The Press.
London, England, 1856-04-19 00:00:00

These oilers were issued with a rigour and cruelty
which makes humanity shudder. Some shots had been
seen to issue from the house No. 12, at the corner of the
Rue Montmorency, in the Rue Transuovian, and orders
were liven to force it open and despatch the insurgents
within. The soldiers broke the doors open by blows of
hatchets, and rushing in, as into the breach of a town
taken by assault, in a state of frenzy put every living sonl
to death within the walls. Sixteen unhappy beings, for
the most part unarmed—old men, women, and chil-
dren—were massacred ! It recalled the worst days of the
first revolution ! The resistance elsewhere was soon over-
come; and this frightful massacre had nut even the excuse
of danger or necessity, for the forces of the insurgents
were small and wholly overmatched.

The account of the means taken by Louis
Philippe to secure his throne is not the least
instructive part of this history. When the
principle of life peerages had been established,
it was unscrupulously used by the Govern-
ment to extend its power. In October, 1832

An ordnnnance appeared creating sixty new peers, besides
seven nominated at the close of the last session—a fresh
inundation which completed the degradation of that dig-
nified portion of the Legislature.

The creation of peers became thenceforward
au instrument in the hands of the Executive
to obtain majorities, and to rule by au organ-
ised system of corruption. When the new
Chamber of Deputies assembled in August,
1834, the Goverument was able to command
320 votes out of 460. The results of the revo-
lution thus accomplished are briefly summed
up by the author :

The public burdens had, on an average of years, been
increased by fully one-third ; the army and all its conco-
mitant expenses doubled. Such had become the penury of
the working classes, especially in the great towns, the cen-
tres of revolution, that they had been driven by sheer
suffering into two desperate revolts both at Paris and
Lyons, which had only been suppressed after a lamentable
effusion of blood, and fearful exasperation on both sides.
The complaints of the press, so far from having ceased,
bad augmented tenfold ; the Citizen• King bad become the
object of greater vituperation than Charles X. had ever
been ; the Government was engaged in an incessant war
fare in the courts of law with the Republicans ; and peace
was only preserved in the capital by forty thousand soldiers,
and as many National Guards and armed patrols.

The other chapters on the politics of Eng-
land and the affairs of Turkey are so full of
facts judiciously arranged that they may be
consulted at all times with advantage. We
are disposed to cordially concur with the
author, that to the refusal of England to afford
assistance to Turkey in 1833, must be attri-
buted the encroachments of Russia which led
to the war just terminated :

That was perhaps the most fstal and inexplicable orris
sion ever made by the Cabinet of Great Britain. The
much wished for opportunity had arrived. Turkey, in the
agonies of dissolution at the hands of its rebellious vassal,
had flown to England for protection; a few sail of the line
would have placed the capital in safety, and the prestige of
Muscovite supremacy would have been at once destroyed
by the most important of its protected States having vo-
luntarily placed itself under the protection of another and
a rival power. Instead of this, what did England do?
She refused succour; threw the Ottomans into the arms of
Russia, who extorted as the price of her protection the
treaty of Nukiar Skelessi, which converted the Euxine
into a Russian lake and left the forts of the Bosphorus
vis-à-vis to the bastions of Sebastopol, with a few sail of
the line, ill•manned to combat eighteen line-of-battle ships,
the skill of whose gunners England afterwards so fa-
tally experienced on the ramparts of the Malakoff and the
Redan.

The volume concludes with a most spirited
and accurate sketch of the French conquest of
Algeria.

Italian Sights and Papal Principles. By James
Jackson Jarves. London : Sampson Low
and Co.
THIS is a readable sketch of Italy and the
Italians, dashed with just sufficient bad taste
and egotism to make us laugh without making
us frown. The style is fluent and graphic, and
now and then approaches the confines of dig-
nified eloquence. The contrasts in the book
are most striking. Few Europeans would have
written the first chapter about the sick old
gentleman in the cabin ; few Americans could
have written the last chapter about Venice. We
cannot bring ourselves to extract the first-named
scene—how the author and an English young
lady were the only two passengers on board
the steamer who were determined to have their
dinner—how they were surrounded by fellow-
voyagers in every stage of nausea, and how
they were finally routed by the startling and
decisive conduct of the old gentleman afore-
said ;—but we shall subjoin a specimen of the
latter in its proper place. The " show piece"