of his charter, would be the convocation of a legislative assembly, freely and fairly chosen ; but

strike at the chiefs of the guilty and the discontented; there are no chiefs-the poppies are all of the same height. They have all France to oppose and keep down; and they have more -they have the force of opinion in all Europe; for, notwithstanding the politics of the different cabinets, and the former aggressions of the imperial government, have placed the French nation and the other people of the continent, as well as ourselves, in opposition to each other; yet the spirit of independence, which is working its way in the heart of those very countries whose legions have beaten down the efforts, and arrested the progress, of that spirit, when connected with the support of Napoleon, will not permit a continued combination of kings to uphold the pretensions of any monarch or dynasty, in opposition to the will and the rights of an insulted nation. When the Germans have paid themselves the debt of national hatred and revenge; when the Emperors and Kings shall have satisfied their private piques; when full restitution for the rapines of conquerors, half of them swept from the face of the earth, shall have been exacted from their survivors, there will then be a chance of coming to a dispassionate conclusion as to the hopelessness and injustice of assisting the project of a single family, aided by a minority comparatively insignificant, to re-establish the ancient monarchy upon the ruins of modern France, and to contribute to the forcible extinction of the liberal ideas, diffused amongst eight and twenty millions of people.

The fear, which was the feeling that enabled the combined sovereigns to lead their subjects against France, has no longer any existence; the consequent desire of vengeance has began to feel satisfied with victory and retaliation, and when it shall

what has he done in this respect? By his ordonnance of the 13th, he has called together the

have entirely subsided, will be succeeded by commiseration. This feeling, joined with the persuasion that the commotions of the French are but a civil discord; the struggle of a people for rights established in the most enlightened countries, and beginning to be recognised throughout the rest of Europe, and of a government for privileges long since obsolete, and for authority proved by experience to be untenable, will prevent the possible recurrence of another monarchical conspiracy against the rights of mankind. It is one of the most singular coincidences, that the armies of Prussia, of Belgium, of Wurtemberg, should be levelling the last ensigns of independence in France, at the moment that they were endeavouring to secure to themselves the rights and benefits of the representative system at home, and that one portion of the Spanish forces was preparing to restore a Bourbon in France, whilst another was meditating a revolt against a tyrant of that same family in their own country. The contrast may be heightened by recollecting that a commotion, almost approaching to revolution, to defend what were supposed the rights of the lower classes of the population of England, against the unjust interference of the higher orders in parliament, was only quelled by turning the stream of ignorant turbulence against the efforts of the French people, then in opposition to the pretensions of the crown and of the privileged classes. A French war is a very ancient soporific, prescribed, time out of mind, against internal disturbances in England, but has been tried so often, that it is to be hoped even the humblest of our countrymen will prefer some other remedy to one which may be fatal to their constitution. The continental nations are not habituated to such a repetition of

electoral colleges under such regulations, and prescribed such conditions to the eligibility of the

the same applications. The name of Napoleon, the remembrances of recent injury and disgrace, the fear of their recurrence, which were resorted to before, cannot be employed again, to array them in opposition to a cause which is their own, and which they now appear to have discovered to be so. They will see, that nothing less than a foreign military force in the capital, and the citadels of France, is capable of curbing the rights of human nature in that country, and even their government will begin to find out more reasonable causes and pretexts for war, amongst each other, than the suppression of those rights; they will also suspect that they are lending themselves too entirely to the triumphant ambition of the ancient rival of France, and to the accomplishment of her imputed schemes of continental aggrandisement. The alliance will dissolve-the first decisive triumph of the principles of national liberty will be witnessed in that country, where they struggled originally into life. The individuals of this or that family, or faction, will be borne down at once without resistance, perhaps without violence, and lost for ever. The shock of parties, or of nations, internal differences and foreign wars, may, for a short time, confine the empire of reason and independence by the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Rhine, just as it has been for more than a century circumscribed by the sea that washes the British Isles; but the spirit of the age will extend its reign beyond the boundaries prescribed for individual ambition, and, embracing state after state, establish at last its prevailing happy sway over the fairest portion of the civilised world. The power and duration of such moral communities, as were founded in the weaknesses and bad passions of human na

deputies, as are sufficiently indicative of the system intended to be pursued by the court.

The number of representatives is reduced to 396; the qualification necessary for a candidate is enacted to be the payment of 1000 francs of contribution, a condition totally exclusive, in some departments, of any suitable appointment; and such presidents are named to the electoral colleges as must shut out all hope against any but a court candidate; take, for example, M. Kergorlay, the denouncer of Napoleon, who complained of the commencement of the reign of terror in terms, which, if there had been any cause for his complaint, would have cost him his head, and would have been considered an overt act of treason in our own country. The court

ture, and constituted by a Mahomet, a Hildebrand, or any other audacious or artful impostor, may induce us to encourage a hope, that a system, having no base but the rational rights, and no aim but the equal happiness of mankind, when once established, will last for ever. This hope, which has been before hypothetically indulged in the course of these letters, is here repeated under circumstances less favourable to its accomplishment. An older politician may dismiss the dream through the ivory gate; but the millenial reign of the saints, not only the expectation, but the creed, of a sect once prevalent, is scarcely less visionary, although it must be confessed less brilliant, than the perpetual republic of the wise.

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seems determined to employ only one set of agents, namely, those of the ancient regime. Nearly the whole of the new prefects are nobles, and other appointments have been made in the same spirit. The certainty of support has given to the partisans of the restored family an audacity which characterises the victory of a weak and prejudiced minority: already have accounts arrived that the massacre of the protestants has begun in the south-a strange contrast, when proceeding from the presumed friends of order, and of the ancient social system, with the forbearance and tranquillity that marked, on the return of Napoleon, the conduct of all the abettors of anarchy in those protestant provinces, in which the imprudence of the privileged classes, during the first reign of Louis XVIII., might have been expected to have laid up some vengeance in store for the day of triumph.

I account for this difference in the same position in the conduct of men, to whom measures exactly the contrary to their real actions have been and are still imputed by all the friends of all old systems in every country and in every age, not from supposing, with Algernon Sydney, that there is something in the cause of pure monarchical institutions which has a worse influence on the passions of man