The Express.
London, England, 1852-01-16 00:00:00

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LONDON, FRIDAY, JANUARY 16.

Tint Autocrat of France has promulgated the
constitution that might have been expected of him.
It is precisely that constitution which the favourite
clown or charlatan of the day might have announced
with enthusiastic applause to the audience that
throng's before any theatre of the Boulevard da
Temple. It is the very burlesque of representative
government, the parody of every system that hea
been seriously essayed in really free countries. Power
Without responsibility, debates without publicity, a
commons house without the faculty of originating a
law or modifying a budget, an upper house without
hereditary dignity or elective right, a government
which is nothing but a police, and an army whose
duty is merely that of gendarmes—such is the poli-
tical system solemnly proposed for and to France in
the middle of the nineteenth century.
Tho consular constitution of the year VIII.,
from which the mock system is borrowetl, wee, it is
well known, an undisguised and complete dictatorship.
The council of state were the advocates whom the
future emperor paid and consulted, The senators were
his valets. The tribunate, or lower house, was com-
rof his paid talkers, who, when they talked raly way that government did not like, were pre-
cluded from talking at all. Soon after this consti-
tution was originally granted, the tribunate, as the
House of Representatives was then called, chose to
discuss and criticise Narto.Kox's two measures of the
code and the concordat. The FIReT Cosset. ran in-
dignant at their audacity, and withdrew these laws,
giving the tribunate nothing whatever to discuss.
They nad no power by the constitution of originating
a law or a motion, consequently their functions were
suspended, their place became a sinecure, and they
themselves beemne the laughing-stock of the Pari-
sian.. The same fate awaits the mock House of Com-
mons of Louis NveoteoN, if, indeed. he can get any
Frenchmen above the rank of village schoolmasters
who would so far demean themselves as to wear the
livery, and receive the par, of popular representatives
witliout the faculty of auing. anything save what
they were hidden. Why not issue a decree, that the
servants who wait behind the chairs of the guests
at the Elyse, shall take the seats in the morning,
and vote the laws of the l'iti:sint:Nr, including his
own civil list and their expenses. It would be just
as respectable and genuine a House of Commons as
the raletaille which the mock constitution summons
from the provineea.
Odious as is a dictatorship. the least humiliating
form of it is that which avows what it is, and which
assigns reasons for its necessity. lioNaraiere, in
1800, was not without these reasons. The country
had just recovered from civil war and from foreign
war, from both of which be who claimed the dic-
tatorship had saved it. The representative system
lad in a manner worn itself out. Its last manifesta-
tion war a reckless and exuberant royalism, that
threatened to give up every boon and conquest of
the great revolution. The excuse of lioNveAcrE
was that he wanted to save the revolution,
the benefits and the acquisition of this re-
volution from a reckless and criminal reaction. To
maintain the revolution, to uphold in office, influence,
and power, the ideas and the generation which it
had produced, such was the idea of NsrotEos. Ile
eiru determined to save revolutionary France from
the despotic subjugation of Europe. to endow France
with new laws and with a social and political
organisation in accordance with the state of things
and of society that the revolution had created, and
that the counter-revolution threatened to destroy.