Duchess d'Angoulême. He never hesitated as | employment for your workmen; with the same to his divine mission, and gave himself out for the prophet of a new religion, the high priest of a new church.

"In literature what a chaos of new and extravagant ideas-what a torrent of absurd revolting madness has burst forth in a short period! It is especially during the last eighteen months, that all men of reflection have become sensible of the reality of our state of perfection; they have seen that the inefficiency of our literary and political character is at least equal to their pride, and nothing more can be said of them.

ships that your merchants are starving; with the same revenues that you are compelled to sell the royal forests, contract enormous loans, pillage the fund laid aside for the indemnity of individuals, and incessantly increase the floating debt; that it is with peace both within and without that you are obliged to augment the army, and restore all the severity of the conscription. How is it that the ancient dynasty preserved us from so many misfortunes, and the new one has brought us such terrible scourges? I will explain the cause.

"Confidence creates this prosperity of na"One would imagine, in truth, that Provi- tions. Disquietude and apprehension cause dence had intentionally rendered the triumph of the it to disappear, Security, for the future, given Revolutionists so sudden and complete, expressly in or taken away, produces activity or languor, order to open the eyes of those by a new example, to riches or misery, tranquillity or trouble. You whom the first would not suffice. Nothing has con- have made your election for the wrong side of tended against them but the consequence of that alternative, when instead of Right you their own principles, and yet where are they? substitute Might: because Right, which never They have declaimed for fifteen years against changes, bears in itself all the elements of the undue preponderance of the royal authori- stability, while Power, which changes every ty, and the want of freedom; and yet they have day, brings home to every breast the feeling proved by their actions that they could take of instability. I know well, that to the present nothing from that authority, and add nothing triumph of power its leaders strive to annex to that freedom, without plunging us into anar- an idea of right; but it will be just as easy, chy. Follow attentively their reign-their own when the next heave of the revolutionary principles have been sufficient to destroy them, earthquake displaces the present authority, to without the intervention of a human being. clothe that which succeeds it with a similar The first ministry, M. Guizot and the Duke de title to permanent obedience. Every succesBroglio, had the favour of the king, and of the sive party in its turn can rest its pretensions majority in both chambers. Under the Resto- to sovereignty on the authority of the People. ration, a ministry could never have been over- On the other hand, our right of succession turned which stood in such a situation; but depends on an immovable basis. If Charles nevertheless it did not exist three months; X. or Henry V. is on the throne, every one without being attacked it perished; disap-knows that no person can claim the crown on peared in the midst of a tumult. The repres- the same title as that by which they held it: sion of that disorder was the nominal, the prin- but under the present government, how is it ciples of the government itself the real cause. possible to avoid the conviction, that if it The same causes overthrew in a few months pleases 300 persons at Metz or Grenoble to more the succeeding ministry. The adminis- proclaim a republic, or 300 others at Toulouse tration of Casimir Perier had also the support or Bordeaux, Henry V., and if a general stupor, of the king and of the chambers, and no one arising from the weakness of each of the deattacked it; but nevertheless it was compelled partments taken singly, prevents any effectual to purchase a disgraceful and ephemeral exist-resistance, the new government will immedience, by the suppression of the hereditary ately acquire the same title to obedience as peerage. Such is the state of this government; that which now fills the throne?”—St. Chawith all the elements of force it is incapable of mans, 57, 58. governing; with 500,000 men, and an annual "It is therefore in the principle on which the budget of 1500,000,000, (64,000,0002.,) which it government is founded, that we must look for has at its disposal, it is not obeyed.. At Paris, the cause of our suffering and our ruin. If to this nothing has occurred but revolt upon revolt, cause we add the consequences, not less powerwhich could be suppressed only by abandoning ful, of a democratic constitution, that is, to an to their fury the Cross, the emblem of Chris-organized anarchy, we may despair of the tianity, the palace of the Archbishop, and the arms of the throne; while in the provinces insurrections have broken out on all sides, sometimes against the authority of the magistrates, sometimes with their concurrence, which have led to such a stoppage of the revenue, as has led to the contraction of debt to the amount of 20,000,000l. a year.

