PREFACE.

AMERICANS have been so much in the habit of confining their regards to Great Britain, or of looking at the continent of Europe through British publications, as almost to justify the reproachful sarcasm, "that England is the Europe of America." The following Letters are submitted to the public, in the hope, that whatever may be their imperfections, they may contribute, in some slight degree, to remove that imputation. They were written in Paris in the spring of 1820, after a residence of some months in that capital. Their object was to embody an American's views of the actual moral and political condition of the French people; to point out the causes which have led to that condition; and to suggest the consequences that are likely to flow from it. If the observations they contain are founded in truth, they must be gratifying to all those who feel a lively interest in the fortunes of mankind; and if they are bottomed on error, they can do but little harm, since the press is constantly teeming with much abler essays on the other side of the question. Independent indeed of a want of ability in the author, they were hastily thrown together in a city in which every thing was new to him, and of course attractive; in which the mind of a stranger is so perpetually diverted from all serious reflection, either by the unusual splendour of a military parade, or a religious procession-by the brilliant gaities of society, or the fascinating

allurements of the opera and theatres, that it is almost impossible for it to feel a profound and exclusive interest in any one subject. It was, in fact, as an occasional refuge from the enchanting dissipations that embellish existence in Paris, and as an excitement to procure information, that the writer was induced to continue those letters, which he had begun in consequence of some severe strictures on the hereditary instability of the French character, that he heard a distinguished traveller let fall in Italy, in 1819. As they were not originally intended for publication, there was but little care taken to note down authorities for facts or opinions; and hence, in some instances, ideas may have been borrowed without the possibility of recollecting, at this distance of time, the source whence they were derived.An attempt, however, has been made to correct this omission, by pointing out authorities, and the writer hopes with sufficient success to relieve him from the imputation of warping circumstances into conformity with his private opinions, or of colouring them after the complexion of his own prejudices.

In sketching the historical portrait of France since the revival of learning, an attempt has been made to avoid any minuteness of delineation that might not contribute to a just comprehension of the picture. If therefore, those who are well acquainted with history, should find some traits which it might have been unnecessary to fill up for them; or if the more careless contemplator of human affairs should not, from the contraction of the features, comprehend their relative connexion, it is hoped that each will recollect that those Letters were not addressed by an author to the world, but by a young gentleman, (a mere Tyro in the Republic of Letters) to a friend of philosophical taste; and that their object was to prove, by induction, that the condition of the world is so rapidly improving that there is no reason to despair of the future from the gloom of the past.

The ancient regime of France presented the most perfect model of absolute government ever known in Europe, and yet there is not one, the contemplation of whose history tends more to heighten and confirm an attachment to liberty, inasmuch as it proves, that there exists an inseparable connexion between oppression, vice, and ignorance on the one hand, and between freedom, intelligence, and virtue on the other.

It is a source of regret to the writer of these letters, that their perusal is calculated to give a less favourable impression of the French character than he actually entertains. This defect was, in some degree, inseparable from an inquiry which may be considered rather as an Exposé of the causes of the few defects of the French character, than of the sources of its more numerous virtues. It was, not so much his object to trace the causes by which France was raised to the proud eminence she has long held among nations, as to point out the clogs and weights which retarded, and some of which still continue to impede, the course of her ascendancy. The liberal censure, therefore, of the lives and manners of those who perverted the morals of that brilliant people, should not be confounded, even in imagination, with the censure of the nation itself. Princes and men in power find persons enough ready to praise their scanty virtues, and to exalt their discharge of the simplest duties into acts of miraculous goodness. If their vices and follies were set in equal relief, mankind might be soon cured of their inordinate admiration of royalty.

