The Express.
London, England, 1863-01-14 00:00:00

HIGH WATIR AT WIDOW =IDOL

TN Da us.
96. Miaow" 98.

LONDON, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 14..

Win= the last six days the movement for the
relief of the distress in the Department of the
Lower Seine has advanced rapidly and steadily, and
the subscriptions begin to flow in to the Central
Committee at Rouen from all parte of France.
Earnest appeals addressed to the public by a
few high-minded and independent journalists have
been echoed throughout the country, and the
well-to-do classes in France are at length awaken-
ing to their responsibilities, and to the danger and
disgrace of leaving them unfulfilled. Our neigh-
bours are a people of warm and generous instincts,
but their sympathies are perhaps more readily
touched by dramatic and imaginary sorrows than
by the vulgar sores of the real LAziarre at their
door. There are many persons in all countries
of the liveliest sensibility and the keenest sym-
pathy, who are easily affected to tears at a play,
though tolerably callous to the workaday troubles
of their fellow-creatures. The sensibilities of
Frenchmen have been largely drawn upon by suf-
fering nationalities abroad and by paroxysms of fra-
ternity at home, and it may be that the stock is

somewhat exhausted. In no country in the world
have the cruel anomalies and inequalities of an
imperfect social state, the wrongs of poverty,
and the rights of labour, been more fervently
and fiercely proclaimed. Not once or twice
only the foundations of French society have been
shaken by revolutions which were destined to make
the whole human race a loving brotherhood. The
result of these excesses of brotherly love has
been not the reconciliation but the separation of
that society into hostile classes, mutually bent upon
. . . . .

each other's extermination whenever a favourable
opportunity should occur ; and meanwhile, divided
by barriers of bate, envy, and fear. It was such •
society as this, a frivolous remnant of aristocracy,
a panic-struck and selfish bourgeoisie, an ignorant,
close-fisted, and superstitious peasantry, and a
working class sick of visionary politics, exhausted
by agitation—that Loris NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
saw and conquered ; and upon this foundation
the Second Empire was established. As a
literary socialist, be was to be the champion
of "the masses ;" as a man of order, he was to
preserve the propertied classes from socialism. In
some respects he has judiciously disappointed those
who for opposite reasons concurred in placing him
in power. He has carried Free Trade in the teeth
of his protectionist supporters; he has encouraged
the association of capital, and he has neither organ-
ized labour, nor declared St. Simonianism the reli-
gion of the State. One thing he has not done,
and it would be madness in him to do it. He
has not healed the animosities of classes,
for it is by their animosities that his government
subsists. What the Second Empire has done is
precisely what all military despotisms that have
ever existed have always done. It has encouraged
luxury, gambling, and prodigal living ; it has syste-
matically debauched the public taste and
morals ; it has crushed the public mind, sup-
pressed public spirit, made itself the one law
and gospel, and providence, and dispense-
tion, and destiny to France. By an arbi-
trary organization of a so-called universal suf-
frage it has buried under an immense imposture
the independence and intelligence of honest men,
while by an enormous system of legerdemain it
has contrived to make the national vote a national
ostracism.
Let us see, then, how this vaunted system, I
which sycophants and knaves all over the world
are for ever extolling, operates in the presence of
some great domestic calamity, such as this cotton
famine in the Department of the Lower Seine. How
must it work, according to the inexorable logic of
cause and effect f One hundred thousand families
are starving through the sudden and unavoidable
cessation of the industry by which they lived. Here
is a real national calamity which the whole nation
should unite in relieving. But before relief can
come the suffering must be known. " The King can
"do no wrong " is • very sound and salutary maxim
in constitutional monarchies, where it acts as
a flywheel to the machinery of the State. But
In States where one man's will is supreme, it is a
maxim capable of the most curious perversions,
and of the most pernicious developments. It
means, for instance, that as the Imperial Govern.
ment is alone responsible to the people, and
affects the power and the wisdom of • Second
Providence, that responsibility must be always
covered, and always exempt from criticism.
Personal Government is naturally jealous of any
other initiative than its own, necessarily suspi-
cious of any manifestation of public spirit or
public concert for • national purpose. Under
personal Government all calamity has the look
of a failure of power or forethought in the ruler,
and to publish it is to excite to the hatred or con-
tempt of the Government. The press, therefore,
must abstain from making it a pretext for agita-
tion ; the nation must leave it to be dealt with
by the Sovereign. The official and semi-official
journals of the French Empire remained abso-
lutely silent upon the increasing distress in the