OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.

New Zealander, Volume 8, Issue 626, 14 April 1852, Page 3

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.

The Globe. Revolutionists who set out by spurning all authority invariably find the authorities of their erection kicked down in turn. A public regimen respected by none, cannot overawe personal interests and ambitions ; and so soon as the minority in the Assembly had vetoed revision, and the majority had shown itself indisposed for a revision such as Louis Napoleon wanted, a struggle was foreseen, by all who could foresee anything, between the chiefs of parties and the Chief of the Executive. The only question 'was, which would seize the first opportunity ; and had Louis Napoleon failed to strike his blow against the Assembly, it would most certainly have struck its blow against him — (we will not |say without sufficient veason — since the President's preparations had been long manifest to draw around him an overwhelming force). The project of law which had just been brought before the Assembly, for regulating official responsibility, and the true scope of which might have been described brieily as a project for suspending and arresting the President, had the following article : — "If the accusation be admitted, the National Assembly issues a decree which convokes the High Court of Justice, and designates the town in which it will hold its sittings It nominates, by the absolute majority, the commissaries, who may belong to the Assembly or not, charged to conduct the prosecution before the High Court of Justice. They enter immediately on the exercise of their duties. The accuskd immediately CT.ASr.S HIS FUNCTIONS." By the above article, one of the co-ordinate powers would have assumed the right to cut short all dispute between them by suspending the other. The Assembly would have been absolute. Now, we don't ask whether a self-denying patriot would have waited till this web was spun, and till he himself was involved in its meshes. Perhaps he would. But v/hieh of the African Generals, whose arrest has excited such indignant sympathies, would have waited — having armed force to strike first ? Let us entertain what idea we will of the coup d'etat which has just been struck in France, but let us— for the exercise of our own reasonable judgment — remember in what element, in what atmosphere that coup has been struck>

The Standard. If it should be asked by what law did Louis Napoleon dissolve the National Assembly ?— the answer would be, " By the same law by which it existed ;" by the same law by which it abolished the Monarchy re-established in 1814, and the Constitution of the Charter untouched in the arrangement of 1830, which was scarcely a revolution" as it merely changed the Sovereign and the succession in just punishment for a violation of the Charter Constitution. The re-establishment of (he French Monai-chy in 1814, it is to be remembered, was part of a compact made by France with the Great Powers of Europe, which at the time occupied her capital and territory. The Assembly, which abolished the Monarchy, ' and abolished it without a pretence of crime on the part of the Avise and good Monarch, was guilty of a double illegality— violating the public law of Europe by a breach of a solemn engagement, as well as the municipal law of France ; and the overthrow of this doubly rebel Assembly is treated forsooth as an illegality, not to express abhorrence of which has the ignominy of baseness. Approbation or disapprobation of the conduct of the present Dictator of France is wholly uncon • nected with the satisfaction which all men of sense must feel at the overthrow of the Murrast Constitution, and the disappointment "of the traitors of 1848. The conduct of the ex-President may be bad (we do not say that it is), and yet the result of that conduct may be such as to gratify the best men, and such we believe to be precisely the case. As an exemplary lesson, the history of the last three years of France is of inestimable value.^ It may not silence the Humes and Cobdens, Brights and Walmsleys — nothing but death or a chokepearjjcould do that — but it will leave them comparatively without hearers and altogether without disciples ; and, we trust, that the common sense of the nation will never be again insulted by Ministers of the Crown citing in Parliament the dogmata of the coxcombs and fribbles of the French salons, such persons as Lamartine and Tocqueville, as the great modern authorities' in political science to whom all mnbt bow. We see in the history of France since 1848 the handiwork of such teachers.

