The Express.
London, England, 1868-08-13 00:00:00

HIGH WATER AT LONDON =DOS

!To-DAT 110 m Aftentocs,_
BeL
To-lkasow—lLoralag, GEL Altanaoas, 10h. Am.

Noyxca.

khakis!. are rataartad to Mil-Le-11;k Paat-orlos orders payable
to kr. Josioa Itaaamoror, Port-olles, Tkatostrart, E.C.
Parkas of BMWS, XAZZIAGIS, aed Duran, aai reaped
rata 12 o'doek tor bastion aim maim. Prior fa.

A SECOND EDITION of the EXPRESS,

CONTAINING
The Latest Foreign Telegrams; the Latest City;
Railway, Mining, and other Shares; Sporting,
and General Intelligence,

EVERY EVENING.

LONDON, THURSDAY, AUG. 13.

UNEASY SYMPTOMS IN FRANCE:

TUE question whether Imperialism, as it has
existed for the last sixteen years, can co-exist with
liberty, is beginning to prose upon the French
government for an answer, which cannot long or
safely be delayed. That pusillanimity of the
middle classes, and that exhaustion of the revolu-
tionary spirit in the multitude, which made the
restoration of the Empire easy in 1852, no longer
operate to preserve a regime which has enjoyed
ample range and leisure to indulge in almost
every fault and folly that human nature, invested
with supreme power and exempt from the ordinary
conditions of responsibility, can commit. The
middle classes, who were scared by Socialism
into accepting the rule of the sabre, have had
time to digest their fears, and the " red spectre"
is remembered only as a nightmare. They find
themselves burdened with as increased taxation
to which the obnoxious 45 centime which saved
the Republic from insolvency in 1848
were but a fleabite; and, in the capital, saddled
with a municipal administration over whose
lavish expenditure they have no control. They
find themselves, their families, and their for-
tunes, at the mercy of a personal will, or a per-
sonal caprice, which may, at any moment, send
their sons to perish without glory, in some dis-
tant crusade, for the sake of keeping the troops in
wind ; or provoke a general European war, in
order to avoid the domestic agitation of a general
election. In the midst of peace they have
to bear the cost and the uncertainty
of war, without hope of profit or of
glory. They ask themselves in vain what the
Russian war, or the Italian war, or the Roman
occupation, or the Mexican expedition, has done
for French interests or Preach honour. They ask
themselves what the policy of nationalities, or
of " grand agglomerations," or of ultramon-
tanism, has done for the greatness or the
security of their country. They ask themselves in
Paris what the grand agglomeration of workmen
employed in the building trade, and the incessant
demolitions and reconstructions of streets, so that
no man can call his domicile his home, have done
for the comfort or happiness of their households,
or to make life easier or more convenient.
On the other hand, the working men of the great
cities, some of whom were seduoed into voting for
the EMPEROR, by the promise that the Empire
should be democracy and socialism enthroned, have
discovered that man does not live by work and
wages alone, and that dear and distant lodgings
and a rise in the prices of all provisions snake
a democratic despotism represented by a civil
list of a million sterling, and by a reckless parade
of unproductive public works, a hard bargain for
the hewers of wood and the drawers o f
water. Then the new conscription, which
makes every able-bodied man liable to
servo under the standards, and to waste
the prime of his years in the forced

idk6ees of igarris'oe. is solningeheine be as bad-
ness and the bosoms even of those staunch and
superstitious Imperialiats, the peasantry, who are
slowly awaking ,to the coassionsaums that
the' Mastyr of St. Helena died some Tsars
ago, and that the present Naeotgoe is
not the groat Captain who led their fathers to
the slaughter. The peasantry, it is true, are
priest-ridden, and for the moment the priests are
on the aide of the Empire ; but there h a
lurking hatred to'priests in the French peasant's
heart, which, when the Church is most
powerful, may easily revive. It is often said by the
eemi-official journals, and the plausible assertion is
repeated by their complacent eohoes abroad, that
the Empire has done much for the
material interests of France. Nor is the
assertion altogether unfounded. After the
crash and commotion of '4B and '49, any government
that kept order in the streets, and seemed to offer
some guarantee of endurance, must have given to
mercantile and industrial undertakings that feel-
ing of confidence and security which is the
life of enterprise. The Second Empire un-
questionably inaugurated an era of gigantic
speculation and unlimited credit, and discovered
the secret of transmuting worthless scrip into
fabulous wealth and Babylonian luxury. It has
engendered a now race of millionaires. It has
turned a boat of penniless adventurers into pro-
prietors of palaces and estates. Doubtless in
this great whirlpool of gambling some have gone
down and disappeared, but it cannot be said that
any ono of the men who made the Second Empire,
or who have served it devotedly, has lost by the
operation. Sixteen years have proved at length
that gambling is not prosperity—that an in-
flation of credit is not an increase of wealth,
that repression is not order, that silence is not
security, that moral and material interests cannot
be disjoined, and that a nation which abdicates
its own responsibilities and escapes from the noble
task of self-control into the indulgences and the
apathy of dependence and submission, will sooner
or later have to pay the penalty of its humiliation
by the loss of that specious security and that
spurious prosperity for which it threw its liberties
away.

Such reflections as these are, we know, weighing
upon the minds of many Frenchmen who
fancied that they had found in the
Second Empire a refuge from the troubles
and the dangers of freedom and self-rule. As
to the liberal professions, the Second Empire
has always had reason to count them, with
few and not illustrious exceptions, among " the
" old parties." By no persuasion, no bribe, no in-
timidation, has it conciliatedthe intellect of France.
Its lawyer-statesmen, its magistrates, confer no
lustre on the profession from which they
emerged by their ready and unscrupulous rhe-
toric and their pliant services on the judgment-
seat. Literature the Second Empire has none. It
subsists on the remains of the Restoration and the
Monarchy of July, and the few successors of
that brilliant company of writers belong to the
most implacable opposition. The Minister of
Public Instruction apologises for this undeniable
decadence by the plea that the present is an age
of action, as if the greatest names in all literature,
ancient and modern, had not flourished in ages of
action.

Nor must it be forgotten, in considering
the prospects of the present Government in
France, that a new generation has sprung up since
the Revolution of February and the Restoration of
the Empire ; a generation which knows nothing of
the panic of '4B, or of the lassitude and discourage-
ment of '5l. This generation, as the recent inci-
dent at the distribution of prizes in the Lycke
Louis le Grand has shown, has no love or
loyalty to spare for Imperialism. With all
the generous ardour of youth it aspires
to something nobler and better than a
system of government which writes the prin-
ciples of 'B9 on its flag, while it proscribes liberty
and laughs equality to scorn. Every day our
neighbours are becoming more and more aware of
the fallacy which foreigners have long perceived,
that in the absence of liberty France enjoys
equality. Very possibly, and as we think very ro-
gretably, France prefers equality to liberty; and
a certain kind of social liberty, not to say license,
France undoubtedly enjoys, and never more per-
haps than under the present regime. But of that
equality which the Revolution of 'B9 proclaimed,
equality before the law, there is at this moment
no civilized country more destitute than France.
What sort of equality is that which will not permit
the meanest functionary of the Government to be
prosecuted by a private citizen without the express
authorisation of the Council of State—a body of
functionaries nominated and appointed by the
Crown ? The simple truth is that no government
in Franco has yet succeeded in establishing the
principles of 'B9. In this respect the Second
Empire only betters the instructions of its prede-
cessors.