The Express.
London, England, 1864-09-03 00:00:00

MOE WATER AT LOWDEN MDR&

Till DAY 7: tioiiiiag 211 s.
TO-MORROW Morning, U. 430.....A11inew6L6Ta

LONDON, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER &

Ir England has not all the speechifying at this
season to herself, neither has Ireland all the riot-
ing. While the zealots of the rival faiths were
pounding each other like Irishmen and Christians
at Belfast, Geneva was offering an unexpected at-
traction to tourists in search of the picturesque.
Instead of a civilized and comely city, prosperous,
well-to-do, contented, liberal, humane, wrapt in
the enjoyment of peace—of honourable and digni-
fied security, the passing traveller might have seen
a few days since, on the shores of that lovely
lake, a fair, free city divided against itself, be-
sieged, barricaded, stormed, surprised into revolt,
trembling with the shock of hostile cannon, and
aghast at the spectacle of civil war and
bloodshed in its streets. An English tra-
veller inquiring what it all meant, would have been
little edified by the information that a procession

of unarmed citizens accompanying the returning
officer of an election had been waylaid, assaulted,
and fired upon without a moment's warning or
hesitation by an armed body of supporters of the
unsuccessful candidate, and that artillery had been
planted in a leading thoroughfare for the
purpose of punishing the victorious majority with
grapeshot. Any ordinal/ Englishman, no doubt,
would be more astonished at the form than the
fact of such a disturbance. Brickbats, and broken
heads, and tumultuous avengers of the conquered
candidate,might not be altogether foreign tohis own
experience. But the muskets and the grapeshot
would give him pause, and from the scenes of a
general election in stirring times at home his
thoughts would turn to continental revolutions,
and he would ask himself whether Geneva was
qualifying itself for annexation to a neighbouring
Empire, by proving in the most conspicuous and
disgraceful manner its political degeneracy and
demoralization, its contempt for law, its impa-
tience of liberty, its disregard of right,
except indeed the right of the strongest.
Thereupon any intelligent Englishman would pro-
ceed perhaps to further inquiries, and the result
of his discoveries would, we clammy, be far from
clear or convincing. He would learn on one aide
that it was but a purely local squabble that had led
to all this disorder and violence ; that for thirty
years past, but more particularly for the last
eighteen years, the city had been divided into two
parties, sometimes called the Radicals and the
Conservatives, and sometimes (far more intelligibly
to any one familiar with local circumatutces),
PREEMIE and Independents—that is, partisans of
M. Jamas Fszy, who foi fears had exercised, in all
but the form and the name, a veritable poli-
tical dictatorship, and a dictatorship modelled
on the Parisian plan—arbitrary, headstrong,
violent, lavish of public money, destructive of
public morals. He would hear that this M. JAREN
FAZE, though a citizen of Geneva, and of an old
Protestant family, was by education and political
associations one of those French cosmopolitan
democrats who so easily become Imperialists, and
in whose precedents and traditions Imperialism !
finds a warrant for all its lawless extravagance''
and oppression ; that the Conservatives, or rather
Independents, were the patriotic representatives
of the ancient virtue and simplicity of the Re-
public, of its pure religion, its austere morality, its
prudent and ordered freedom ; that M. FREY was
a professed imitator of the system of French Im-
perialism, of its public works, its reckless budgets,
its " fast " living, its supremacy of force, and lie
organization of a spurious national will ; '
that it was even suspected that M. Farr, ever since
he had been deposed from his dictatorship,
had been engaged in plotting and contriving
a further rectification of the French frontiers,
and the absorption of a city and territory
which served as a refuge for the free thought and
discontent of disloyal subjects of the EMPEROR.
M. FAZE'S recent alliance with the Catholic party
who had been wont to regard him as their most
dangerous and powerful adversary was interpreted
as another symptom of a conspiracy which em-
ployed with equal readiness and recklessness all
weapons, whether of intrigue or of disorder, to
gain its ends. Such is one account the English.
man at Geneva might have heard on the spot of
the causes of the recent disturbance. On the
other hand, if he had met a " Radical," or
FAZYIET, he might have beard a very plausible tale
of M. FA Z v's vigorous intellect, his fame as an ecc -
nomist, his statesmanlike capacity, his enlightened
administration of the finances and public works of
Geneva, his razing of the fortifications, his dame-
litions and reconstructions,his introduction of many
of the attractions of Baden and Homburg into a city
as famous among tourists for its dulness as for its
beautiful situation and its excellent hotels. And
as for M. Fazv's propensity to Imperialism, he had
been the staunchest of Republicans, the friend
and associate of Republicans from his youth up ;
as for his alliance with the Catholics, he had
al vays been a disciple of that Patriarch of Feeney,