Illustrated News. In the sixty -two years that have elap&ed since the ) memorable period of' 1780, Fivmc9 has experienced i many strange revolutions, and tried many different ! and "contradictory forms of Government. Until the 2nd of December, 1851, it might have been said of her that she had suffered every kind of ; calamity, made every possible experiment in , liberty and in anarchy, and been subjected to

every kind of despotism, from that of the most sanguinary of mobs to that of the most merciless of single tyrants. But strange and deplorable as her previous revolutions have been, with the sole exception of the first, they all sink into utter insignificance when compared with that astounding rerolution which has been operated by the cool head and iron hand of M. Loui& Napoleon Bonaparte. History offers no example of such audacity as that with which the accepted heir representative of the Bonapartes planned his coup d'etat, or of such ferocity, cold, inflexible, compi'ehensive, and unpitying, as that with which he executed it. Having resolved upon the act, and calculated to the minutest fraction what it would cost, having made himself sure of his instruments, and resolved that failure was impossible, he never allowed himself to hesitate. There were moments last week when one atom of fear or of mercy might have led to results which would have consigned him to the dungeon or the scaffold ; but he remained stern and unyielding as fate, and did his work with as total an absence of feeling as if he had been a steam-engine and not a man. Compared witli his despotism, that of his imperial uncle was mildness itself. European history offers no parallel to it. If we wUh to find anything like it, we must look to Persia or to Morocco, where human heads may roll from the shoulders that bear them at the nod and caprice of an irresponsible autocrat, whose word is law, and whose slightest burst of anger or of spleen may be death to myriads. For the present France is completely in his power. There is not a particle of liberty of speech or action remaining, and the press is as mute under the regime of the bayonet as if the art of printing were not invented. Yet there can be no doubt, or at least there is none to our minds, that the result of the appeal to the people, which is to be made between the 14th and the 21st of this month, will be an acquiescence in the dictatorial power which M. Louis Napoleon and his unscrupulous and obedient army have assumed — and that five or six millions of votes will be recorded in favour of the President's retention of office for the ten years which he demands, or for life if he insists upon it. Indeed there is no choice left. It is Louis Napoleon and comparative repose on the one hand, or the most fearful anarchy and civil war, and a train of calamities which might appal the boldest imagination on the other. If ssando — and while adding our feeble voices to the general indignation that is heard throughout Europe — we, in common with others, may well ask, whether, after all, the French nation are not rightly served? They invited despotism, and they have got it. They have got it, and they flatter it. Already the symptoms of adulation are abundant, and the bourgeoisie, as well as other classes, prove, that in the full blaze of his success they will not only strew flowers in the pathway of the conqueror, but that they are ready to crouch beneath his hand, and to grovel in the dust at his feet. Their present subjugation would almost seem a befitting retribution for the choice which so many millions of people so blindly made of Louis Napoleon as their ruler. A man who had shown no wisdom, who had given no proofs of genius or patriotism, or even of talent, avlio was only known as the representative of a great military conqueror and a mighty civil despot, and as one who had committed two most reckless, and to all outward appearance, insane, acts — was suddenly invested, for his name's sake, with the chief power and authority in a country that believed itself to be free. It is scarcely to be wondered at, that this man, who really had talent, though nobody knew it — who was sagacious and far-seeing, as well as daring and self-confident — should have interpreted the choice thus made to amount to approbation of that military tyranny from which his name derived its greatest if not only splendour ; and that he should have imagined that the French nation had wilfully put its head into the noose, and asked no better than to be I tethered as he willed it, or led whither it pleased him. When we reflect coolly upon the events of the week, we are inclined to believe that this astounding tyranny was but the necessary and inevitable result of all previous revolutions, and an experience which France was fated to undergo The French, as we all know, are pre-eminently a military people. Nothing flatters them so much i as " glory." Their men of all clas&es strut for half their lives as soldiers, leaving work and business to the women. They are, moreover, trained to habits which make them the veriest despots over the weak, and the most abject of slaves when they find they have got a master. Another deplorable circumstance in the recent history of France should not be forgotten, and it is one for which that unhappy country must yet suffer long and keenly. It has no religion, no faith, no abiding principle of any kind. The tone of public opinion is low. Louis Phillipe degraded the people by the sordid selfishness of his system of government. He acted upon the principle that every man had his price ; that no virtue or genius was proof against a clever corruption ; that honesty was a farce ; that the people about him were all knaves, and that the only mode of governing such knaves, as he imagined them and all other men to be, was to rule them by cunning more acute than their own, and by a knavery more subtle and calculating. He acted upon this principle, and he fell ; but the unhappy seeds which he sowed in the national mind produced their fruit. There is scarcely a public man of any note in France who has not shown that he would intrigue and re-intrigue for his own interests, oblivious of the higher interests of the nation. Even those who inveigh most loudly against the acts of M. Bonaparte, have no sympathy for such men as M. Thiers, and those, who, under his unlucky guidance, provoked the aggression of the President. Had there been ten honest men in the Assembly, had there been a fair and just public opinion in the country, had the French people understood what true liberty means, had they been a nation that could discuss a great principle without thinking it necessary to knock down or murder a conscientious opponent, M. Bonaparte might have tried his coup d'etat in vain. Such success as his would have been impossible among a sober-minded and really free people.

