pleases can set up as a separate Republic. The majority will no longer control the minority, and thus the first elements of an united Government will be extinguished. Those who say that the best thing to do will be to recognise that this is a case beyond the pale of constitutional law, and to abstain from any pretence of exercising an impossible coercion, ought to remember that it will henceforth be in the highest degree difficult to keep together the States that still remain in the federation. It is true that it will be equally difficult to manage a Union in which the members are kept against their will. Mr. Lincoln and his friends seem to think it possible that the Union may be preserved, or rather restored, and that the seceding States may be coerced, but that their coercion may be managed in such a way as to lead them back rather by forcing on their consideration the consequences of separation, than by using actual force. The President therefore proposed to retake and hold the federal forts, and to collect the customs of the Southern ports. The effect of this might be that the South not having the excitement of fighting, and bearing the burden of oppressive taxation, in terror of their slaves, and anxious for their cotton crop, might own themselves beaten, and return to the Union after having received a lesson that would have cured them of all taste for secession. The weak part of this plan is, that it depends for its success upon the avoidance of bloodshed. But if the forts are to be held and retaken, bloodshed must ensue. It is said that the Cabinet has already been forced to renounce the reinforcement of Fort Sumter. This was evidently the real test of the courage of the advocates of coercion. Fort Sumter has been held with great firmness and gallantry by Major Anderson, it has been the theme of constant talk, it is a challenge to the inhabitants of Charleston, and if the Government was prepared to show its strength anywhere, it ought to have been at the place where seces sion first began. That the reinforcement of the fort would have cost many lives and much money is true, but it is childish to suppose that the policy announced in the inaugural address of the President could be carried out except at the cost of much blood and money. The President therefore has had to abandon one great part of his policy within a week of announcing it. If His relations with foreign Powers will also throw great difficulties in the way of his carrying out bloodless coercion by means of collecting the customs of the Southern ports. Supposing an English vessel arrives laden with iron at Charleston harbour; a cruiser of the United States will intercept her, and will collect the customs enforced by the New Tariff Bill. She will then pass into Charleston, and there she will be subjected to the dues exacted by the Southern Confederation. But she will have a clear right to recover these dues from the Federal authorities at Washington. Charleston is within the Union, as by the hypothesis of the Washington Government she is, if the duties are collected by a cruiser of the United States, then a foreign vessel, having paid them, is entitled to protection against further exaction in a city of the United States, and to redress if a further exaction is made. If the Federal Government recognises that there is a state of war between itself and South Carolina, then the English vessel is a neutral, and has a right to enter into the ports of a belligerent without paying customs to the other belligerent. It is true that by establishing a blockade the United States may lawfully keep out the neutral vessel altogether; but thẹn, as Lord Lyons has already intimated at Washington, the blockade must be a real and not a paper blockade; and to carry out an effective blockade of all the Southern ports will be beyond the powers of It is the Federal Government. therefore highly probable that the President's address may come to have no other meaning than that of a strong protest against the doc trine that each State has a right to secede, and that the seceding States will be allowed to do as they please. The debates in the French Chambers have up to this point done the Emperor very considerable service. They have indeed revealed the great strength of the Catholic party, and the jealousy with which a large section of Frenchmen regard the creation of an Italian kingdom. But the Emperor may reasonably wish that this should be known. His best apology for the indecision of his Italian policy, lies in the necessity of consulting the wishes of a very large proportion of his own people. If France were polled to-morrow, and if by a miracle universal suffrage could for once be purged of its absurdities, and the opinions of the French were made known, there can be no doubt that a large majority would vote for restoring the Pope to all his temporalities, and driving back Victor Emmanuel into Northern Italy. The Emperor only represents a minority. It is the minority of intellect, of free thought, of generous sympathy for foreign patriots, of a careful consideration of European politics as a whole. We are delighted that this minority should triumph. The whole English constitution is directed to letting such a minority have its due influence, while it is prevented from going too fast. But the Emperor has to encounter all the responsibility and meet all the difficulties of setting aside the will of the numerical majority. The Italians are now aware, if they were ignorant before, how much courage the evacuation of Rome will demand, and must see that France has really done as much for them as could be expected. It is, indeed, far too bold an assumption to say that the Emperor is a consistent friend of Italian liberty, and that he is only kept back by his people. He is apparently a man of an undecided mind, and wavers backwards and forwards between conflicting policies. He also allows many mixed motives to enter into his conduct, and looks out for him self whatever he does. But he has an inclination to befriend and free Italy; he has, there can be no doubt, a just appreciation of the miseries to which ecclesiastical government condemns a country, and he can look beyond the present and knows what a Catholic restoration would cost France in the long run. The