"Whence is it, that with the same elements from whence Charles X. extracted so much prosperity, and maintained such perfect peace, nothing can be produced under Louis Philippe but misery and disorder? It is impossible to blink the question; it is with the same capital that industry and commerce are perishing; with the same manufactures that you cannot find

safety of our country, if it is not destroyed by the seeds of destruction which such a government carries in its bosom. In no country, and in no age, has democracy made a great state prosper, or established it in a stable manner; and even though it should become inured to the climate elsewhere, it would always prove fatal in France. The foundation of the French character is vanity; and that feeling which, under proper direction, becomes a noble desire for illustrators, which has been the source of our military glory, and of our success in so many different departments, is an invincible bar to our essays in democracy, because every one is envious of the superiority of his neighbour, conceives himself qualified for every

of the impetuosity and vehemence of the po- | words, the equal partition of the means of rispulace and their demagogues by the steadiness ing to glory and distinction in the state."* and weight of the aristocracy; of the ambi- This lesson would not suffice. The revolution and oppression of the aristocracy by the tionists saw their despotic rule melting away vigour and independence of the commons, is under the just and equal sway of the Bourbons, indispensable to the equilibrium of govern- and therefore they inflamed the public mind ment and the preservation of freedom; but it till they got their government overthrown. is precisely the state of things which the re- Despotism of one kind or another instantly revolutionists will ever assail with most vehe- turned: that of the National Guard, the Parimence, because it affords the most effectual sian Emeutes, or Marshal Soult's cannoniers, coercion to their passions and despotic ambi- and liberty has been destroyed by the demation. The spirit of democracy, that keen and gogues who roused the people in its name. devouring element which has produced, and is Thus it ever has been; thus it ever will be to producing, such ravages in the world, is to the the end of time. Individuals may be instructed political what fire is to domestic life. Politi- by history or enlightened by reflection; the cal freedom cannot exist without it, and when great masses of mankind will never learn wisproperly regulated, it vivifies and improves dom but from their own suffering. every department of society; but if once allowed to get ahead, if not confined within iron bars, it will instantly consume the fabric in which it is placed.

Napoleon has left the following picture of the manner in which freedom was devoured by democracy, during the first French Revolution:-"Liberty," said he, " was doubtless the first cry of the people when the Revolution arose; but that was not what they really desired. The first lightning of the Revolution showed what talents then existed, which the levelling principle would restore to society for the advantage and glory of the state. Thus it was equality which the French people always desired; and to tell the truth, liberty hath never existed since it was proclaimed. For the proper definition of liberty is the power of freely exercising all our faculties; and with the exception of some speeches which the orators of the sections were allowed to make in 1795, show me a period when the people were at liberty to say or do what they wished since 1789? Was it when the crowds of women and malecontents besieged the Convention? Begone; think of your business, said they; and yet these poor people only asked for bread. Will any one pretend that the years 1793 or 1794 were the eras of freedom? Under the Directory, no one dared to open their mouth; and after the 18th Fructidor in 1797, a second Reign of Terror arose. Never have the people, even under Louis XI. or Cardinal Richelieu, or in the most despotic states, had less liberty than during the whole period which has elapsed since the first Revolution broke out. What France always wished, what she still wishes, is equality; in other

This distinction between individual freedom and political power, between liberty and democracy, is the great point of separation between the Whigs and Tories. The Conservatives strive to increase personal freedom to the utmost degree, and to effect that they find it indispensable to restrain the efforts of its worst enemies, the democracy.. The Whigs attend only to the augmentation of popular power, and in so doing they instantly trench on civil liberty. When were persons, property, life, and thoughts, more free, better protected or secured, than in Great Britain from 1815 to 1830, the days when the Democracy was restrained? When have they been so ill secured since the time of Cromwell, as during the last two years, illuminated as they have been by the flames of Bristol, and the conflagration of Jamaica, the days of democratic ascendency? Ireland, at present under the distracting rule of O'Connell, the demagogue, is the prototype of the slavery to which we are fast driving, under the guidance of the Whigs: England, from 1815 to 1830, the last example of the freedom from which we are receding, established by the Tories. What farther evils the farther indulgence of this devouring principle is to produce, we know not, though experience gives us little hopes of amendment till we have gone through additional suffering; but of this we are well assured, that the time will come when these truths shall have passed into axioms, and experience taught every man of intelligence, that the assassins of freedom are the supporters of democratic power.

Napoleon, en Duchesse Abrantes, vii. 169, 170.

