Not

virile nation, is to my mind evidence itself. On this point I have a faith which I should be glad to have on many others. But how difficult it is to establish liberty firmly in nations which have lost the use, and even the true conception of it! How powerless are institutions when they are not fostered by the ideas and habits of the people! I have always thought, that to make France a free nation (in the true sense of the word)—that enterprise to which we have devoted our lives to the extent of our small abilities-I have always thought, I say, that this enterprise was a grand but a rash one. I think it every day more rash, but more grand also; and so much so, that were I to be born again, I should still prefer to risk everything in this hazardous undertaking rather than to bow under a necessity to serve. Will others be more fortunate than we have been? I know not; but I ask myself whether in our time we shall see in France a free nation, at least what you and I mean by the word. That does not mean that we shall not see revolutions. Nothing, believe me, is settled. An unforeseen circumstance, a new turn given to affairs, any accident whatsoever, may bring on extraordinary events to force every man from his retreat. It was to that I alluded in my last letter, and not to the establishment of regular liberty. But what makes me fear that nothing will for a long time make us free, is that we have not the desire to be so. indeed that I am one of those who say that we are a decrepid and corrupt nation, destined to perpetual servitude. Those who, with this notion, exhibit the vices of the Roman Empire, and complacently imagine that we are to reproduce them on a smaller scale, are people who seem to me to live in books and not in the reality of their age. We are not a decrepid nation, but a nation worn and terrified by anarchy. We are wanting in the sound and lofty conception of freedom; but we are worth more than our present destiny. We are not yet ripe for the definitive and regular establishment of despotism; and the Government will find this out if ever it attains sufficient security to discourage conspiracies, to cause the anarchical parties to drop their arms, and to crush them from the scene. The Government would then be astonished, in the hey-day of its triumph, to find a stratum of bitterness and opposition, beneath that layer of obsequious followers who now seem to cover the surface of France. I sometimes think that the only chance of seeing a strong love of liberty revive in France is in the tranquil and apparently definitive establishment of absolute power. Observe the working of all our revolutions; it can now be described with great precision. The experience of seventy years has proved that the people alone cannot make a revolution; as long as that necessary element of revolutions works alone, it is powerless. It does not become irresistible till a portion of the educated classes has joined it; and these classes will only lend their moral support or their material co-operation to the people when they cease to fear it. Hence it is that at the very moment when each of the governments we have had in the last sixty years appeared to be the strongest, that it caught the disease by which it was to perish. The Restoration began to die the day when

nobody talked any longer of killing it, and so with the July monarchy. I think it will be so with the present government. Paul [M. de Beaumont's youngest son, then a child] will tell me if I am mistaken.' (P. 490.)

There has not been any time since the establishment of the Imperial Government, at which this language was so likely to arrest the attention of the French people as the present. The signs of the times, especially in the recent elections, indicate a spirit very different from the apathy of abject submission and indifference which seemed to have emasculated France. On almost every point of the country-in the choice of representatives, in the choice of the conseils généraux, and in the municipal elections-the Government finds its nominations energetically disputed and not unfrequently defeated. If at this moment the Legislative Assembly were re-elected, the Opposition would be represented in it by at least a powerful minority, and if that Opposition is not already in the Chamber, it is out of doors, in spite of all the persecutions and restrictions which have been laid on the exercise of the most legitimate electoral rights. The machinery by which universal suffrage was converted for a time into a toy for prefects and ministers to play with, and an instrument to crush the real intelligence of the people, is worn out. There is once more a voice and a will in that ballotbox; and that voice condemns the Imperial Government. As M. de Tocqueville observed in 1858, it is by facts alone, and not by arguments, that the true character of the Government is known-facts such as the state of the finances, the Mexican war, the restrictions of the Press, the prosecution and punishment of electoral committees, are gradually bringing back light to the French nation, and when light breaks in, the 'nation will judge.' In spite of many errors of judgment and of conduct, we do not dispute the services which the Emperor Napoleon III. has rendered to France, and we do not question that his popularity is still undiminished with the great majority of the nation. But that popularity cannot cover all the shortcomings and abuses of his government; and dependent as it is on his personal authority, the idea of the termination of his reign is becoming as much an object of terror to the timid, and of perplexity to the wavering, as the incoherent threats of anarchy. For what would he leave behind him? A government composed of men for the most part profoundly discredited —a youthful heir-a regent perhaps, who, both as a foreigner and a woman, has hardly had justice done her by the French people,—and, on the other hand, a rising tide of liberal feeling, more and more disposed to demand institutions which shall give

