sion for the poor, except by hospitals in large towns, and what are called committees of beneficence, the scanty funds for which arose from the octrois, or taxes on provisions, levied at the gates of towns. These funds were distributed by the minister of the interior on the demands of the prefects, but were often converted to the use of the army by Buonaparte. Before the revolution the church had distributed the alms, and its ministers had acquired considerable influence over the numerous class of the poor. On the disposal of church property by the state, in the first years of the revolution, that which lay in the vicinity of small towns and villages was divided among the poorer inhabitants, so that each family became proprietor of half an acre, the produce of which land, cultivated by the family at leisure hours, bestowed independence, raised it above the humiliation of receiving charity, and rendered poor's rates useless. The order of the priesthood had lost both its influence and its wealth, and had sunk below its due estimation in society. The return, therefore, of the priesthood, the restoration of their power, the re-establishment of tythes, and the restitution of national property, were circumstances of which the very possibility was regarded with abhorrence: and a general impression was diffused by the partizans of Napoleon, that these measures were about to be enforced by the existing government. It is not surprizing, therefore, that Buonaparte should have been received at every stage of his progress to the capital, by the general acclamations of the lower classes, as their deliverer from the oppression and injustice which they had been taught to anticipate. The fear of losing the emigrant property, which they had purchased at onethird of its value, and of again becoming subject to their feudal masters, contributed to alienate the affections of the peasants from their legitimate and virtuous, but feeble, monarch.

Nor did the remembrance of former times contribute to alleviate that anxiety which the prospects before their view led them to indulge. The name of Bourbon was, in their opinion, synonymous to tyranny, profligacy, and oppression, and the horrors of the Bastile, mitigated, as they were, by the lenity and

justice of their murdered sovereign, still rankled in the bosoms of the people. So lately as 1783, lettres de cachet were sold, with blanks, to be filled up with names at the pleasure of the purchaser; who was thus able, in the gratification of private revenge, to tear a man from the bosom of his family, and bury him in a dungeon, where he would exist forgotten, and die unknown!

An anecdote, which I have from an authority to be depended on, will explain the profligacy of government in respect to these arbitrary imprisonments. Lord Albermarle, when ambassador in France, about the year 1753, negotiating the fixing of the limits of the American colonies, which, three years after produced the war, calling one day on the minister for foreign affairs, was introduced, for a few minutes, into his cabinet, while he finished a short conversation in the apartment in which he usually received those who conferred with him. As his lordship walked backwards and forwards, in a very small room (a French cabinet is never a large one), he could not help seeing a paper lying on the table written in a large legible hand, and containing a list of the prisoners in the Bastile, in which the first name was Gordon. When the minister entered, Lord Albermarle apologized for his involuntarily remarking the paper; the other replied, that it was not of the least consequence, for they made no secret of the names. Lord Albermarle then said, that he had seen the name of Gordon first in the list, and he begged to know, as in all probability the person of this name was a British subject, on what account he had been put into the Bastile. The minister told him, that he knew nothing of the matter, but would make the proper inquiries. The next time he saw Lord Albermarle, he informed him, that, on inquiring into the case of Gordon, he could find no person who could give him the least information; on which he had had Gordon himself interrogated, who solemnly affirmed, that he had not the smallest knowledge, or even suspicion, of the cause of his imprisonment, but that he had been confined thirty years; " however," added the minister, "I ordered him to be immediately released, and he is now at large." Such a case wants no comment.

