The Sun.
London, England, 1851-11-14 00:00:00

Lo mina .70in1h

LONDON, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1851.

REJECTION of the MINISTERIAL
ELECTORAL BILL BY THE FRENCH
ASSEMBLY.

At nine o'clock last evening the French Legisla-
tive Assembly rejected, by a majority of seven, the
Bill submitted to them by the PRESIDENT of the Re-
public and his Ministers, for the repeal of the Elec-
toral Law of the 31st of May, 1850, and for the
restoration of Universal Suffrage.
This is a defeat, a crushing defeat, alike to the
PRESIDENT and his Ministers, who have been sub-
jected to the insult of having their measure igno-
miniously rejected without even a first reading
accorded to it, and to the Bourbonists and part-pretre
fractions of the reactionaries, who cannot hope to
maintain by a narrow majority of seven the dis-
franchisement of 3,000,000 of Frenchmen. The
PRESIDENT and his Ministers are defeated, but with
them the law against which they strove is defeated
also. The law is, as we said a few days since,
doomed ; it can never be carried into execution, and to
the Republicans, the only party which throughout
these contests has acted upon high principle,
untainted by sinister motives or personal
ambitions, the victory now remains. This division is,
a great victory for the
Republicans.toall intent intents
The
andpudrapiossieosn has put the PRESIDENT,
and his Ministers effectually hors de comsat, and has
destroyed whatever faint chance the PRESIDENT
might have possessed of obtaining a revision of the
Constitution in time to enable him to become, with-
out a violation of the Constitution, a candidate for
re-election. It remains now for the Republican
party to secure that which was refused by the As-
sembly to the PRESIDENT—the repeal, namely, of this
Electoral Law, which 348 representatives of the
people have, by their votes, joined with the:PRESIDENT
and his Ministry in declaring is a provocation to civil
war. Various opportunities will occur for enabling
them to attain this very desirable object, and thus to
save France from those dangers into which, to serve
their own personal ambition, the different fractions of
the reactionary and anti-national party—viz., the
clerical fraction, the Bonapartist fraction, the Legiti-
matiat fraction, and the Burgraves, are each en-
deavouring to plunge her. If 1852 should
pass over quietly in France it will be entirely owing
to the wisdom, prudence, patriotism, and
dignified forbearance of the Republicans ; for
never have any men so strenuously exerted
themselves to provoke outbreak and insur-
rection as that widely organised conspiracy
which, calling itself the party of order, has been
since 1848 assiduously engaged in endeavouring to
throw everything in France into disorder. We,
however, repose the utmost faith in the firmness and
good sense of the Republicans, and doubt not but that
in the course of a very short time they will procure
the formal repeal of that which it is now impossible
ever to carry into effect—the unconstitutional Elec.
toral Law of the 31st May, 1850.

However much the opponents of KOSSUTH have
assailed his character, their malignant:calumnies have
altogether failed to interfere with its proper appre-
ciation. Embezzlement is not the least of the crimes
imputed to this very remarkable personage. He has
been traduced as one notoriously convicted of pusil-
lanimity, peculation, and licentiousness. Yet the man
whom these writers have dared to vilify as a coward,
a robber, and a profligate, has been greeted with the
welcome of a hero by many thousands of
Englishmen. So little is the attention paid
to anything asserted by the unprincipled apolo-
gists of Absolutism. Englishmen have judged
KOESUTII by his career, by that career
which he himself has aptly designated as " an open
book." They have marvelled at the astonishing
powers of that humble lawyer of a village, that
homely writer of short-hand, that secluded editor of a
newspsper,who by the simple force of his genius rose to
be the Dictator of Hungary, of that regal and aristo-
cratic race whose chivalric senators had, in a preceding
century, drawn their swords to the famous cry,
Moriatnur pro Rege nostro I The people of Eng-
land have recognised that there was something more
than ordinary in the man who could attain
the chieftainship of such a nation solely by the
influence of his intellect and his principles, pouring
from the resources of his polioy eighty millions of
florins into an empty exchequer, and creating from
the dragon-teeth of his eloquence a vast and well dis-
ciplined army, before the terrors of whose prowess the
imperial veterans of Austria and Russia quailed—an
army conquered at last not by superiority of numbers
but by stratagem, by the treason of GORGET more
than by the legions of the AuTocafer. The commu.
nity in this country have not only borne these facts
in remembrance in forming their opinions of Louts
KOSSUTH, they have themselves listened to the magic
of his voice, they have seen him face to face, grasped
him hand to hand, heard from his lips the history of
the Hungarian struggle, and of his own various And 1