debates on his Italian policy will help him forward in the right road. The honours of these debates, merely as powers of rhetoric and of effective speaking, have fallen to Prince Napoleon in one Chamber, and to M. Jules Favre in the other. country so fond of intellectual display as France, it is a considerable advantage that the speakers who win most admiration should be the most fervent friends of Italy. In a That the final determination of the Emperor will be to leave the Pope and the Italians to get on as well as they can together, becomes less and less doubtful. The Ministers who have had the ungracious task of defending a policy which in the past they could not control and for the future they cannot profess to explain, had evidently been instructed so far to announce the Emperor's intentions, as to intimate that an arrangement must be made by which the Pope would satisfy the Italians and the Italians the Pope. This is putting vaguely what Prince Napoleon put explicitly. The Imperial orator declared that a very proper arrangement might easily be made. The Pope might be put quietly with a palace and endless churches on one side of the Tiber, while the King and Parliament of Italy occupied the other side. The only difficulty is to get the Pope to see that this would be preferable to living at Madrid in the bosom of admiring orthodoxy. The Tiber is not much of a stream to divide the Head of the Catholic world from the man whom he thinks the greatest enemy of the Church. But the present state of things cannot last much longer. The Emperor has quarrelled too openly with the Catholic party to make a temporising policy practicable. The Pope refuses to allow the French bishoprics to be filled up, and the French Government has instructed its subordinates not to pay any social honours to the most audacious of the episcopal enemies of the Emperor. The contest must soon be ended in one way or another, and the debates of the Chambers showed that the Emperor can really do as he pleases. If he gives the Pope notice to quit, Catholic France will grumble but will acquiesce. If the Catholic party showed the Emperor in a favourable light in the debates on the address, the Protectionists showed still more conclusively that the Emperor is far in advance of his countrymen in political economy. The French are, as a nation, confirmed Protectionists. They have no notion of what we mean by the advantages of Free Trade. It is only a very small fraction of Frenchmen that have taken the trouble to learn the arguments on which the doctrines of Free Trade are based. Consequently the Emperor and his Free Trade advisers are obliged to humour the French by every kind of concession, and never to speak of Free Trade as good on principle. M. Chevalier, the pink of French Free Traders, has felt himself compelled to defend the Treaty of Commerce on the ground that France has tricked England in it, that English goods are still excluded from France, while French goods are poured into England. The merchant marine, again, which is languishing so desperately that it is only saved from utter decay by the fish-trade, is to be fettered and impoverished because its languor is supposed to be essential to the flourishing of the French navy. There was nothing of which the Chamber of Deputies seemed to have so sincere à horror as of any tampering with the Navigation Laws. The Government, therefore, cannot go further than they have done, and must confine their efforts to working out the treaty in a liberal spirit. They are inclined to do so; and they have so pleased Mr. Cobden, that he has recently given them one of his strange cer 527 tificates, in which he announces to an English Chamber of Commerce that he is able to say from the handsome way in which the duties on pig-iron have been arranged, that the Emperor has no notion of interfering with us in Syria or Egypt; that he builds an iron navy without the remotest intention of ever using it; and that he never dreams of contesting our maritime supremacy. These childish manifestoes of Mr. Cobden do much more harm than good. So long as we only hear that the French Government is friendly and courteous to our official representative we are pleased with the compliment, and the good feeling of the two countries is increased. But when one of our officials is so tickled with his good treatment that he orders us to believe, on his personal authority, things of which he has no opportunity whatever of judging, we are naturally inclined to restate and perhaps exaggerate our suspicions, in order that we may show that independent judgment must still continue; and thus a greater alienation between the two nations is the ultimate result of an imprudent attempt to conciliate them. The debates on the address showed that the Catholic party are far more inclined to a war with England than the Emperor is; and therefore we may in this light also consider him superior to a large portion of his countrymen. That he has any immediate intention of landing his Zouaves on Hastings beach is not even a dream of fools. Nobody believes it. But that if England were defenceless at home, and unable to assert her maritime supremacy abroad, she would be powerless in the councils of Europe, and virtually at the mercy of France, is a plain truth that cannot be set aside by the pleasantness with which Mr. Cobden has been met in settling the details of a Treaty of Commerce. Victor Emmanuel has assumed the title of King of Italy, and he now waits to see how many of the great Courts of Europe will recognise his new dignity. He cannot be said to be certain of any except England. Prussia would gain by boldly taking a step that would distinctly associate her with the liberal States of Europe. But Prussia is not likely to affront Austria and Russia. Count Cavour has re-organized his ministry to please those, and especially the Southern, Italians who are jealous of the ascendancy of Piedmont. It probably makes little immediate difference who are the other ministers, so that Cavour is at the head of affairs. Italy cannot settle down to quiet life until she has tried the chances of another war. There is no disposition for immediate war in any part of Europe, and yet peace seems to hang on a thread. Every day some new occurrence takes