The Wa.tcuman. Assuredly Louis Napoleon Bonaparte forsaw that the coup d'etat he meditated would provoke resistance. If lie were not so stupid as to be reckless, even of his own life, he must have calculated | on demonstrations which have not been made, indeed, but should have been expected. It became him, even though he had quenched the last ! spark of humanity, and hardened his conscience into marble, to calculate, as an effect following a [ cause, on the opposition of the people, backed by the influence of the majority of the outraged Assembly-, and supported by the men of the National Guard. But when desperation had screwed up his courage to the pitch necessary for this groat crime, lie could blindly face the most fearful probabilities, and hold himself in readiness to float the streets of Paris with blood. He suppressed the Assembly nnd imprisoned the members, with no other probability awaiting than the slaughter of thousands of that very people whom he invites to accept iiim as their Director for ten years to come ; that is to say, for his life. To allow, therefore, that he is innocent of the blood shed in taking a few hastily constructed barricades, is n stretch of charity to which ho cannot be entitled. For his personal aggrandizement he provoked civil war, and must have answered tit the bar of God for all the horrors of that war, even if not aggravated by a single deed of wantonness or by the sacrifice of one life beyond the inevitable number. But General Magnan, acting under his authority, went his troops, for no other purpose than that of murder, into quiet fauxbourgs where not a shot had been fired, nor any hostile demonstration made, and there ! bade them shoot down even casual passengers, and