THE FALL OF TURKEY.*

THE long duration and sudden fall of the Turkish Empire is one of the most extraordinary and apparently inexplicable phenomena in European history. The decay of the Ottoman power had been constantly the theme of historians; their approaching downfall, the unceasing subject of prophecy for a century; but yet the ancient fabric still held out, and evinced on occasions a degree of vigour which confounded all the machinations of its enemies. For eighty years, the subversion of the empire of Constantinople had been the unceasing object of Moscovite ambition: the genius of Catherine had been incessantly directed to that great object; a Russian prince was christened after the last of the Palæologi expressly to receive his throne, but yet the black eagle made little progress towards the Danube; the Mussulman forces arrayed on its banks were still most formidable, and a host arrayed under the banners of the Osmanleys, seemingly capable of making head against the world. For four years, from 1808 to 1812, the Russians waged a desperate war with the Turks; they brought frequently an hundred and fifty, sometimes two hundred thousand men into the field; but at its close they had made no sensible progress in the reduction of the bulwarks of Islamism: two hundred thousand Mussulmans had frequently assembled round the banners of the Prophet; the Danube had been stained with blood, but the hostile armies still contended in doubtful and desperate strife on its shores; and on the glacis of Roudschouk, the Moscovites had sustained a bloodier defeat than they ever received from the genius of Napoleon. In the triumph of the Turks at that prodigious victory, the Vizier wrote exultingly to the Grand Seignior, that such was the multitude of the Infidel heads which he had taken, that they would make a bridge for the souls of the Faithful from earth to heaven.

ing advantage of the weakness consequent on so many reverses, has boldly thrown off the yoke, and, advancing from Acre in the path of Napoleon, shown to the astonished world the justice of that great man's remark, that his defeat by Sir Sidney Smith under its walls made him miss his destiny. The victory of Koniah prostrated the Asiatic power of Turkey; the standards of Mehemet Ali rapidly ap proached the Seraglio; and the discomfited Sultan has been driven to take refuge under the suspicious shelter of the Russian legions. Already the advanced guard of Nicholas has passed the Bosphorus; the Moscovite standards are floating at Scutari; and, to the astonishment alike of Europe and Asia, the keys of the Dardanelles, the throne of Constantine, are laid at the feet of the Czar.

The unlooked for rapidity of these events, is not more astonishing than the weakness which the Mussulmans have evinced in their last struggle. The Russians, in the late campaign, never assembled forty thousand men in the field. In the battle of the 11th June, 1828, which decided the fate of the war, Diebitsch had only thirty-six thousand soldiers under arms; yet this small force routed the Turkish army, and laid open the far-famed passes of the Balkan to the daring genius of its leader. Christendom looked in vain for the mighty host which, at the sight of the holy banner, was wont to assemble round the standard of the Prophet. The ancient courage of the Osmanleys seemed to have perished with their waning fortunes; hardly could the Russian outposts keep pace with them in the rapidity of their flight; and a force, reduced by sickness to twenty thousand men, dictated peace to the Ottomans within twenty hours' march of Constantinople. More lately, the once dreaded throne of Turkey has become a jest to its remote provinces; the Pasha of Egypt, once the most inconsiderable But though then so formidable, the Ottoman of its vassals, has compelled the Sublime power has within these twenty years rapidly Porte, the ancient terror of Christendom, to and irrecoverably declined. The great barrier seek for safety in the protection of Infidel of Turkey was reached in the first campaign battalions; and the throne of Constantine, inof the next war, the Balkan yielded to Russian capable of self-defence, is perhaps ultimately genius in the second, and Adrianople, the an- destined to become the prize for which Moscient capital of the Osmanleys, became cele-covite ambition and Arabian audacity are to brated for the treaty which sealed for ever the degradation of their race. On all sides the provinces of the empire have revolted: Greece, through a long and bloody contest, has at length worked out its deliverance from all but its own passions; the ancient war-cry of Byzantium, Victory to the Cross, has been again heard on the Egean Sea;† and the Pasha of Egypt, tak

*Travels in Turkey, by F. Slade, Esq. London, 1832. Blackwood's Magazine, June, 1833.

When the brave Canaris passed under the bows of the Turkish admiral's ship, to which he had grappled the fatal fireship, at Scio, the crew in his boat exclaimed, "Victory to the Cross!" the old war-cry of Byzantium. -Gordon's Greek Revolution, i. 274.

contend on the glittering shores of Scutari.

But if the weakness of the Ottomans is surprising, the supineness of the European powers is not less amazing at this interesting crisis. The power of Russia has long been a subject of alarm to France, and having twice seen the Cossacks at the Tuileries, it is not surprising that they should feel somewhat nervous al every addition to its strength. England, jealous of its maritime superiority, and apprehensive-whether reasonably or not is immaterial-of danger to her Indian possessions, from the growth of Russian power in Asia, has long made it a fixed principle of her policy to

coerce the ambitious designs of the Cabinet of St. Petersburg, and twice she has saved Turkey from their grasp. When the Russians and Austrians, in the last century, projected an alliance for its partition, and Catherine and Joseph had actually met on the Wolga to arrange its details, Mr. Pitt interposed, and by the influence of England prevented the design: and when Diebitsch was in full march for Constantinople, and the insurrection of the Janissaries only waited for the sight of the Cossacks to break out, and overturn the throne of Mahmoud, the strong arm of Wellington interfered, put a curb in the mouth of Russia, and postponed for a season the fall of the Turkish power. Now, however, every thing is changed; -France and England, occupied with domestic dissensions, are utterly paralysed; they can no longer make a show of resistance to Moscovite ambition; exclusively occupied in preparing the downfall of her ancient allies, the Dutch and the Portuguese, England has not a thought to bestow on the occupation of the Dardanelles, and the keys of the Levant are, without either observation or regret, passing to the hands of Russia.

