nistration of justice. The following passage from the official declaration of the 19th April deserves to be preserved. It is an answer to the question, What does Paris demand?" and it was probably written by Délescluze, who perished behind a barricade on the 25th May.

"The recognition and consolidation of the Republic, and the absolute independence of the Commune extended at all places in France, thus assuring to each the integrity of its rights, and to every Frenchman the full exercise of his faculties and aptitudes as a man, a citizen, and a producer. The independence of the Commune has no other limits but its rights. The independence is equal for all Communes who are adherents of the contract the association of which ought to secure the unity of France. The inherent rights of the Commune are to vote the Communal budget of receipts and expenses, the improving and alteration of taxes, the direction of local services, the organisation of the magistracy, internal police, and education; the administration of the property belonging to the Commune, the choice by election or competition, with the responsibility and permanent right of control and revocation of the Communal magistrates and officials of all classes, the absolute guarantee of individual liberty and liberty of conscience, the permanent intervention of the citizens in Communal affairs by the free manifestation of their ideas and the free defence of their interests, guarantees given for those manifestations by the Commune, who alone are charged with securing the free and just exercise of the right of meeting and publicity, and the organisation of urban defence and of the National Guard, which must elect its chiefs and alone watch over the maintenance of order in the city. Paris wishes nothing more under the head of local guarantees on the well-understood condition of regaining, in a grand Central Administration and Delegation from the Federal Communes, the realisation and practice of those principles; but, in favour of her independence, and profiting by her liberty of action, she reserves to herself liberty to bring about as may seem good to her administrative and economic reforms which the people demand, and to create such institutions as may serve to develope and further education. Produce, exchange, and credit have to universalise power and property according to the necessities of the moment, the wishes of those interested, and the data furnished by experience.

Our enemies deceive themselves, or deceive the country, when they accuse Paris of desiring to impose its will and supremacy upon the rest of the nation, and to aspire to a Dictatorship which would be a veritable attempt to overthrow the independence and sovereignty of other Communes. They deceive themselves when they accuse Paris of seeking the destruction of French unity, established by the Revolution. The unity which has been imposed upon us up to the present by the Empire, the Monarchy, and the Parliamentary Government, is nothing but centralisation, despotic, unintelligent, arbitrary, and onerous. The political unity, as desired by Paris, is a voluntary association of all local initiative, the free and spontaneous co-operation of all individual energies with the common object of the wellbeing, liberty, and security

of all.'

In spite of the vague and ill-translated language of this document (which we have not seen in the original), it is evident that this idea of communal government is based on communal sovereignty. Instead of municipal power being derived from the State or from the State Legislature, the State itself is to become a voluntary association of local initiation' -instead of being subservient, the Commune becomes supreme. The tie uniting these independent sovereignties together being voluntary, is, at most, a slender Federal contract. The authority of the State would therefore be extinguished. The towns would become the centres of political power, but they would be disunited; and the country would, we presume, be held like the terra firma of Venice, or the rural districts of the Republic of Florence, in subservience to the urban authority. The Girondins of 1793 were proscribed for their attachment to what was called Federalism,' which only meant that they denied the central dominion of Paris, and thought that the National Assembly ought to be protected against Paris by the forces of France. But the Girondins never propounded a scheme which would, like this, disintegrate the territory, depose the Government, and annihilate the collective authority of the law. By a curious inversion of the parts taken in this Revolution, the Conservative Assembly at Versailles is now defending the one and indivisible' commonwealth of France, whilst the descendants of the Mountain would pulverise it into a thousand fragments. They propose to carry the French municipal theory of divided sovereignty to its extreme limits, and the consequence will probably be that in the end municipal institutions will be more discredited than they deserve.

6

It is certainly one of the most curious results of the aberration of the human mind, when it has freed itself from the restraints of faith, law, and experience, that such schemes as these should be propounded for the regeneration of France and described by British democratic writers as the finest political 'conception of the age.'* To us the scheme seems somewhat deficient in originality, but for the purpose of destroying the social and political existence of a nation it is no doubt admirably adapted. It would in fact bring France back to the condition she was in, under the feudal system, in the eleventh century, as described by the most eminent of her own historians: Le caractère propre, général, de la féodalité,' said

The expression was used by Mr. Frederic Harrison; for the Commune of 1871 finds apologists and even admirers among a certain class of persons in this country.

