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from the mere abuse of the liberty of the press itself. This would certainly seem to be the more rational and fair interpretation. A seditious mob in every large town, with seditious publications issuing from an hundred presses to excite and justify their excesses, such as have been witnessed in England more than once, would form a crisis requiring and excusing much stronger measures than an unusual quantity of abuse, or an universal expression of dislike, against the Jesuits, or the ministry: yet, to the king's confessor, or to a tottering minister, the latter might appear equally alarming with the former, and the law permits the application of the power of imposing silence in the one as in the other. The law, however, was allowed to remain as it was, the minister of the interior assuring the Chamber that no cabinet had ever borne the attacks of the press with more patience and forbearance than that of which he was a member, and that, when they used the power which they possessed, it would not be to defend themselves, but to prevent, instead of punishing, crimes which might endanger public order. The editor of the Journal du Commerce was called to the bar, for a libel on the Chamber; and, after he had been heard by his counsel, was punished with a month's imprisonment, and a fine of an hundred francs-the minimum of penalty allowed by the law. Another member complained to the Chamber, of the editor of the Drapeau Blanc, on account of a mis-report, not of his own speech, but of that of the minister of war, who was represented to have said something insulting to him. An angry discussion followed, the liberal party insisting, with no

great indulgence for the errors of the "chartered libertine," that the reporter to the journal should, in future, be excluded from the sittings of the Chamber: but it came to no practical result.

once

In the internal state of France there was scarcely any thing to occupy public attention, except oecurrences arising from the conflicting efforts of different sects of religionists. Some ecclesiastical orders, particularly the Jesuits, had been gradually courting favour, and increasing in influence, and endeavouring to recover a portion of that authority which was theirs. Ecclesiastics of a different description were devoting themselves to the task of awakening among the people a spirit of fanatical piety; and men of considerable authority in the church availed themselves of their station, to try to enforce a more rigorous discipline, and to restore to superstitious rites the credit which they had long since lost. The party calling itself liberal, again, was opposed to these religionists: they dreaded the approaches of the Jesuits to power, because experience had taught too clearly how exclusive and despotic that power would be; and they disliked the rigorous austerity and debarring superstition of the others, because its direct tendency, and its great object, was, to enthrone ecclesiastical authority by absorbing the mind in theological dogmas and devotional rites. The religionists were the enemies of all popular rights; and the imprudence of some individuals among them permitted doctrines to be seen which appeared to be equally hostile to the Crown. At the end of the preceding year, the editors of two liberal journals had been tried for

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the writer composes, leaves him to say every thing that can be said, and creep deliberately into every nook and cranny of his subject; the debater seizes only what impresses itself upon him as important. Accordingly, more real business is done in the House of Commons in a month, than in the Chamber of Deputies in a session. It may be true that the French system enables a man to cull his phrases with greater care, and turn his periods with greater elegance; to give every member of a sentence its proper length, stick every interjection in its proper place, and introduce every metaphor with a due flourish of rhetorical preparation. But it is inconsistent with energy and boldness; it leads irresistibly to a vitiated taste; it ends in that puerile, declamatory, style of oratory (if so it must be called), which has fixed its abode in the French tribune. The French may possibly attain the smooth enamel, and the nice finishing, of the miniature, but they can never reach the power and magnificence of the fresco. If Cicero had been a French deputy, he would have unfolded his manuscript in the tribune, and, holding it to his eyes, would have read out, Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra," with tones and gestures of most extemporaneous preparation. Moreover, it is ridiculous to call that mode of discussion a debate, in which every body reads his own sentiments, but nobody discusses them; in which every one gives his opinion, but no one disputes it; in which all open, but nobody answers or replies. No one advantage of debate is gained; there is no mutual sifting of opinions and reasons. A member mounts the tribune to reply to another;

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but as he could not anticipate what that other was to say, his reply never touches on what has gone before. If a ready command of the stores collected by reading and thinking, rapidity of invention, quickness of thought, accuracy of memory, and facility of expression, be valuable mental qualities, the French mode of parliamentary discussion is equally unfavourable to them all.

