published is worthy of such a mind; for in 583 pages of his first, and 425 of his second volume, we do not believe there is a single combination of ideas which is just, or one conclusion which facts or principles would authorize.

We

We are not induced to pronounce this opinion by any resentment towards M. Rubichon; for he is one of the most lenient detractors whom England has found for a long time among his countrymen. We are quite sure too that he is sincere in what he says, and that he is not warped by any voluntary prejudices. He judges England and France just as he would a book, or à prospect, or a ballet; and is not more in an error about them than he would be about the merest trifle. He appears to possess one of those minds which cannot see any thing exactly where it is; but living in a strongly refracting medium, never looks at it in a straight line, or beholds it otherwise than distorted; and taking the prismatic colours of his inflected vision for the tints of nature, is always the more convinced by the lengthened spectrum of his imagination, the more it differs from the object of which he conceives it to be the exact representation. We should not indeed have introduced him to the acquaintance of our readers, were it not that in point of false but well-meaning judgment he is a kind of phenomenon. His work too has had some success in France, and is even referred to by persons of a certain class there as their political creed concerning the countries which he compares; and many who imagine they have just notions upon England and her feudal system, quote M. Rubichon, perhaps, as Tacitus De Moribus Germanorum might have been quoted at the court of Domitian. Our object then is to let the English public know what the state of belief and knowledge is among our neighbours concerning our country, and that among persons more respectable than the fond sectaries of General Pillet.

M..Rubichon allows that the English had by nature many excellent qualities, but says that our institutions, our internal policy, have injured them. A representative government, the reformation, the revolution, have prevented us from running the same career of prosperity which we might have reached in common with France. He is a strenuous advocate for divine rights, which he asserts not only in favour of kings, but of the whole human race. It is by divine right that every man is what he is; and this is the true doctrine, because it is the doctrine of liberty. The representative system is adverse to liberty and civilization-a system to which the people have as much right as Caligula's horse had to the consulship. Such a mode of legislation can be advantageous only when the framers of the laws are not parties interested; when laws for England are made in Paris, and laws for France in London. Trial by jury is held in the highest contempt by English jurists, yet not so much as it deserves. The current price for a seat in parliament is 5000l. Montesquieu and Voltaire (for he has coupled these names together) were wrong in calling the

House

House of Commons a democratic institution. In England the popular party is weaker than the aristocratic or the monarchical; but in old France stronger, because in the latter the parliaments were not elected. The feudal system is, at this hour, maintained in its full vigour in England, and without it she must have long since fallen. The Catholic religion is more conducive to morality, liberty, civilization and prosperity, than the protestant; and hence the Protestant electors are obliged (not enabled) to keep on foot more numerous armies than the Catholic. The reformation was undertaken for the purposes of confiscation and spoliation in the three kingdoms. Presentations to livings are usually sold by auction, or played for at the gaming table. All improvements in modern literature, science and the fine arts are due to learned corporations, such as once existed in certain Catholic religious orders; and wherever these have been suppressed, learning has uniformly declined; hence the bourgeoisie of England is the most ignorant in the world; and no nation so little knows its own constitution as we do, and no men from their early youth are imbued with such contracted ideas as the English. Hence, too, we never have possessed one good publicist; for Coke, Hale and Holt were vast but vicious minds; Blackstone was one of the most illjudging intellects that fertile Britain ever has produced; Pitt was a ninny and coxcomb, and Dundas the only statesman of the country who never had a wrong idea. The territory of England twenty-five years ago might have been divided into terres roturieres, nobles and communales. In France the lawyer, the merchant, the citizen, possessed much landed property; in England scarcely any. Want of taste in such things as the Catholic religion made common, has dreadfully increased the immorality of England so much so that no man can purchase any thing unseen, or trust in another's word. What distinguishes the females of this country from all other European women, is—a bunch of keys at their sides; and even the most fashionable, she who has no pockets to carry her handkerchief, puts on a gaoler's girdle whenever she goes out from home, attached to which, at every step she takes, the pendant keys that protect her property from domestic spoliation, jingle in the ears of her admirers: and, to crown all, public spirit is the bane of empires.

We wish we could sometimes confide in M. Rubichon, for he is occasionally flattering and consolatory. The power of England, already colossal, is only in its dawn. The average yearly consumption of meat in England is 220lbs. per head; in France 16lbs.: of wheat, 3 hectolitres per head, yearly, in England; in France, 1. The product of labour to a southern Frenchman is 8; to an Italian, 22; to a northern Frenchman, 26; to a northern German,

VOL. XMH. NO. XLV.

N

40;

40; to an Englishman, 140: hence the labour of one Englishman produces 8 times as much as the labour of one Frenchman. An English scarcity, compared to a French scarcity, is as the noces de Gamache to Count Ugolin's tower (this indeed we must vouch for, as also for this;-that what is called ruin and poverty in England, bears an aspect of more real comfort, than all the splendour we ever saw elsewhere.) In England thirty horses are kept for pleasure to one in France. England has not yet the tenth part of the wealth she will have. The first question Frenchmen ask in England is, 'Where is the peasantry ?** All this certainly wears a very satisfactory appearance; but, coming from M. Rubichon, it is quite alarming; and we could almost fear that our poor country is fast verging to its ruin. Another eulogium of his we must concur in- L'histoire de l'Angleterre est si belle et si pure quant à ses relations extérieures, que les Anglois, comme tels, jouissent d'une grande considération.' In whatever sense he uses this phrase, we rejoice to find that a Frenchman, who speaks ill of us in other respects, does not cast in our teeth the hackneyed phrase of Punica fides.' It is quite inconceivable how many upon the continent, urged on by the vociferations of France, believe, or affect to believe, as they once did, the story of Thionville, that we led the emigrants to Quiberon to be slaughtered; that we were accessary to the murder of the Emperor Paul; that we winked at the invasion of France by Buonaparte, from Elba. It is in vain that we say it would have been less perfidious and less expensive too, to leave the emigrants to perish from want and misery, in those very countries which bear but a small portion of French hatred, than to equip a costly expedition, for the purpose of betraying them to the revolutionary swords of their countryIt is in vain to urge, that the hundred days of Buonaparte's last reign cost us 8,000,000l. sterling.

men.

We shall take leave of M. Rubichon and his innocuous absurdity, with two extracts from his work, the one containing some strictures upon modern French glory, the other upon the actual state of policy, since the return of Louis XVIII. They will serve as a specimen of his style, which, as might be expected in a mind deprived of all sound judgement, must, if it has any sound quality, possess some glow.

6

Qu'est devenue, hélas! cette malheureuse France, depuis qu'elle s'est laissée balotter entre les mains de tant d'avanturiers? Ils l'ont dépouillé de ces biens ecclésiastiques qui entretenoient, dans les campagnes, ce culte qui répandoit des jouissances morales, des consolations,

We heard a similar question asked in Sir Francis Burdett's riot. A Frenchman newly arrived in England went to see what was going forward, and conceiving that the crowd consisted of spectators like himself, asked, where is the mob?

et