The Express.
London, England, 1863-12-26 00:00:00

LONDON, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 26.

PARLIAMENTARY Government, ever since the
earliest Parliament assembled, has always meant,
first end foremost, financial controL Examine the
origin and growth of the freest and most power-
ful of legislative bodies, and you find a monarch
wanting money, usually to carry on a war, and the
representatives of the nation summoned to grant it.
As the power of the people incre tees, and the ca-
prices of the sovereign are more and more subject
to restraint, the faculty of granting or withholding
supplies becomes the test and touchstone of a real
effective national representation, until the de-
gree of freedom enjoyed by a people may
be accurately measured by the laxity with
which its pursestrings were held, and its expendi-
ture and taxation fixed sod appropriated. In
short, the key of a nation's cash-box is the key of
that nation's liberties, and it matters not a little
in what bands the key is kept. In the govern.
meat of highly civilized communities State finance
is State policy, and it is of no trifling import to
the welfare and happiness of any country, and
often to the peace of a continent, that one man
should have it in his power, by the stroke
of a pen or a wave of the hand, to drag millions of
men from the cultivation of the soil, and from re-
productive labour and industry, to glut a passion for
glory, or to appease a restless and insatiable am-
bition, or to save his subjects and himself from
ennui, and the discontent which ennui engenders.
Some such reflections as theee seem to be
operating upon the public mind in France just
now, and to be arousing it from the lethargy
and prostration of twelve years. Our neighbours,
in spite of all their political reverses and retreats,
and long " flashes of silence," believe themselves
still the pioneers of progress and the advance-guard
of liberal ideas, for no other reason than that
more than seventy years ago they proclaimed a
set of principles which remain a set of principles
still—and nothing more. Perhaps, however, men
really deceive themselves, and imagine they are
advancing very fast when they are only taking
tremendous jumps into the air, rearing back and
plunging forward, and coming suddenly to a dead
atop ; and performing these evolutions over and
over again, while nations without a theory or an
idea to speak of, are plodding slowly on, but never
losing ground. There, for instance, is the last new
Legislative Corps, with an overpowering majority
elected by tho Government, and an opposition con-
sisting of some thirty members. Such is the
contagion of independen3e within any political
Assembly when liberty is in the air, such the moral
superiority of a small but compact liberal opposi-
tion, representing real constituencies, to a majo-
rity representing nothing but administrative
domination, that this Legislative Corps, majority
and minority alike, is already becoming conscious
of its duty to the public at large, and of its respon-
sibility as the guardian of national interests.
The Report of the Committee on the bill for
a loan of twelve million francs was as different
as possible, in form and substance, from what
such a document would have been in the
earlier years of the Second Empire. Instead of •
formal act of homage and adulation to the all-wise
omnipotence of the EMPIROR, and a devout so.
knowledgment of the Imperial beneficence in con-
descending to accept a testimony of affection in
the shape of three hundred millions of franca, M.
Got IN'll Report (and M. 001:IN is a member of
the majority) begins by declaring that such a pro-
position must be a subject of moat anxious conside-
ration ; and that, in accepting the present loan as a
purely financial measure for the liquidation of liabi-
lities already sanctioned, and for the diminution of
the floating debt by creating new resources for the
Treasury, the Committee do not intend to give
the Government the means of incurring extraor-
dinary expenditure ; but, on the con-
trary, they "insist " that the Government shall