M. Guizot in 1829, 'c'est le démembrement du peuple et du 'pouvoir en une multitude de petits peuples et de petits 'souverains; l'absence de toute nation générale, de tout gouvernement central.'* The Republican Commune aimed at recovering precisely the same isolated, turbulent, and destructive power which was exercised in the darkest of the middle ages by the feudal nobility. The excess of centralisation in France has no doubt given birth to this protest against central authority-that nation, once proudest of its national gifts, and now humbled by the loss of them, was to be taught to renounce alike national authority, national strength, and of course national pride-the empire builded up by the conquests of a thousand years was to be shattered by the workmen of Paris and their inspired guides into communities about the size of the Swiss Cantons, for that is, according to M. Comte, to be the form of government of Western Europe-and the social life of one of the wealthiest and most industrious of cities was to be placed under new conditions by the expulsion of capital and the extinction of credit-the reign of privileges was to be restored in the land of equality, but they were to be the privileges of the towns over the country, of the needy over the rich, of the turbulent over the peaceful populationlastly, universal suffrage was to be deposed and repudiated because it affords too firm a foundation for the will of the majority, and the minority is to claim its right of directing the revolutions of the world. To these wild pretensions there is but one answer. As they would within a very short space of time annihilate, not only all political power and order, but the very means of existence, and reduce mankind to a second and more brutal barbarism, it is absolutely necessary to resist them by force. Society is, indeed, already resolved into its primitive elements, when it is called upon to take up arms in defence of the first principles of life, property and liberty. That is unhappily the state of France, but it is the result, as we endeavoured to show last January, of the protracted influence and action of the false doctrines sanctioned eighty years ago by the authors of the Revolution. We traced it then in other forms: we have traced it now in the erroneous conception of municipal power. With these materials the result was long ago foreseen and predicted. That identical result is now before us-no sovereign, no allegiance to the ruler or to the law, no undisputed authority

Guizot, 'Histoire de la Civilisation en France.' Cours de 1829-30, Leçon i. p. 6.

in the representation of the people, no certain peace between the regular and the civic forces of the country, and a chaotic state of society, in which the evils of foreign occupation and the burden of an enormous tribute to a victorious enemy, are almost forgotten in comparison with the internal calamities of France.

Gloomy as this prospect is-and we hold it to be the most awful spectacle that the world has witnessed since the invasion of the barbarians-it has not been entirely unforeseen even by the most patriotic Frenchmen. More than twenty years ago, M. Raudot, then a member of the Legislative Assembly, published an essay entitled 'De la Décadence de 'la France,' which we have placed at the head of this article, to show that if our prognostications are dark, they are not conceived in any spirit of national rivalry, but have already been anticipated by some reflecting and patriotic Frenchmen. M. Raudot first established by figures that the Revolution had cost France all her great colonies, and that her population had increased by about one-sixth, while that of England and of Germany had doubled. 'Si la dissolution des deux grands 'royaumes de la Prusse et de l'Autriche,' said he, doit en'fanter l'unité de l'Allemagne, la puissance relative de la France sera encore bien plus faible. Un état compacte, 'plus grand que la France d'un cinquième et peuplé de quarante millions d'Allemands, rejetterait la France au 'second rang, et pourrait, en s'alliant à l'Angleterre, causer 'sa ruine complète.' This was published in 1850. He then examined the state of her forces, of her wealth (which has since enormously increased), and the physical diminution of the standard for recruits. If the standard of height which was in force before 1789 were still required, half the population would be rejected; it has in fact been lowered more than three inches. Thus he arrived at the conclusion that France was declining and would decline under the influence of her system of centralisation, which caused the nation to regard the State and Paris as the only vital portions of the country. At the close of this remarkable paper he wound up the subject by pointing out that the subdivision of landed property was tending more and more to give the peasantry exclusive possession of the soil-that the peasantry must therefore soon find themselves at variance with the classes who seek to draw their existence from the State, since the former pay, and the latter receive, the taxes-that the increase of luxury tended to waste the substance of the upper classes, and that the towns were peopled with multitudes of men who lived chiefly by ministering

VOL. CXXXIV. NO. CCLXXIII.

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to this expenditure-that the concentration of power led men to look to the State as the sole source of activity, and even as the sole rightful owner of property-that if the life of a great people is arrested, the increase of poverty is such and so sudden that despair drives men to pillage, and civil war-that in such a state of things the foundations of the edifice are upon a quicksand, which may be shaken at any moment by a popular convulsion-and that the army alone remains; but as an army can only exist with subordination, discipline, and obedience, its power depends on the maintenance of those conditions (which are now lamentably wanting), and on the other hand the burden and expense of large armies is an additional grievance to the people. Our readers will judge for themselves to what extent these far-sighted observations have been realised.* To us it appears that the Revolution has very nearly reached its ultimate consequence by the repeated overthrow of the State and the attempted destruction of the capital; and that if the same principles were to continue to operate for another half century they would end in the annihilation of the country. But we are not without hope that the tremendous severity of this last paroxysm may work a salutary change. For the first time in the course of the Revolution, Paris has been overpowered and crushed by the nation. Great as the disaster is, we are assured that the abasement of Paris is not regarded as an unmixed evil by the provinces. Let. Paris perish,' is their cry, if she is to C be to us for ever a hotbed of revolution, or a seat of despotism.' The moment is approaching-perhaps it is come— when a great creative genius might construct in France a system of government on entirely new principles, or rather on old principles revived, and entirely opposed to the revolutionary centralisation of the last eighty years; but the whole edifice must be built up from the foundation, and the strength of the base is of more importance than the form of its architecture or the name of the superstructure. But who is equal to so great an enterprise?

Few Englishmen have been better acquainted with France and French society than the late Mr. Senior. His Journals kept in France and Italy in 1848 and 1852, and recently published by his daughter, contain a most accurate and interesting account of the state of political society in those countries at that time.