By a law passed in 1822, for the regulation of the press, it was enacted that "if, in the interval of the sessions, serious circumstances (circonstances graves) should render the measures of guarantee and repression for a moment ineffectual, the censorship may be immediately established by a Royal Ordinance." Such a provision is utterly destructive of the liberty of the press, because it leaves the determination of what circumstances require the introduction of a cen sorship dependent on the execu tive alone. A very mischievous measure may be carried through in a very short interval; and it may be extremely desirable for the executive to prevent the public press, during that interval, from sound ing the alarm. Provisions founded on an anticipated necessity for dispensing with the regular and estab lished law cannot wisely be made standing parts of a form of govern ment: they are prospective bills of indemnity. M. Royer Collard, therefore, had reason on his side, when he wished to modify this law, or at least to fix the meaning of the "circonstances graves," which were to justify the crown in imposing temporary fetters on the press. He wished it to be restricted to "great events, great troubles, extraordinary cases, which could not be foreseen,"

in short, to something different

from the mere abuse of the liberty of the press itself. This would certainly seem to be the more rational and fair interpretation. A seditious mob in every large town, with seditious publications issuing from an hundred presses to excite and justify their excesses, such as have been witnessed in England more than once, would form a crisis requiring and excusing much stronger measures than an unusual quantity of abuse, or an universal expression of dislike, against the Jesuits, or the ministry: yet, to the king's confessor, or to a tottering minister, the latter might appear equally alarming with the former, and the law permits the application of the power of imposing silence in the one as in the other. The law, however, was allowed to remain as it was, the minister of the interior assuring the Chamber that no cabinet had ever borne the attacks of the press with more patience and forbearance than that of which he was a member, and that, when they used the power which they possessed, it would not be to defend themselves, but to prevent, instead of punishing, crimes which might endanger public order. The editor of the Journal du Commerce was called to the bar, for a libel on the Chamber; and, after he had been heard by his counsel, was punished with a month's imprisonment, and a fine of an hundred francs-the minimum of penalty allowed by the law. Another member complained to the Chamber, of the editor of the Drapeau Blanc, on account of a mis-report, not of his own speech, but of that of the minister of war, who was represented to have said something insulting to him. An angry discussion followed, the liberal party insisting, with no

I

great indulgence for the errors of the "chartered libertine," that the reporter to the journal should, in future, be excluded from the sittings of the Chamber: but it came to no practical result.

once

In the internal state of France there was scarcely any thing to occupy public attention, except occurrences arising from the conflicting efforts of different sects of religionists. Some ecclesiastical orders, particularly the Jesuits, had been gradually courting favour, and increasing in influence, and endeavouring to recover a portion of that authority which was theirs. Ecclesiastics of a different description were devoting themselves to the task of awakening among the people a spirit of fanatical piety; and men of considerable authority in the church availed themselves of their station, to try to enforce a more rigorous discipline, and to restore to superstitious rites the credit which they had long since lost. The party calling itself liberal, again, was opposed to these religionists: they dreaded the approaches of the Jesuits to power, because experience had taught too clearly how exclusive and despotic that power would be; and they disliked the rigorous austerity and debarring superstition of the others, because its direct tendency, and its great object, was, to enthrone ecclesiastical authority by absorbing the mind in theological dogmas and devotional rites. The religionists were the enemies of all popular rights; and the imprudence of some individuals among them permitted doctrines to be seen which appeared to be equally hostile to the Crown. At the end of the preceding year, the editors of two liberal journals had been tried for

the king, arising from his birth,

and assailed the order of succession
to Of this latter
he throne.
charge he was acquitted; the court
holding that the passages of his
publications on which it was found-
ed, were rather a discussion of the
first proposition of the Declaration,
than a direct and positive attack
against the dignity and birth-right
of the monarch, or
"the
order of
succession, and that the known re-
ligious and monarchical opinions of
the Abbé were against any pre-
sumption of his having intended to
commit such an offence. On the

political libels, and acquitted. The acquittal was very displeasing to the Jesuits and their coadjutors; and the Abbé de la Mennais, in a pamphlet which he published upon the occasion indulged himself in opinions which went to subvert the fundamental rights of all governments except that of the Pope, and to raise the altar above the throne. A Declaration of the French clergy made and registered in the parliament of Paris, in 1682 forms the basis of the law of France regarding the power of the pope within the kingdom, and constiAntes the record of the liberties of first count, however, he was found

