The Sun.
London, England, 1848-09-06 00:00:00

FIRST ACCUSATION :—That I have been ardent in
ambition, and feeble in the exercise of power
during the interregnum and the dictatorship.
I reply :
The revolution of February surprised me, as it did
the whole world. The Republican system, the
Government of pure reason, was, in my opinion, an
ideal more or less distant from the claims, from the
reign, from the progress of the people. It was
not a conjuration (the result of a conspiracy).
I had no immediate aversion to constitu-
tional monarchy, no personal antipathy to the
dynasty. I held myself apart from its favours—l
simply witnessed its administration—behold ! that
is all.
Had its supremacy—some of the principles of which
I held in estimation, such, for example, as its pre-
dilection in favour of peace—neither diminished nor
corrupted freedom, I should not have hesitated to
have afforded it my allegiance. When, however, the
monarchy and the dynasty were abandoned by the
People, by the National Guard, by the Chamber, and
by the army, both of them fell at once from their own
weakness in the course of a single moiety of a sitting.
The days of royalty had disappeared, and it became
only possible to pity it, and to fill up the place which
it had left vacant. The people themselves first dis-
played the tokens of this honourable commiseration.
They fought—they allowed royalty to escape—they
did not condescend to one act of insolence.
I remained isolated, pensive, silent, upon my bench
(in the Chamber of Deputies), contemplating that
abrupt catastrophe which did not leave one time
enough to measure its profundity. Moved even to
sadness by this calamity, and this new birth over-
whelming a throne in a revolution, my heart strug-
gled within me against my reason.
Several of the people and of the Deputies—though
they may now have forgotten the circumstance—ap-
proached me, and, seizing my arm in order to rouse
me from my abstraction, summoned me energetically
to throw myself between t.narchy and my mother-
land, calling me by name and impelling me towards
the tribune. From that tribune M. Odillon Barrot
had just descended, from the exhaustion produced by
his efforts to save the monarchy from destruction. A
musket was levelled at my head from one of the gal-
leries, but an unknown hand struck up the muzzle.
In a few syllables I proclaimed myself to be in favour
of a Provisional Government—a Government which
should grasp the crisis on the instant, so as to bring
it under control. This Government gave augury,
it is true, of a Republic, but it reserved to the Na-
tional Assembly that which I had expressed in my
first words—that of which it could never be deprived,
whether by faction, by seduction, or by acclamation
—the full and sovereign sanction of the definitive form
of government, such as might be suitable for the
acceptance of the nation.
The voices of the people and of those Deputies
who still remained in the Chamber summoned me to
designate myself the members of the Provisional
Government. I refused. M. Dupont (de l'Eure),
the natural dictator of public esteem, was carried, in
spite of his modesty, to the chair of the presidency.
He read the names which a tumultuous sitting had
selected for the formation of the Government. We
could not recognise in this sitting any other authority
besides the authority of danger and devotion. This
danger and this devotion formed our only title. They
prevented us from resigning power, irregular though
it was, into the hands of anarchy. "I ac-
cept this power by reason of the blood which
flows, and which must be staunched at all
price." Those were my words : I find them recorded
in the illoniteur. We marched at once to the Hotel
de Ville, at the head of a procession of the people.
We were carried under the shelter of sabres, and
pikes, and bayonets, into the Looms stained with blood,
encumbered with the dead and the wounded, even to
the little table where the Government was organized.
Even at that hour the great struggle commenced
outside between the two republics; the one violent,
inexorable, dictatorial, terrorist—in word, in act, and
in colour; the other, moderate, pacific, legal, unani-
mous, constitutional; between the Republic which
you wish, and that which you do not wish.
The first act of this terrorist republic, wrong both
in manner and in time, was to wish to hoist its
colours—the colours of blood. During two days
and two nights some of the armed advocates of this
faction inundated from time to time the squares, the
courts, and the halls of the Hotel de Ville. They
summoned us to give, on the instant, to the young
republic the character, the attitude, and the insignia
of the first revolution. My colleagues and myself
resisted then, though we were in danger of our
lives. Twenty times during those seventy-two
hours I was roused, dragged, and carried to the
doors, to the windows, to the railing of the stair-
cases, in the courts, upon the Place, to speak to those
men of another epoch who interpreted so badly the
wishes of the people, and to repulse those symbols of
terrorism with which they desired to dishonour the
Republic. You will call to mind those last words
which decided the victory of the tricoloured ban-
ner; they were thoughts which were already
upon the lips of my colleagues, and in pro-
nouncing those words, I only gave to those
thoughts utterance—" Citizens, the red flag which
you offer to us has only made the tour of the Champs
de Mars, trailed in the blood of the people ; the tri-
coloured' flag, the flag which we wish to preserve to
the Republic, has made the tour of the world with
our courage, with our glory, and with our liberties !"
Is there in all this, I ask, anything like the premedi-
tated ambition of a pest whose peril had thrown us
all (like the forlorn hope of the Revolution) into the
very breach of society ? Is there in all this a token
of feebleness ? Is there in it the evidence of a compli-
city with terrorism ? Answer me !

ASHTON.—The prompt and energetic measures
lately adopted by the authorities to suppress sedition in
this place have happily been most successful. All at-
tempts to carry on the Chartist agitation have been
abandoned; and even those who, immediately after the
late arrests, kept up the public alarm by meeting during
the night in the fields, through the unwearied vigilance
of the police have been completely put down. There
are rumours that the nightly meetings are secretly held,
but they must he without foundation, as the fields and
moors are constantly watched, and no trace whatever has
been seen. We are sorry to learn that as yet no trace
has been obtained to the murderers of Bright, the police-