pour volley after volley into the houses of unoffending citizens for several hours without intermission. The single object of the traitor was to make an impression of terror. Conscious of poverty, both moral and intellectual, inheriting only the sanguinary appetite and seared conscie'nee of his Uncle, without a particle of his grandeur of conception and manlincrs of purpose, surrounded by dastardly Priests and Jesuits, emboldened, perhaps, by the thought that lil might successfully ape the more recent strategy of Frederic William when he annihilated the Berlin Parliament, and emulate th* strong -will and savage ferocity of Imperial Generals in Lombardy, or the Inquisitorial absolutism of his adored friend the Pope, at Rome, he resolved to snap the last cord ot honour and of shame, and let loose the army upon France. lie did so. Whatever deeds of madness may be provoked henceforth, be it remembered that he was the aggressor, and of all guilt that shall be incurred, his will be the deepest. It is vain to say that the Assembly deserved it, or that Frenchmen by frivolous or unprincipled submission, brought down this last stroke upon themselves. All this is true enough, but " Napoleon the Little," as he has hitherto been called — and the title is too good for him — is covered with infamy ineffaceable. Whether he shudders, like Charles IX. after the massacre of St. Bartholomew, at the sight of his own deed, we cannot say. Fear belongs to a guilty conscience, and he seems to be shut up at home, not daring to show his face in the streets to the thousands who must be vowing vengeance. God he feai'ed not, but he does fear the light of day. We watch, with some solicitude, the effects produced in other Courts by the massacres of Paris. In Vienna, the first intelligence was received by the people with intense and anxious interest, but by the Emperor with undissemblcd joy. He took an effectual method of stilling any thought of popular demonstration, by calling out the troops, keeping them under arms long enough to tell what might be expected if one revolutionary murmur should be hoard, and then, as if to appease the dissatisfaction which the conquerors of Austria must have experienced, for want of an opportunity to gather laurels like those won by their brethren upon the houlemrds of Paris, made them a donative of three days' pay. They say that besides the gold which the President obtained from the Exchequer on the clay preceding his crime, he had received a subsidy or 0,000,000 florins in silver from his ally Fran'zy Joseph. The military government of Spam receives the tidings with no less fervent satisfaction. The Queen's Ministers deem it right to assume an imposing attitude, and have, therefore, dismissed the Deputies from their routine duty in the Palace of the Cortes, sent them home to keep the country quiet, called out all the battalions of reserve, instructed the provincial governors to repress any sign of insurrection that may appear, and to visit the slightest breach of " order" uilh extreme vengeance. In short the Parliament of Madrid is dispersed, not to say dissolved, in harmony with the anti-Parliamentary policy of Paris. The Prussian Cabinet, as if secretly sympathising with the criminal, maintains a prudent reserve. One portion of the fettered Pres-s labours to extenuate the guilt, while another dares to express some pity for the victims. But the second Chamber at Berlin, having before their ej*es the fate of legislators who presume to legislate, display extreme restlessness, ask leave of abseuse, and there have been even two resignations of prudent men who foresee the evil and h'de thomselves. But who can calculate how much evil threatens Europe ? The French army has comquered France. Town after town, with but a slight struggle, succumbs before the power of the sword. A host of civil authorities, and the whole body of the priesthood are on the side of the Usurper. The Univers declares for hiai in France, like the Tablet in Ireland, The Church glories in the prostration of another people at her feet. The witchery of Romish priestcratt, and the cunning of an ecclesiastico-jcsuitical policy pervade every parish, and, at least in central and northern France, seem to encounter little effective resistance. The army, therefore, will soon have done its work in France, and whatever may be said of England, the better minded Prussians, as we observe, express a fear that this huge army, once let loose, will seek work abroad when there is no further conquests to be achieved at home. We remember what followed from the fall of the Republic and the triumph of military despotism in 1799, and cannot but acknowledge that if there be not a personal successor of Bonaparte in France there is an incalculably more fearful power, a Roman Court, labouring night and day to subvert every established constitution in Europe, and to destroy whatever has been wrought for the good of religion and humanity during the last three centuries. And the sword of France is now entirely at the disposal of the Church. Say what you j will, so it is. Mark the reaction of the last two years — ponder the events of each day, even so far as they are suffered so transpire — see France and Italy laid in the dust before Louis Napoleon and Pio IX. — think of the single state, Sardinia, that retains any benefit from the recent revolutions, hemmed in on every side by despotism — look at the contempt of law in Ireland by those priests who are now rejoicing in the French butcheries, and lauding the author of them tVs " Napoleon the Great" — and then consider what is the import of a Papal Aggression on England in such a terrible conjecture.

The Edinburgh Advertiser. We appear to stand almost alone amou^ tlie Conservative Press of Scotland in our estimate of the late events in Paris. Most of our contemporaries seem to have formed their judgment ef Louis Napoleon's coup on the mere abstract principles of justice and morality. They have left out of account every circumstance that conkl either palliate or excuse the stroke ; they have regarded the conduct of the late President with the eyes of men nursed under a Constitution which has shone for ages with undimmed lustre; and their judgment has been both harsh and false. It ma) be — we do not deny it — that Louis Napoleon did fling the Constitution to the winds ; it may be that he did practise deceit, and did on afal^e pretext surround himself with troops on whom he could depend, and quietly stow away men who were hi a\ owed enemies ; it may be that he had personal ends in view, and was anxious for something more than the mere security of France; all this maybe true, but it cannot touch our position. We judge of the action, not of the motives. However selfish these motives may have been, however unprincipled the means he employed, it is not of these, nor of the man, but of the end we judge. This end has been accomplished, and it has certainly saved France from impending anarchy tnd immeasurable bloodshed. And after all, can thoso who now so loudly decry Louis Napoleon prove that horrible treason with which they charge him ? To break a law is not always a crime : to foment a re\ ohition is not always sinful. "The safety of the nation," says Vattel, " is the supremo law;" and when Louis Napoleon found the safety of the nation put in danger, and when he saw that only by an in* fringemeat of the Constitution he could avert that danger, shall we say that he was not warranted in the blow he struck ? As well way we Bay that our own great Revolution was an unpardonable crime. The darkening clouds were already gathering which in a few short months at most were to break upon France in all their fury ; the pikes were aU ready bristling, and the barrels were already gleaming, whkh, in the dreaded 1852, were doubt-* less to carry rapine and slaughter throughout the land. Some say the daj> was not so distant — a cry distant it could not ha\ebeen, as those stores of weapons and cases of gunpowder, which ure daily brought to light, so amply testify. The Keel Be-