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the Gallican church. The first proposition of this Declaration states, that St. Peter, his successors, and the church itself, have received no authority from God, except things spiritual, and not over things temporal and civil; that kings are not subject, in things which concern temporal matters, to any ecclesiastical power; that they cannot be deposed directly or indirectly by the authority of the head of the church; and that their subjects cannot by him be exempted from the submission and obedience which they owe them, or dispensed from their oath of allegiance and by a subsequent royal edict all the king's subjects are prohibited from maintaining, writing, or printing, any thing contrary to the principles of this Declaration, or tending to renew disputes, or give rise to a difference of opinion on the subject. Mennais was brought to trial for having, in the plenitude of his zeal on behalf of his order, attacked the doctrines of the Declaration, and violated the edict, by asserting the subjection of the kingly power to the supreme authority of the church. A second count accused him of having denied the rights of

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guilty of having written several chapters directly and formally impugning the declaration of 1682, and violating the edict which had made that Declaration part of the constitutional law of the land. He was condemned to pay a fine of thirty francs, and his work "On Religion, considered in its Relations with Political and Civil Order," was ordered to be seized and destroyed wherever it might be found. The court justified the smallness of the fine on the ground that the blameable passages formed only a small part of the work-that the remainder consisted of theological discussion with which they could not interfere-that the book was one which would be read and appreciated only by the well-informed and that the abbé himself was a person of most respectable character. It is worthy of remark, as a historical coincidence, that while, in the discussions of the British parliament on the Catholic question, the friends of Emancipation maintained that the older doctrines of the Romish church regarding her supremacy over kings had been fully and finally renounced, there was in Paris a

1

member of that church, and an adherent of its most learned, most politic, and once most powerful, order, convicted and punished for openly maintaining from the press the very doctrines, which it was said to have abandoned.

1760, the edict of Louis XV, in 1764, the edict of Louis XVI. in 1777, the law of May 1792, and the republican decree of the 3rd Messidor in the year 12, the legislature of France had formally opposed itself to the re-establishment of the society called "The Society of Jesus," under whatever denomination it might present itself; that these edicts and decrees were founded on the acknowledged incompatibility between the principles professed by that Society and the independence of civil governments-principles still more incompatible with the constitutional charter which was itself a public right. But they likewise held that to suppress of dissolve congregations or associa tions formed in contempt of these laws and decrees, belonged to the department of the high police alone; that any facts of a different kind mentioned in the denunciation, did not constitute any crime, misdemeanour, or contravention, which

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Another measure directed against the ecclesiastical orders was the publication by a count Montlosier of a work entitled "A Denunciation" of the Jesuits, and their congregations, and addressed to the Cour Royale in which he declaimed against these religionists as enemies of the state and abusers of religion, and formally called upon the Court to perform its duty, by putting in force the existing laws against them. This example of a popular right of action, by which an uninterested individual demanded the interference of a court provided with its own officers to put its powers into action, was not favour able either to public tranquillity or to the regular administration of the law but the partiality of could be judged of in that Court; party spirit exalted Montlosier into an idol; and a written opinion was published, signed by nearly fifty of the most respectable counsel of the French bar, bearing that the Denunciation," as demanding the execution of the laws against 'the Jesuits, and the congregations, France had not as yet formally was an immense service rendered recognized any of the South to the king and to the country. American republics; but, in the The Court admitted the indict- course of the present year, she apment, so to speak: but the Attorney- pointed commercial agents to reside general appeared, and insisted that in several of them, possessing no grounds were laid even for de- nearly the same character which liberation, and that the Court was belonged to those sent out by this incompetent to hear such a case. country in 1819. In the month All the members of the Court in of January, she concluded a treaty Paris, to the number of fifty-four, the of By attended the discussion, and the this treaty, France expressly reCourt came to the cision. They held that by the deof Paris in

and therefore, upon the whole matter, the Court declared itself to be incompetent. In all the judicial contests between the Jesuits and their opponents, their ancient spirit of Jansenism was distinctly manifested in the bar.

this emperor H

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of the Brazilian empire, and the imperial dignity in the person of don Pedro

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