THE GREAT EXHIBITION IN PARIS.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume IX, Issue 463, 21 March 1867, Page 3

THE GREAT EXHIBITION IN PARIS.

(Paris Correspondent of the Times.) Is the year of 1855, the French GovernTYI ATjf. VArtT rt>«AnAvlv f]ianneonni4 system during the period of the Great Exhibition in Paris. The Emperor profited by that opportunity to make an experiment which has proved to be successful, with the view of abolishing at a later period a humiliating practice which he had long before stigmatised in some of the most eloquent pages of hie writings. The French Government is, I understand, now asked by Watkiii. ivf.P T . ths 1 of tho South-Eastern Railway Company, and by bis colleagues, to suspend the no ! less vexatious ordeal of baggage-searching 1 in Paris during the still,greater Exhibition of 1867. The South-Eastern Company have reduced the time of traveling between Paris and London to ten hours, and the 1 waste of time involved in the existing sysof baggage transit and search cannot, I think, be estimated at less than half average is, when there is a long train, and when there are numerous passengers, an hour, and sometimes more in special cases. It is half an hour, or an hour, or more as the case may be, at the end of a long journey, with, too many, an uncomfortable sea passage in the middle of it, where by the original nuisance is aggravated. It is almost superfluous to observe that in the case of persons who do not speak or understand the language of the country they are visiting, of ladies traveling and unpro* tected, and above all, of invalids, the annoyance occasioned in ransacking portmanteaus and carpet-bags is very great. I am told, on good authority, that the number of passengers conveyed between London and Paris by the South-Eastern and the London, Chatham, and Dover Companies alone is not less than 300,000 in an ordinary year. But in tho year, which will be long memorable, designed for an immense gathering from every quarter of the globe, the number of travellers will be limited only by the amount of facility that can be given them; and many facilities that suggest themselves to the mind of everyone will be impossible of realisation of it is intended to continue the practice of personal and individual search at the Custom-house. For instance, tho railway might deliver the baggage of the hundreds of thousands of English travellers, and travellers from the United States of America and elsewhere, passing through England at the hotel or lodging of eaeh person ; or they might store it for him or her at a general depot in Paris; but if as many hundred* of thousands of bunches of keys, belonging to as many travellers, have to be delivered up to the railway officials, and every seperate portmanteau, carpet-bag, or package has to be tossed upon a counter and and searched, such alleviations of the trouble of passing to and fro in a country of which the habits and language may be strange to most of them, and through the throug and confusion of a mighty foreign city would be impossible. This is but one instance in many. Whether during tho invasion of Paris the contributions levied on tho invaders, instead of on tho invaded, wiU be as enormous as is supposed, I do not undertake to say. At any rate, it is pretty certain that a rich harvest will be reaped from the cosmopolitan multitude who so readily responded to the call of the Emperor of the French. The expectant gatherers of that harvest cannot but be struck by this reflection, that its amount depends a great deal on tho absence of tantalising and, in the main, useless restrictions, which at all times are repugnant to a free people. If it bo a painful undertaking to pay this visit, the great bulk of people—the prospective contributors to Parisian finance—will be deterred from coming. If, on the contrary, the transit in all its stages be made free to all alike, the Englishman and the American will move about the noble squares, boulevards, and streets of this beautiful capital with nearly tho same feeling of lightheartedness and comfort which they feel when travelling upon (heir own soil. Wo are told, and truly told, that the leading idea of this grand exhibition is union and brotherhood ; and surely it would be a blot upon so fair a design if every stranger that treads upon French ground is to be treated as a suspected smuggler, and forced to run the gauntlet through tho microscopic scrutiny of Custom-house officers? Tho present system in England and in France seems to be to treat every traveller, male or female, old and young, adults and children, as rogues who would cheat the revenue if they could, end who can only be kept honest by having their trunks turned upside down and their pockets turned inside out the moment they come to port. The supposition is not flattering to the stranger, tho theory itself is absurd, and its practice is partial, offensive, and, to speak tenderly, execrable. I don’t know whether any persons will venture to affirm that there is more than one in a hundred thousand who is a smuggler, yet the hundred thousand who are innocent of aH criminal designs on tho revenue are to be treated as law-breakers because one man may once in a twelvemonth cheat the Customs to the value of three or four francs.

It is obvious that the Anglo-French treaty has altered the whole face of things. Practically there really is little or nothing left for the dishonest traveller—the one black sheep among a hundred thousand white ones—to smuggle at all. The best spirits and the best cigars, or tobacco in any other form—the omy articles which haunt the waking and sleeping dreams of your old-fashioned Customhouse official—are about as dear in London as in Paris, and in Paris as in London. No doubt, there may be found now and then an excursionist traveller who on his first visit

to France imagines that a bottle of brandy at 1 f. 50 c. is worth passing through at Dover or Folkestone, and may smuggle to that extent; but I believe no Frenchman coining back to his own country, thinks of attempting the convene of the operation. The fact is that this brandy at 1 1. 50 o. is reaUy distiUed from grains or vegetables of some sort iu England; is then sent to u ranee to adulterate the native produce, and so adulterated goes back to England as a first*rate French alcohol for Mr, Bull’s consumption. Thus the daring smuggler of the If. 60 c. is Eunpiy swallow* I ing an English product, perhaps made slightly more injurious—a process which often carries with it its own punishment.

Assuming that the French revenue might suffer to some small extent, is it, one may be permitted respectfully to ask, the will of the Emperor Napoleon, who can by a word suspend this grievance, or even abolish it for good and oil, that friendly foreigner* shaU visit the capital, of which he is so justly proud, in a period of seven months' pleasure and rejoicing, intellectual and moral, through the offensive impediments and unjust suspicions of which antiquated Custom-house regulations are the expression ? Whether or not, both in France and England, the whole system should be abolished at all ports and everywhere may, if you will, be a question for discussion; but to enforce it in its most objectionable form at such a time in France would be to throw coldness into tbs welcome which Erancs holds out, through the Emperor of her choice, to all mankind.