place, and often in the most unexpected quarters, which gives rise to apprehension. Turkey has to tax her resources to the utmost in order to quell a threatened outbreak in the provinces that border the Austrian dominions. The Hungarians are rapidly putting the courage of Austria to the test. The elections for the Hungarian Diet, so far as they are known, are very unfavourable to the Austrian Government, and there can be little doubt that the Emperor will have either to face the Diet, withdraw his concessions, and overawe resistance by force, or else to yield to the claims of the Diet, and recognise the independence of Hungary. It is said that he is prepared to do this, rather than run the hazard of a civil war; but there is no saying what will be demanded of him if further concessions are made. The time must come when he will have to make a stand, and then an appeal to arms seems to be inevitable. Lastly, the German Diet threatens war in behalf of Holstein, and although neither the Diet nor Prussia will like to run all the risks to which war, when once begun, will expose them, yet it may be very difficult to avoid a conflict. For it can only be avoided by ordering Holstein to cut itself off from Germany, and join heartily with Denmark, and a German power can scarcely do this. The world has been astonished during the past month to find that even Russia is obliged to make concessions, and that Poland has once more made its voice heard in Europe. The fortitude and forbearance shown by the Poles after the injuries they received from the Cossack troops, have done more than any outbreak could have done to warn the Czar that there would be danger in trampling down by open force the embers of revolu tion. Accordingly, a limited municipal liberty has been promised, and one or two obnoxious officials have been removed. This is not much; but it is infinitely more than the Emperor Nicholas would have conceded. It shows that a different policy reigns at St. Petersburg. Speculation has been excited as to the nature of this policy; and a portion of the French press supposed to be very friendly to Russia, sees in this concession to Poland & great scheme for reclaiming Posen from Prussia, and Gallicia from Austria, and starting a new Polish kingdom, of which the Czar is to be the King. Probably no vision half so splendid guided the councils of the Emperor. The emanci pation of the serfs is a very perilous crisis for the country, and the Government may naturally wish not to add political distrust and disaffection to the anxieties which the new relations of the landowner and the serf must necessarily produce. We now know the terms on which the emancipation is to be effected. The services of the serfs are to be commuted for a fixed rent, and they are to receive as a gift the usufruct of their dwellinghouses and gardens, together with enough land to enable them to pay taxes; and all serfs will, it is expected, be set free within two years. That for the next two years Russia will thus have a most powerful motive to keep at peace with all the world, is one of the very few encouraging features of European politics. FRASER'S MAGAZINE. MAY, 186 1. SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CONDUCT OF BUSINESS IN PARLIAMENT. WH WHEN we experience anything more than usually disagreeable in the state of the weather, we think we shall be sure to recollect it for ever: that it will be a landmark in our memory. This deep fall of snow,-that continuance of east wind for seven weeks during which we quarrelled with every one of our best friends,-this unwonted blazing out of the sun for more than a month, which quite bewildered us who are accustomed to live in the shade,-that perpetual downfall of rain which made the patter on the pavement a household noise :—will never be forgotten by us, we think. But no: these incidents rapidly fade away from our recollection; and, in general, we soon cease to distinguish any year by the peculiar disagreeableness of its weather, merely concluding in a discontented way, that, like farmers, we have generally had, at any given period, the weather that we did not wish to have just then. Still, there are years so remarkable that we do not quite forget them. If you listen to the stories of old labourers, you find that there is some one winter, or some one summer, that has really made an impression on their minds. 'Sir, I mind when the wheat hereabouts was not got in till after the 5th of November. Old Jim Hodges and I, him as went into the House last week 'cos of his rheumatiz, got a mort o' words from grandfather when we were lads, for having a bonfire anigh a pook of wheat in farmer Stubbs' field as was.' Now much the same thing occurs about Sessions of Parliament. These VOL. LXIII. NO. CCCLXXVII. are generally pronounced to be failures. The common talk is, how little has been done in them; and the proceedings of each session are pronounced as something memorable, which the people concerned with them are sure to remember ever afterwards. But, after all, their recollections take a misty form. They have a general sensation that, in any particular year, a great deal was attempted, and very little was done; that the leader of the opposition got up in his place, and, in terms far from laudatory, reviewed the results of the session; that the leader of the House got up in his place, and said that, at any rate, the session was as fruitful as the last session, when the honourable gentleman opposite was in his place, and that the present session would have been abundant in fruit, if the measures introduced by her Majesty's government had not been received in a far different spirit from that with which he, and the honourable gentlemen who do him the honour to support him, had always shown towards the measures introduced by the honourable gentleman opposite, when they sat upon these benches. (Cheers and ironical counter-cheers, with cries of Oh! oh!) Such are the vague recollections which most men possess of any given session. Still, as in the case of the weather, so in that of the Sessions of Parliament, there may be one or two memorable years which remain in the minds of men, and about which old Parliamentary labourers will gossip, as the agricultural labourers gossip about the year when the N N |