the nation security for the future and a real voice in its affairs. There is not a man amongst the most devoted adherents of the Empire who does not view this state of things with undisguised apprehension; and there is probably not a man who would counsel and abet the Emperor in an attempt to repeat the blow, which he dealt so successfully in 1851 to an effete Assembly and a terrified community. There is, as it appears to us, but one course to be pursued with any prospect of security to the Imperial dynasty and of tranquillity to France; and that course is to accept the progress of liberal opinions. It would not be very difficult, even with the existing institutions of the Empire, to transform the present absolutism of the sovereign into a system of government which might afford a moderate and reasonable satisfaction to the country. The Imperial Government, though extremely arbitrary, and irresponsible to any organised body in the state, has never failed to acknowledge its democratic origin, and to exercise its power with some regard to the prevailing sentiments of the people. It will be well for its own sake if it follow the same course now. It is not by resistance or repression that the Empire can regain the ground it is losing. The language even of its harshest judges and keenest enemies deserves its serious attention; and if France is again to be saved from another of those periodical convulsions which may even now be approaching, like a storm on the furthest limit of the horizon, it will be by timely concessions to the reviving energy of the nation. At such a moment, the voice of M. de Tocqueville, in his ardent love of freedom, will not be unheard or without influence, and we shall be curious to learn what answer will be made to this posthumous appeal of a great thinker and a great patriot.

ART. VII.-Narrative of a Year's Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (1862–63). By WILLIAM GIFFORD PALGRAVE, late of the Eighth Regiment Bombay Native Infantry. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1865.

MANY

6

ANY of our readers will doubtless be familiar with Lady Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt,' already reviewed in this Journal, and will remember the peculiar earnestness with which that accomplished traveller speaks of the tendency of Englishmen and Europeans in general to treat Orientals and other inferior races (as we deem them) with contemptuous hostility whenever brought into contact with them. Lady Duff Gordon appears to think this kind of arrogance to be much on the increase among us. And possibly she is in the right; but this may arise from superficial causes only:

'It is curious (she says) that all the old books of travel that I have read mention the natives of strange countries in a far more natural tone, and with far more attempt to discriminate character, than modern ones, e. g. Carsten Niebuhr's Travels here and in Arabia, Cook's Voyages, and many others. Have we grown so very civilised since a hundred years, that outlandish people seem to us like puppets, and not like real human beings?'

The truth is, we take it, that civilised man rarely learns to treat others as his equals except under the influence of necessary caution; and it is only by treating them as equals, that he can learn what they are really like. In the old days, when Bruce toiled through a thousand dangers to the source of his Blue Nile, and Niebuhr dwelt for years under the Arab roofs and tents, and Hearne and Mackenzie accompanied the Indian hunters in their painful marches to the shores of the Frozen Sea, European wanderers were as yet insulated strangers among multitudes who cared but little for them and their prerogatives, and held, as it were, their lives in their hands. They were compelled for self-preservation to cultivate their companions' good graces, to learn their usages, and defer to their prejudices. Now the steamer brings the young Londoner or Parisian, with all the bloom of his carefully nourished outrecuidance fresh upon him, within a few days' journey of the dwelling of the barbarous people whom he means to visit; he has at his disposal that host of corrupt guides and lackeys which follows the European everywhere in his encroachments, and constitutes in truth one of the worst features of the modern system of travelling; by these he is carefully educated in the notion, to which his own disposition

too much inclines him, that insolence and swagger, or at best the constant maintenance of an air of superiority, are the true method of insuring obedience. And from the exercise of these pleasant methods of persuasion he has, in truth, not much to fear; for those among whom he journeys have learnt to put up with this kind of treatment, as amply compensated by the chink of the stranger's napoleons; or if a rebellious spirit rises within them, they stand in dread of displeasing their own chiefs and governors, who on their part live in salutary awe of the Consuls whose flags wave over their cities. And in this way the visitor goes and returns, a little disabused, perhaps, as to the amount of pleasure to be derived from thus enacting the foreign potentate in the deserts; but, in other respects, with just enough knowledge of the countries which he has visited to enable him to impart to his friends, or readers, his impressions of contempt for the society whose outside he has barely seen.

There is so little to learn from this order of travellers, and they are so numerous, that, for our own part, we rarely attempt to read a new volume of this class of literature, unless in cases where the author has travelled for a purpose, such as the elucidation of points of scientific or antiquarian knowledge. But we make a most willing exception to our rule in the case of those very few who go forth in the resolution to throw aside, for awhile, the self-conceit as well as the habits of civilised life, and to become sojourners in the wild parts of the earth, in the spirit of those old writers whom Lady Duff Gordon mentions, and of their prototype Ulysses, seeing the 'cities, and learning the minds, of many men.'

To this latter category, and to the rarest division of it, those who carry to their work a mind stored with great variety of knowledge and accomplishments, the author of these volumes belongs. It is only necessary for us to refer in passing to the singular effect produced in English society last autumn, by his sudden appearance among us after an almost unbroken absence from this country of many years, and the piquant revelations which he then communicated to the Geographical Society respecting the interior of Arabia, and in particular the secluded metropolis of the Wahabees, concerning whom so much of romantic interest had been vaguely asserted, and so little was really known. For a short time, he disappeared again from among us; and then came the intelligence that he had changed the design of a life, and had adopted again the habits of the native country from which he had been so long estranged. And he now imparts the fruits of his wanderings