LOUIS PHILIPPE. [From the London Examiner.]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume IV, Issue 313, 29 July 1848, Page 2

LOUIS PHILIPPE. [From the London Examiner.]

It is not a slight joy, such as can express itself in vain talk, in bluster, mockery, and " tremendous cheers ;" it is a stern, almost sacred joy, that the late news from Paris excites in earnest men. For a long, melancholy seiies of years past, there has been no event at all to excite in earnest men much other than weariness and disgust. To France, least of all, had we been looking of late, for tidings that could elevate or cheer us. Nor is the present terrible occurrence properly great or joyful, as we say ; vis very sad rather : sad as death, and human misery and sin ;; — yet with a radiance in it like that of stars ; sternly beautiful, symbolic of immortality and eternity ! Sophist Guizot, Sham-King Louis Philippe, and the host of quack?, of obscene spectral nightmares under which France lay writhing, are fled. Burst are the stony jaws of that enchanted, accursed living tomb ; rent suddenly are the leaden wrappages and cere--ments: from amid the noisome calm and darkness of the grave, burst forth, thunderclad, a soul that was not dead, that cannot, die ! Courage : the righteous gods do still rule the earth. A divine Nemesis, hidden from the base and foolish, known always to the wise and noble, tracks unerringly the footsteps of the evil doer ; who is Nature's own enemy, and the enemy of her 'eternal laws, whom she cannot pardon. Him no force of policy, or most dexterous contrivance and vulpine energy and faculty, will save ; into his pit he, at last, does assuredly fall, — sometimes, as now, in the sight and to the wonder of all men. Alas, that any king, or man, should need to have this oldest truth, older than the world itself, made new to him again, and asserted to be no fable or hearsay, but a very truth, and fact, in this frightful manner ! To the French nation and their kings it has been very impressively taught, under many forms, by most expensive courses of experiment, for sixty years back ; and they, it appears, and we, still require new lessons upon it. Very sad on all sides ! Here is a man of much talent, of manifold experience in , all provinces of life, accepting the supreme post among his fellow men, and deliberately, with stedfast persistence, for seventeen years, attempting his high task there, not in the name of God, as we may. say, but of the, Enemy of ! God ! On the vulpine capabilities alone had

Louis Philippe any reliance; — not by appealing, with courageous energy and patience, to whatever was good and genuine and worthy round "him (which existed too, though wide scattered, and in modest seclusion rather than flagrant on the house tops) ; not by heroic appeal to this, but by easy appeal to what was bad and false and sordid, and to that only, Las he endeavoured to reign. What noble thing achieved by him, what noble man called forth into beneficent activity by him, can Louis Philippe look back upon? None. His management has been a cunningly devised system of iniquity in aX its basest shapes. Bribery has flourished ; scandalous corruption, till the air was thick with it, and the hearts of" men sick. Paltry rhetoricians, parliamentary tongue-fencers ; mean jobbers, intriguers ; every serviceabjest form of human greed and low-mindedness has this "source of honour" patronized. For the poor French people, who by their blood and agony bore him to that high place, what did he accomplish 1 Penal repression into silence ; that, and too literally nothing more. To arm the sordid cupidities of one class against the bitter unreasonable necessities of the other, and to leave it so, — he saw no other method. His position was indeed difficult: but he should have called for help from Above, not from Below ! Alas, in his wide roamings through the world, — he had failed to discover the secret of the world, after all. If this uiiiverse be indeed a huge swindle 1 In that case, supreme swindler will mean sovereign ruler : in that case — but not in the other ! Poor Louis Philippe; his Spanish ma>riages had just prospered with him, to the disgust of all honourable hearts ; in his Spanish marriages he felt that he had at length achieved the topstone which consolidated all, and made the Louis Philippe system (cemented by such bribery mortar, bound by such diplomatic tiebeams) a miracle of architecture, when the solid earth (impatient of such edifices) gave way, and the Eumenides rose, and all was blazing insurrection anJ delirium ; and Louis Philippe " drove off in a brougham," or caucou street-cab, " through the Barrier and Passy," — towards Night and an avengirfg doom. Egahte Fils, after a long painful lifevoyage, has ended no better .than Egalite Pere did. It is a tragedy equal to that of the sons of Atreus. Louis Philippe one could pity as well as blame, were not all one's pity concentrated upon the millions who have suffered by his sins. On the French people's aide, too, is it not tragical 1 These wild men in blouses, with their faces and their hearts all blazing in celestial and infernal lightning, with their barricades up, and their fusils in their hands, — they are now the grandsons of the Bastillers of '89 and the Septembrisers of '92 ; the fathers fought in 1830, they are in 1848 still fighting. To the third generation it has been bequeathed by the second and the first : by the third generation the immense problem, still to solve, is not deserted, is duly taken up. They also protest, with their heart's blood, against a universe of lies ; and say, audibly as with the voice of whirlwinds, " In the name of all the gods, we will not have it so ! We will die rather ; we and our sons and grandsons, as our fathers and grandfathers have done. Take thought of it, therefore, what our first transcendaut .FraicA Revolution did mean ; for your own sake and for ours, take thought., and discover it, an 1 accomplish it, for accomplished it shall and must be, and peace or rest is not in the world till then !" " The throne was carried out by armed men in blouses ; was dragged along the streets, and at last smashed into small pieces," sny the journals. Into small pieces : let it be elaborately broken, pains be taken that of it there remain nothing :—": — " Begone thou wretched upholstery phantasm ; descend thou to the abysses, to the cesspools, spurned of all men ; thou art not the thing we required to heal as of our unbearable miseries ; not thou, it must be something other than thou !" So ends the "Throne of the Barricades;" and so it right well deserved to end. Thrones founded on iniquity, on hypocrisy, and the appeal to human baseness, cannot end otherwise. When Napoleon, the armed Soldier of Democracy as he has been called, — who at one time had discerned well that lies were unbelievable, that nations and persons ought to strip themselves of lies, that it was better even to go bare than " c othed with curses" by way of garment ;— when Napoleon, drunk with more victory than he could carry, was about deserting this true faith, and attaching himself to Popes and Kaisers, and other entities of the chimerical kind ; and in particular had made an immense explosion of magnificence at Notre-Dame, to celebrate his Concordat (' the cow-pox of religion,' la vaccine de la religion, as he himself privately named it), he said to Augereau, the Fencing-master who had become Field-Marshal, " Is it not magnificent ?" " Yes, very much so," answered Augereau : "to complete it, there wanted only Bom« shadow of the half-million men who

have been shot dead to put an end to all that." " All fictions are now ended," says M. Lamartine at the Hotel de Ville. May the gods grrnt it. Something other and better, for the French and for us, might then try, were it but far off, to begin ?"