The Sun.
London, England, 1850-10-11 00:00:00

swarmed in the narrow and gloomy streets of the
manufacturing town, you see well-dressed workmen,
with an appearance of strength and health, going to
work or returning peaceably from their workshop
with their tools on their shoulder; young girls
issuing without tumult from the houses where
they work, under the superintendence of
women older than themselves, or of a father or bro-
ther, who brings them back to the house ; from time
to time you see numerous columns of little children
of from five to eight years of age, poorly but decently
clad, led by a woman, who leaves them at their own
doors, after having watched over them all day. They
all present the appearance of relative comfort, of the
most exquisite cleanliness, and of health. You will
perceive few, if any, idle groups on the public way,
and infinitely fewer drunken men than formerly;
the streets appear as if purged of vice and wretched-
ness, or only exhibit those which always remain on
the scum of an immense population.
If you converse in a drawing-room, in a public
carriage, at a public dinner table, even in the street,
with men of the different classes in England; if you
take care to be present, as I did, at places where per-
sons of the most advanced opinions meet and speak ;
if you read the journals, those safety-valves of public
opinion, you must remain struck with the extreme
mildness of men's minds and hearts, with the tempe-
rance of ideas, the moderation of what is desired, the
prudence of the Liberal opposition, the tendency
evinced towards a conciliation of all classes, the jus-
tice which all classes of the English population render
to each other, the readiness of all to co-operate, each
according to his means and disposition, in advancing
the general good—the employment, comfort, instruc-
tion, and morality of the people—in a word, a mild
and serene air is breathed in place of the tempest
blast which then raged in every breast. The equi-
librium is re-established in the national atmosphere.
One feels and says to oneself—" The people can come
to an understanding with itself ; it can live, last,
prosper, and improve for a long time in this way. Had
I my residence on this soil I should not any longer
tremble for my hearth."
I except, it must be understood, from this very ge-
neral character of harmony and reconciliation two
classes of men whom nothing ever satisfies—the de-
magogues and the extreme aristocrats—two tyrannies
-whi,l cannot content themselves with any liberty,
because they eternally desire to subjugate the people,
the one by the intolerance of the rabble, the other
.by the intolerance of the little number. The
newspapers of the inexorable aristocracy, and of the
ungovernable radicalism, are the only ones that still
contrast, by their bitterness, with the general mild-
ness of opinions in Great Britain. But some clubs of
Chartists, rendered fanatical by sophistry, and some
clubs of diplomatists, rendered fanatical by pride, only
serve the better to show the calm and reason which
are more and more prevailing in the other parts of the
nation. The one make speeches to the emptiness of
places where the people are invited to meet, and the
others pay by the line for calumnies and invectives
against France and against the present age.*
No one listens and no one reads. The
people work on. The intelligent Tories lament
Sir R. Peel, and accept the inheritance of his Con-
servative doctrines by means of progress.
It appears that a superhuman hand carried away
during that sleep of 20 years all the venom which
racked the social body in this country. If a Radical
procession is announced, as on the 10th of April,
250,000 citizens, of all opinions, appear in the streets
of London as special constables, and preserve the pub-
lic peace against these phantoms of another time.
Such is the present appearance of the public mind in
England to a stranger.

A. DE LAMARTINE.

Nothing equals the acrimony of two or three Tory
newspapers in ~England against France, democracy, the
Provisional Government, the Republic, and all the men
who were mixed up, intimately or remotely, in the
crisis of 1848. These journals translated, for the use of
the English aristocracy, the diatribes of the French
journals against these men. It is easy to see that
French anger is concerned in the ink. Such outbreaks,
natural enough in France, are absurd in London. When
Ireland, then volcanised, came, after the revolution of
February, and asked for the support of France against
England, the Provisional Government replied, " We are
at peaca with Great Britain; but even were we at war
with her, we could not consent to light up a civil war
amongst our enemies." England then applauded, now
sho hoots and groans. That is neither English nor
French: it is savage.