In delineating the characters of the two parties which divide Europe at present, these letters evidently lean in favour of that which desires the acquisition of rational liberty, and whose doctrines the writer believes to be favourable to human prosperity, and of course in unison with the will of the all-wise and beneficent Creator of the Universe. He may therefore be thought, by those who confound the present liberal party in France with the old Jacobins, to have represented their views and sentiments in too favourable a light. The same opinion, however, would have been entertained by a similar class of politicians, of an equally fair representation of the principles of the Whigs in England, if published before the Revolution of 1688. Yet the writer is willing to admit, that in a nation so lately rent asunder by the collisions of civil war as the French, and in which, as in the ocean after the violence of a storm hath subsided, an agitation still continues, it is very difficult indeed, for the mind of even a foreigner, so to steady and compose itself, as to judge dispassionately of the influence of past, or of the tendency of passing events. Amid so many discordant factions as exist in France,

an observer, in order to see well, should be armed like Perseus with the helmet of Pluto and the buckler of Minerva.

That the Revolution, in spite of its horrors and its follies has been of immense advantage to France, and is now producing the happiest effects on the public mind of Europe, are facts which are beginning to be very generally suspected even by those who are not at all inclined to believe them. Yet it is somewhat singular that although the great potentates of Europe have combined in a "Holy Alliance," to shut out from the nations they govern the lights of liberty and truth; that although the press has been put in requisition to calumniate and to slay the spirit of innovation; that although the censors of the journals in France have lost no opportunity of bringing the representative system of government into disrepute by caricature representations of some disorderly scenes got up in the Chamber of Deputies by the enemies of the freedom of debate, and which reports have been carefully copied into foreign journals to throw discredit or derision on the French nation; that although every effort has been made, even in that glorious Island in which modern liberty was born, to bring the old Jacobite spirit of allegiance into vogue-there has scarcely been a single publication in the English language to show the progress France is making in civilization under even her present imperfect system of government; or to vindicate the principles of the liberal party against the calumnies of such politicians as those "qui en France s'informe pour inviter quelq'un a diner, s'il est en faveur aupres des ministres."*

The recent change of ministry, which has brought the ultra royalists into power, has, it is true, been regarded by many as a convincing evidence that the spirit of freedom is retrograding in France. It must be admitted, to be sure, that even the tempora-ry triumph of the enemies of civil liberty is a national calamity in any country; but on the present occasion in France it is an unequivocal symptom of the progress of an independent spirit. The neutral party which supported the ministries of Richelieu and of Decazes had scarcely more than an imaginary existence in the body of the nation itself. It was created by the influence of the government, and the spirit of subserviency. If the free

* De Stael.

dom of election had not been nearly destroyed by the law of 1820, the ficticiousness of that party would have been proved by the triumph of the liberal or national party, which it was sufficiently evident would have happened after the election of the third fifth of the deputies under the law of 1817. To prevent this the government racked its brain to discover a mode of election in which the voice of the nation should be virtually, though not seemingly suppressed. They placed the choice of deputies in the hands of the Aristocrats to keep it out of those of the Public, and thus after the election of the one hundred and seventytwo new members, and the removal of the second fifth of the Chamber under the new law, the consumptive fraction of the Chamber of 1819-20, called the "Coté droit," or Ultras, became the majority, and have converted the government into a a sort of oligarchy. This is a forced and unnatural state of things which cannot last very long; but whether it will be destroyed by a great revolutionary convulsion, or by the soberer influence of public opinion, it might be difficult to conjecture. As M. Villele, the present actual prime minister, is a man of fair character and large abilities, a hope may be indulged that he will not run into any excess, nor attempt any violent opposition to the tide of public opinion. In the mean time the nation is advancing in political experience; the politicians of the old school are gradually dropping off; and the neighbouring nations are making an auxiliary progress in the knowledge of representative government; so that when the change comes, (and come it must) it will probably be more in harmony with other existencies, and be accomplished with greater ease and felicity.

There is no probability that the Liberals will be discouraged, since they know that the nation is with them, and feel the justice of the remark of Sallust, "Pulchrum est bene facere reipublicæ." Their doctrines are unfashionable at court and they must necessarily continue to be so. There are no truths which are not offensive to some people. The Grecians persecuted Anaxagoras for asserting that the sun was larger than Peloponnesus; and the Italians Gallileo, for believing that the earth revolved around the Yet time has rectified the judgments of men, and these facts are now as universally admitted as the simplest axioms of philosophy. Political and moral truths are necessarily slower in

sun.