publicans nnd Socialists were looking forward lo 1852 as a year of jubilee ; when France, without ft head, would lie plunged into all the horrors of anarchy, and the country fall a prey to every lawless horde of murderers or banditti. Such hordes, whose anticipations and hopes /nave been blasted by the events of last week, are now in some of the central and southern districts, as we have just seen, giving vent to their disappointment and rage in the perpetration of deeds, which, if Louis Napoleon had not prevented it, would in 1852 have been their pastime. It may be that such scenes France has yet to go through ; we even expect so ; but there cannot be a doubt that Louis Napoleon has made the evil day more distant. And for this shall we brand him a traitor ? Even were we to allow that the new Dictator was guilty in going beyond the limits of the Constitution, was he more guilty than the Assembly which he dissolved ? Which has most to answer for' — the man who strikes the first blow, or the man' who strikes the second ? The National Assembly were the first who infi inged the Constitution of M. Marrast, — we do not ■> ei'rr to the law of May 31st, to which Louis Napoleon was a party, — and they infringed it, not once, but a dozen of times. For the last six or eight months they had been busy in undermining it, by putting on its articles an interpretation which its framers never intended that they should bear ; the ex-President, like a skilful general, chose the fitting moment, destroyed their approaches, and by a bold move sprung the mine which they had dug, and involved them in the ruins. The Assembly intrigued against the President, thinking to curb Imo, and become more powerful at his expense ; the President over-reached them — and for this must we blame him ? No ! The Assembly had assumed an attitude which threatened an almost immediate dissolution of those bonds by which society is held together even in its loosest and most barbarous state ; and, to use the words of a metropolitan contemporary, "nothing but a dictatorship could avert the frightful calamity ; and whatever Louis Napoleon's motives of private ambition, if he had such motives, he acted exactly as the be3t citizen would have acted in like circumstances, ■when he assumed a Dictatorship." Motives of ambition may in part have dictated the policy of the late president 5 but such ambitious motives were the natural consequences of the position in which the nation hau elevated him. In placing him at the head of ihe Republic, France laid before him the stepping stool to the Dictators chair; and few men could have had moral courage enough to sit upon ihe <4001, while the chair stood empty above. If Louis Napoleon nursed ambitious thoughts, it was France that first in -.tilled them; so let us blame the tempter, not the tempted. France can never be a Republic; and even the fiamers of her late precarious Canstitution knew this. Every politician in France who has but the slightest acquaintance with the works of that deep thinker Montesquieu, knows it. No man can rr.le in France as the Head of a Republic; to expect it were to expect too much of human nature Again we say, then, if Louis Napoleon allowed ambition to over-rule him — blame the tempter, not the tempted. We oiler these remarks not from any admiration either of revolutions, or coups d'etat, or republics, or dictators. Our views are well known ; ytz hold Monarchy to be the only safe form of government for France. Our feelings go, too, Henry V. ; hut neither for Monarchy nor for Henry Y. is the door yet open. Which, then, shall we choose — inevitable anarchy and civil war, or a Dictatorship ? We necl hardly ansu er. But in conclusion we think we may here find a fit place for the following few lines from our Ministerial contemporary, the Globe : — ''At present the I'reucu nation ha* really no choice ftPtl, so fnr as yet appears, h,is no sympathy with the late Assembly against the President ; seeing that the Assembly was preparing to sup-r^de a power that existed, without having anything equally stable to offer in its s( pad. Henry Y. is the representative of the principle of hptWttary right, and be hns a party rievoir-il to him and hit light ; hut that party is a u<\nor\\y s and before Henry Y. can govern France, either he and his partisans, or the majority of the nation mu^t greatly alter their opinions. Ihe Orleans branch represer t.not the principle of hereditary right, but of popular choic*. 'Jiiat choice was for them in 1830 ; it was against them in 1818 ; and does not appear likely to be for tbtw in J852. What the majority of the Assembly, tberolore, had to offer to Franca in exchange for the continuance of the present President's administration was the prospect of civil war. The question is whether the harvest they were sowing might not have been more blood) bad it ripened, than a* thus early cut."