The Express.
London, England, 1867-04-01 00:00:00

THE EXPRESS, MONDAY EVENING, APRIL 1, 1867.

into the political institutions which their hosts
may enjoy or endure. None of us will proceed to
Paris to hold public meetings and discuss the
relative superiority of Parliamentary governments
or administrative and military monarchies. We
shall remember that we are guests, and not to look
too closely into the private and personal affairs
of the good people we are visiting. British
" society " will learn that there are beyond
Belgravia and clubs out Pall-mall, and that to
a considerable public on the other side of the
Channel the movements and marriages of
a few rich and titled British families
are as important and as interesting as
though they happened in Kamschatka. Our
bishops and clergy will discover that their scandals
about vestments and their squabbles about altar
candles look as large in Paris as a crowd in
Fleet-street from a balloon four miles high in air.
Our barristers will find that the most illustrious
browbeaters in i..i Pri,4B are conspicuously in-
significant personages 300 miles away ; our M.P.s
will have to own that the names of no more than
half a dozen among them have crossed the water,
and even Peers and Baronets will acknowledge
that there is a world where Peers and Baronets
are unknown. Our actors will, we trust,
take a lesson in the rudiments of dramatic
art ; our men of letters will be agreeably
surprised by their obscurity ; our very coachmen
will perceive that there is more than one rule
of the road, and only one beyond the circuit of
these islands, and that not theirs; and, above all,
let us devoutly hope that our hordes of vulgar
rich will, by a diligent and persevering effort of
observation, arrive at the conclusion that it, is
possible to live and die like a gentleman in an
apartment on the fifth story.

OUR CONTEMPORARIES.
(THIS DAY.)

from W.isliiugton to the confederation of our North Ame-
rican provinces. It is more than an answer—it is a
challenge.

When such barefaced designs to remove a neigh-
bour's landmark are paraded by a man like Granier
de Cassagnac, the authorised historian of the coup
d'etat, and who has been a government writer
ever since, what government can have any confi-
dence in professions that France does not meditate
a raid in Europe ? What minister or diplomatist
can flatter himself that he would be serving the
cause of peace by facilitating the degustation by
France of such a hors d'a or re as Luxemburg, which
would be merely a whet to its ravenousappetite ? The
Pays, while announcing that it is about to make a
regular paper campaign against Belgium, protests
loudly that it is not a government organ and that
all its staff are thoroughly independent men who
speak only their own opinions. The 3fouiteur,
without a moment's loss of time, chimes in with
this assertion of the Pays by saying that several
" foreign journals" [it is always foreign journals
which are made responsible for false news]
seek to accredit the belief that the Pays is
the interpreter of the French government, and
that it is important not to allow this
mistake to be propagated. Then, in almost the
very words used by the Pays, it says that the
politics of that journal are entirely personal,
and involve no responsibility but that of the
editor, who was elected by the shareholders.
This explanation will have very little weight
with those acquainted with the mechanism
of the French press. The form of electing M.
Granier de Cassagnac (the standing compiler of
the address in the Corps Legialatif) editor of the
Pays was indeed gone through by the shareholders,
but not until it was known that he had been
selected for the post by government, without whose
authority he could not have filled it. The Coosti-
tationncl is always disavowed whenever convenient,
and yet everybody knows that it is a semi-official
journal. The Ltberte has an ironical article this
evening pretending to believe that Belgium is
saved, because the Pays is disavowed by the
Mouiteur, but at the same time saying how unfor-
tunate it is that M. Rouher, when M. Granier de
Cassagnac, the editor of the Pays, said in his place
in the Corps Legislatif that ho was not against the
policy of annexation, did not at once say from the
tribune that the government did not share his
views.

A THEOLOGICAL DISCUSSION IX THE FRENCH
SENATE.

In the French Senate on Friday, during a dis-
cussion on the bill relating to primary instruction,
Count de BEGUIt D'AGUIDShEAU, in speaking d the works
published of late years against the Christian religion,said—
I ban many reproaches to make to the government
on this question, and I cannot refrain from censuring
the facility with which it has let pan a multitude of
facts which might have been the object of judicial pro-
ceedings,. I could also wish the state to set the example, so
that we should not see in the public workshops a penitent
violation of the Sabbath, the only day when men have time
to remember that they have a family and a soul, or can fol-
low any course of religious instruction. The people should
not be encouraged in allowing themselves to be carried away
by the current of materialism, which leads astray the
masses and seduces them from the prescriptions of the
most holy religion laws. I have another reproach to
make—against M. Rouland on the subject of certain scan-
dalous nominations made formerly by him, and am glad
that be is present for me to tell him that, in spite of the
good intentions he manifested last year at the time of a
discussion raised by a petition concerning the protestants,
to tell him, I say, that be ought to preserve all his life a
feeling of remorse for a nomination which was a great
scandal. (Murmurs.)
M. nc SAINTC-BECVE, interrupting—l protest against
personal imputations having nothing to do with the ques-
tion and addressed to honourable then.