These events are so extraordinary, that they almost make the boldest speculator hold his breath. Great as is the change in external events which we daily witness, the alteration in internal feeling is still greater. Changes which would have convulsed England from end to end, dangers which would have thrown European diplomacy into agonies a few years ago, are now regarded with indifference. The progress of Russia through Asia, the capture of Erivan and Erzeroum, the occupation of the Dardanelles, are now as little regarded as if we had no interest in such changes;. as if we had no empire in the East threatened by so ambitious a neighbour; no independence at stake in the growth of the Colossus of northern Europe.

volatile and inconsiderate mass from which it sprung; and hence its menaces are disregarded, its ancient relations broken, its old allies disgusted, and the weight of its influence being no longer felt, projects the most threatening to its independence are without hesitation undertaken by other states.

Nor is the supineness and apathy of the nation less important or alarming. It exists to such an extent as clearly to demonstrate, that not only are the days of its glory numbered, but the termination even of its independence may be foreseen at no distant period. Enterprises the most hostile to its interests, conquests the most fatal to its glory, are undertaken by its rivals not only without the disapprobation, but with the còrdial support, of the majority of the nation. Portugal, for a century the ally of England, for whose defence hundreds of thousands of Englishmen had died in our own times, has been abandoned without a murmur to the revolutionary spoliation and propagandist arts of France. Holland, the bulwark of England, for whose protection the great war with France was undertaken, has been assailed by British fleets, and threatened by British power; and the shores of the Scheldt, which beheld the victorious legions of Wellington land to curb the power of Napoleon, have witnessed the union of the tricolour and British flags, to beat down the independence of the Dutch provinces. Constantinople, long regarded as the outpost of India against the Russians, is abandoned without regret; and, amidst the strife of internal faction, the fixing of the Moscovite standards on the shores of the Bosphorus, the transference of the finest harbour in the world to a growing maritime power, and of the entrepôt of Europe and Asia to an already formidable commercial state, is hardly the subject of observation.

The reason cannot be concealed, and is too clearly illustrative of the desperate tendency The reason is apparent, and it affords the of the recent changes upon all the classes of first great and practical proof which England the empire. With the revolutionists the pashas yet received of the fatal blow, which the sion for change has supplanted every other recent changes have struck, not only at her feeling, and the spirit of innovation has extininternal prosperity, but her external independ-guished that of patriotism. They no longer ence. England is now powerless; and, what is worse, the European powers know it. Her government is so incessantly and exclusively occupied in maintaining its ground against the internal enemies whom the Reform Bill has raised up into appalling strength; the necessity of sacrificing something to the insatiable passions of the revolutionists is so apparent, that every other object is disregarded. The allies by whose aid they overthrew the constitution, have turned so fiercely upon them, that they are forced to strain every nerve to resist these domestic enemies. Who can think of the occupation of Scutari, when the malt tax is threatened with repeal? Who care for the thunders of Nicholas, when the threats of O'Connell are ringing in their ears? The English government, once so stable and steadfast in its resolutions, when rested on the firm rock of the Aristocracy, has become unstable as water since it was thrown for its support upon the Democracy. Its designs are as changeable, its policy as fluctuating, as the

league in thought, or word, or wish, exclusively with their own countrymen; they no longer regard the interests and glory of England, as the chief objects of their solicitude; what they look to is the revolutionary party in other states; what they sympathize with, the progress of the tricolour in overturning other dynasties. The loss of British dominion, the loss of British colonies, the downfall of British power, the decay of British glory, the loss of British independence, is to them a matter of no regret, provided the tricolour is triumphant, and the cause of revolution is making progress in the world. Well and truly did Mr. Burke say, that the spirit of patriotism and Jacobinism could not coexist in the same state; and that the greatest national disasters are lightly passed over, provided they bring with them the advance of domestic ambition.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, are so utterly desperate in regard to the future prospects of the empire, from the vacillation and violence of the Democratic party who are