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Even under the mild and virtuous reign of Louis XVI. the abuses attending the levy of taxes were heavy and universal. The kingdom was parcelled into generalities, with an intendant at the head of each, into whose hands the whole power of the crown was delegated for every thing except the military authority; but particularly for all affairs of finance. The generalities were subdivided into elections, at the head of which was a sub-delegué, appointed by the intendant. The rolls of the taille, capitation, vingtiemes, and other taxes, were distributed among districts, parishes, and individuals, at the pleasure of the intendant, who could exempt, change, add, or diminish, at pleasure. Such an enormous power, constantly acting, and from which no man was free, must, in the nature of things, degenerate in many cases into absolute tyranny. It must be obvious, that the friends, acquaintances, and dependents, of the intendant, and of all his sub-delegués, and the friends of these friends, to a long chain of dependence, might be favoured in taxation at the expence of their miserable neighbours; and that noblemen in favour at court, to whose protection the intendant himself would naturally look up, could find little difficulty in throwing much of the weight of their taxes on others without a similar support. Instances, and even gross ones, have been reported in many parts of the kingdom, that make one shudder at the oppression to which numbers must have been condemned, by the undue favours granted to such crooked influence. But, without recurring to such cases, what must have been the state of the poor people paying heavy taxes, from which the nobility and clergy were exempted? A cruel aggravation of their misery, to see those who could best afford to pay, exempted because able! The enrolments for the militia, which the cahiers call an injustice without example, were another dreadful scourge on the peasantry; and, as married men were exempted from it, occasioned in some degree that mischievous population, which brought beings into the world for little else than to be starved. The corvées, or police of the roads, were annually the ruin of many hundreds of farmers; more than three hundred were reduced to beggary

in filling up one vale in Lorraine: all these oppressions fell on the tiers etat only: the nobility and clergy having been equally exempted from tailles, militia, and corvées. The penal code of finance makes one tremble at the horrors of punishment inadequate to the crime.

It is calculated by a writer (Recherches et Considerations par M. le Baron de Cormeré, tom. ii. p. 187.) very well informed on every subject of finance, that, upon an average, there were annually taken up and sent to prison, or the galleys, men, 2340; women, 896; children, 201.-Total, 3437. Three hundred of these to the galleys (tom. i. p. 112). The salt confiscated from these miserables amounted to 12,633 quintals, which, at the mean price of 8 livres, are 101,064 livres. 2772 lb. of salted flesh, at 10s. 1,386 1086 horses, at 50 livres...... 54,300 52 carts, at 150 livres......... 7,800 Fines...... 53,207 Seized in houses............. .......105,530

323,287

A few features will sufficiently characterize the old government of France.

1. Smugglers of salt, armed and assembled to the number of five, in Provence, were punished by a fine of 500 livres, and nine years galleys; in all the rest of the kingdom, death.

2. Smugglers, armed, assembled, but in number under five, a fine of 300 livres, and three years galleys. Second offence, death 3. Smugglers, without arms, but with horses, carts, or boats, a fine of 300 livres; if not paid, three years galleys. Second offence, 400 livres, and nine years galleys. In Dauphiné, second offence, galleys for life. In Provence, five years galleys.

4. Smugglers, who carried the salt on their backs, and without arms, a fine of 200 livres; and, if not paid, flogged and branded. Second offence, a fine of 300 livres, and six years galleys.

5. Women, married and single, smugglers, first offence, a fine of 100 livres. Second offence, 300 livres. Third, flogged, and banished the kingdom for life. Husbands responsible both in fine and body.

6. Children smugglers, the same as wo

men. Fathers and mothers responsible; and, for defect of payment, flogged.

7. Nobles, if smugglers, deprived of their nobility, and their houses rased to the ground. 8. Any persons in employments (in the salt-works, or the revenue), if smugglers, death. And such as assisted in the theft of salt in the transport, hanged.

9. Soldiers smuggling, with arms, were hanged; without arms, galleys for life.

10. Buying smuggled salt to re-sell it, the same punishments as for smuggling.

11. Persons in the salt employments empowered, if two, or one with two witnesses, to enter and examine houses even of the privileged orders.

12. All families and persons liable to the taille, in the provinces of the Grandes Gabelles, enrolled, and their consumption of salt for the pot and salière (that is, the daily consumption, exclusive of salting meat, &c. &c.) estimated at 7lb. a head per annum; which quantity they were forced to buy whether they wanted it or not, under the pain of various fines, according to the case.

The capitaineries were a dreadful scourge on all the occupiers of land. By this term is to be understood the paramountship of certain districts, granted by the king to princes of the blood, by which they were put in possession of the property of all game, even on lands not belonging to them, and, what is very singular, on manors granted long before to individuals, so that the erecting of a district into a capitainerie was an annihilation of all manorial rights to game within it. This was a trifling business, in comparison of other circumstances; for, in speaking of the preservation of the game in these capitaineries, it must be observed, that by game must be understood whole droves of wild boars, and herds of deer, not confined by any wall or pale, but wandering at pleasure over the whole country, to the destruction of crops, and to the peopling of the galleys by the wretched peasants, who presumed to kill them, in order to save that food which was to support their helpless children. The game in the capitainerie of Montceau, in four parishes only, did mischief to the amount of 184,263 livres per annum. No wonder then that we should find the people asking, "We

most earnestly pray for the suppression of the capitaineries, and that of all the game laws." And what are we to think of demanding, as a favour, "the permission to weed their corn, to mow their upland grass, and to take off their stubble, without consulting the convenience of the partridges, or any other sort of game." Now, an English reader will scarcely understand this, without being told, that there were numerous edicts for preserving the game which prohibited weeding and hoeing, lest the young partridges should be disturbed; steeping seed, lest it should injure the game; manuring with night-soil, lest the flavour of the partridges should be injured by feeding on the corn so produced; mowing hay, &c. before a certain time, so late as to spoil many crops; and taking away the stubble, which would deprive the birds of shelter. The tyranny exercised in these capitaineries, which extended over 400 leagues of country, was so great, that many cahiers (or petitions of the people) demanded the utter suppression of them.

Such were the exertions of arbitrary power which the lower orders felt directly from the royal authority; but, heavy as they were, it is a question whether the others, suffered circuitously through the nobility and the clergy, were not yet more oppressive? Nothing can exceed the complaints made in the cahiers under this head. They spoke of the dispensation of justice in the manorial courts as comprising every species of despotism: the districts indeterminate-appeals endless-irreconcilable to liberty and prosperity-and irrevocably proscribed in the opinion of the public-augmenting litigation-favouring every species of chicane-ruining the parties, not only by enormous expences on the most petty objects, but by a dreadful loss of time— the judges, commonly ignorant pretenders, who held their courts in cabarets, and are absolutely dependent on the seigneurs. Nothing can exceed the force of expression used in painting the oppressions of the seigneurs, in consequence of their feudal powers: they are vexations which scourge the people—a cruel and ignominious slavery-a ruinous system of oppression. They enumerated, among their grievances, fixed and heavy

rents; vexatious processes to secure them; fines at every change of property; feudal redemption; fines on sales, even to the 6th penny; redemptions injurious in their origin and their extension; and the banalite of the wine and cyder press. By this horrible law the people were compelled to grind their corn at the mill of their seigneur only, to press their grapes at his press, and to bake their bread in his oven. The rod of seignorial finance was continually suspended over the heads of the unfortunate inhabitants.They were subjected to ruin, outrage, violence, and a destructive servitude, under which the peasants were almost on a level with Polish slaves. The cahiers also demanded that the use of hand-mills be free, and that the practice of breaking private hand-mills, and prohibiting the use of them without a license, should be abolished. It appears from these documents that when the lady of the seigneur, or lord of the manor, laid in, the people were obliged to beat the waters in marshy districts, to keep the frogs silent, that she might not be disturbed. This oppressive and humiliating task, which was termed the duty of preserving the silence des grenouilles, was only evaded by the payment of a pecuniary fine.

But these were not all the evils with which the people struggled previous to the revolution. The administration of justice was partial, venal, and infamous. We have been in conversation with many very sensible men, who have visited England, and who have spoken of the government of the Bourbons before the year 1790 with much respect, but upon the question of expecting justice to be really and fairly administered, every one confessed there was no such thing to be looked for. The conduct of the parliaments was profligate and atrocious. Upon almost every cause that came before them, interest was openly made with the judges; and woe betided the man who, with a cause to support, had no means of conciliating favour, either by the beauty of a handsome wife, or by other methods. It has been said by many writers, that property was as secure under the old government of France as it is in England; and the assertion might possibly be true, as far as any violence from the king,

his ministers, or the great, was concerned : but for all that mass of property, which comes in every country to be litigated in courts of justice, there was not even the shadow of security, unless the parties were totally and equally unknown, and totally and equally honest; in every other case, he who had the best interest with the judges was sure to be the winner. To reflecting minds, the cruelty and abominable practice attending such courts are sufficiently apparent. There was also a circumstance in the constitution of these parliaments, but little known in England, and which, under such a government as that of France, must be considered very singular. They had the power, and were in the constant practice, of issuing decrees, without the consent of the crown, and which had the force of laws through the whole of their jurisdiction; and of all other laws, these were sure to be the best obeyed; for as all infringements of them were brought before sovereign courts composed of the same per sons who had enacted these laws (a horrible system of tyranny!) they were certain of being punished with the last severity. It must appear strange, in a government so despotic in some respects as that of France, to see the parliaments in every part of the kingdom making laws without the king's consent, and even in defiance of his authority. The English who were in France in 1789 were surprised to see some of these bodies issuing arrêts against the export of corn out of the provinces subject to their jurisdiction into the neighbouring provinces, at the same time that the king, through the organ of so popu lar a minister as M. Necker, was decreeing an absolutely free transport of corn throughout the kingdom, and even at the requisition of the national assembly itself. But this was nothing new; it was their common practice. The parliament of Rouen passed an arrêt against killing of calves; it was a preposterous one, and opposed by administration: but it had its full force; and had a butcher dared to offend against it, he would have found, by the rigour of his punishment, who was his master. Inoculation was favoured by the court in Louis XV.'s time; but the parliament of Paris passed an arrêt against it, much more effective in prohibiting, than

the favour of the court in encouraging that practice. Instances are innumerable: and we may remark, that the bigotry, ignorance, false principles, and tyranny of these bodies, were generally conspicuous; and that the court (taxation excepted) never had a dispute with a parliament, but the parliament was sure to be wrong. Their constitution, in respect to the administration of justice, was so truly rotten, that the members sat as judges, even in causes of private property, in which they were themselves the parties, and were, in this capacity, guilty of oppressions and cruelties which the crown has rarely dared to attempt.

All these multiplied and intolerable evils were enforced by the Bourbons, till the empire was wrested from their sway, and were abolished by the revolutionary and the imperial governments. In the estimation of the people, therefore the name of Napoleon, however unjustly, was synonymous with liberty and security; while the very mention of the Bourbons recalled the detested images of feudal tyranny and lordly oppression. The internal condition of France had been altered, during the absence of Louis, at least as much as its exterior relations. The original possessors of property and rank, and official and personal eminence, had been all displaced along with the reigning family; and those various titles to power and influence been settled, for twenty years, on other individuals. The whole frame and structure of society had been accommodated to this change. Innumerable multitudes had fairly bought, and diligently improved, the properties originally confiscated in the heat and violence of the revolution. Almost all who had been promoted to office, or attained to distinction, had reached it by the cultivation and exercise of their talents, or by eminent services rendered to what was universally acknowledged to be the settled government of the country. Still greater numbers, who remembered no other government, had innocently succeeded to the advantages thus acquired by their parents, and could not easily be persuaded that they were not entitled to retain them. Almost every person of eminent station had risen from that class of society to which all eminent station had been

formerly interdicted; and whose condition had consequently received an accession of dignity and consequence, that scarcely admitted of being overrated.

The operation of all these circumstances was strikingly exemplified in the progress of Napoleon's march. Wherever he appeared the cries of "The Emperor for ever!" welcomed his approach, and no indications of the slightest opposition impeded his advance.Encouraged by the evident professions of the people in his favour, and by the obvious apathy and imbecility of the Bourbon government, he now left the main body of his troops to the direction of their commanders: proceeded forward with only ten horsemen and forty grenadiers, and on the 5th of March arrived at Gap, from which place he issued his first proclamations. Like all the productions of Buonaparte, they exhibit the most singular example of a powerful and original kind of eloquence, which, if it defies the rules of art, was admirably calculated to excite the sympathy and the admiration of his soldiers and adherents.

"Soldiers! We were not conquered: two men risen from our ranks betrayed our laurels, their country, their prince, their benefactor.

Those whom during twenty-five years we have seen traversing all Europe to raise up enemies against us; who have passed their lives in fighting against us, in the ranks of foreign armies, and in cursing our fine France, shall they pretend to command and control our eagles, on which they have not dared ever to look? Shall we endure that they should inherit the fruits of our glorious labours;-that they should clothe themselves with our honours and our goods;-that they should calumniate our glory? If their reign should continue all would be lost, even the memory of those immortal days. With what fury do they pervert their very nature! They seek to poison what the world admires; and if there still remain any defenders of our glory, it is among those very enemies whom we have fought on the field of battle.

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