Maynooth has got its annual present just as Belfast has got the gift which the crown grants, and the Episcopal Church in Scotland her regium donum,-a donation as inconsiderable in regard to amount, as it has been irregular in its issue. The consequence was, that, from year to year, the expediency of continuing the boon lay open to question; and, though always conceded, the concession was never made till after an opposition, more or less formidable, had been overcome. The head of a Conservative cabinet proposes to put an end to this state of things, and to settle on Maynooth, by act of parliament, an annual sum, which is to be raised by general taxation out of the people's pockets. And here is undoubtedly a change of principle. It may be for the better or the worse, but a change it clearly is; and supposing it to come upon the Conservative party unawares, we are not prepared to say that they have not good cause to complain of it. But does it come unawares? We cannot tell. We know this, and this only, that if Sir Robert Peel never entered into any pledge to resist a further grant to Maynooth, he has as little pledged himself to concede such grant; and most assuredly has never hinted, in all his sayings or doings, whether in or out of office, at changing a free gift from the crown into a right conferred by act of parliament. And if it be fair to take further into account the general bent of his policy as regards the Irish Roman Catholics, up to the year 1844, then are we constrained to acknowledge that the measure now proposed is at open variance with that, and must, therefore, take the parties who have heretofore supported the minister altogether by surprise. It is impossible to tell how the Conservative party will take all these proceedings. Patient they have certainly been as yet; patient- that is to say, in public. For they have voted with the minister often against their private wishes and convictions; and if they complained afterwards, who can blame them? and, therefore, if Sir Robert Peel be determined to go forward in the course on which he seems to have entered, perhaps we could not give to our Conservative friends more wholesome advice, than by entreating them to go with him. But will they follow this advice of ours? Time alone can determine; and yet it would be the veriest moonstruck madness to act over again the tragedy of 1830. Break down his government they could to-morrow, if they wished it, but what would follow? The return of the Whigs; and then, unless the friends of the monarchy deliberately gave themselves up to the business of forcing the monarch to a change of ministers every week, measures more liberal than any with which they are now threatened would come upon them. Would Sir Robert Peel put himself at the head of a Conservative op position again? We trow not. If ever Sir Robert and his present supporters part, they will part in such bitterness as must preclude the pos sibility of a renewed good understanding to the end of their days. And then where are we? Some who now vote for him will with him still; others, in absolute disgust, will join the Radicals; and the remnant must prove too weak to effect any purpose, be it even the retarding of the evil day, whatever the day which is now casting its shadow over our heads may bring forth. go On the other hand Sir Robert Peel, unused as he is to be advised, must bear with us while we remind him that he is not justified, in the pursuit of any objects, be they ever so laudable, to risk a catastrophe, of which we venture to predict that the present generation has witnessed none more terrible. We believe that he intends well in all that he is doing. We are satisfied that even this re adjustment of the Maynooth matter is meant to work for good; but if the Protestant spirit be roused against it, he may rest assured that though he may carry his measure, both he and the country will rue it Why bolster up Maynooth at all? Why not act in Ireland as the King of Prussia has acted in his Rhenish provinces, and give us one or more universities of Bonn, where young men of all religious persuasions shall pursue their general studies together; and part only when such as are de signed for the service of the Church go, each section to its own professor, for instruction in theology? Not a voice would be raised against such an arrangement as this on the English side of the Channel, at all events. And if at the first, both of the great Irish parties condemned it, let them condemn. A measure founded on such manifest justice and regard to truth, must work its own way in the long run. And we really do not know what use there is for a government at all, if it shrink from doing that which is felt, even by the statesmen composing it, to be right; and do something else, which is felt all the while to be wrong, merely because the latter bids fair to work at once, whereas the former may not work for a quarter of a century. country, and nothing else; but never give them ground to suspect, that on questions so grave as those which affect the moral and religious instruction of the people, your mind is I not made up. Arrangements of expediency will not do here. We seek no vantage-ground wherever truth, or what we believe to be truth, shall plant itself. Carry out your Charitable Bequests-bill as far as you please ; and enable pious and wealthy Roman Catholics to endow Maynooth, or any other priestly seminary, till it shall rival in wealth the richest college in Oxford; but do not tax this Protestant nation in order to maintain a school for the instruction of popish priests, so managed as that the minds of the pupils shall be imbued with the most bitter and implacable hatred of Protestantism and its institutions. And, finally, if you cannot please the country gentlemen in all things, at least prevent your subordinates from taunting them as men "who come whining to parliament." We are sorry for it; but we have neither the power nor the will to conceal, that strong as the ministerial party seems to be in the House of Commons, the seeds of dissolution are sown thickly through its ranks. The Church is hardly satisfied; we mean that section of the Church of which Sir Robert Inglis is the mouthpiece. The Tractarians, we believe, are in high glee. This fostering of Maynooth is meat and drink to them; for they take it as preshadowing the re-establishment in Ireland of that Church, one and indivisible, towards which, in their hearts, they lean. But moderate men, and all the Evangelical section, look upon the scheme with distaste; while the Dissenters, by what influence guided we cannot guess, are open-mouthed against it. And all sects and parties, all which have any real reverence for the truth of the New Testament, are dalised by the new-born zeal of the minister in favour of the Jews. Now these are not the sentiments which it is desirable should mature themselves in the minds of his religious supporters towards the minister, yet we fear that they are arising. What, then, is it that we are aiming at, or would advise? To the minister we take the liberty of saying, Whatever you do, take care not to excite a suspicion in the public mind, that there is no standard of truth within your own heart. They believe you to be able, far-seeing, firm of purpose. They do not doubt that objects are praiseworthy, that you seek the general welfare of the scan your On the other hand, our recommendation to the great Conservative party is, that they hold together at all hazards, supporting Sir Robert to the very verge of their conviction; and, as long as they do give their support, to give it cheerfully. At the same time let them be prepared for the worst. Sir Robert Peel is a great man, but must the existence of the party and the fate of the monarchy depend absolutely upon him? We do think that it would be possible to form a Conservative government without him. Yet we should be extremely sorry to see the attempt made; and we, therefore, recommend them to become more than they seem as yet to have been-masters of their own views, and of the best means of effecting them. Sir Robert Peel will do right, even to the minutest point, provided he be convinced that in right, and only in right, there is strength; and his supporters, instead. of voting to-day, and grumbling over their vote to-morrow, will satisfy him on that head, whenever they go to him in a body and tell him so. Since the preceding article was written and sent to press, the Duke of Newcastle has published his letter to the editor of the Standard. We beg to render his grace the tribute of our praise and unbounded respect for the same. We do not profess to agree in all the duke's political opinions; and we fear that the ground from which neither change of times, nor alteration in circumstances, has been able to remove him, is no longer tenable. Yet we honour the consistency which has kept him, through good report and through evil, true to the principles which he professed in early life, and steady in the defence of them. As to the immediate cause which produced this letter, we have no language at our command wherewith fairly to describe it. The motion of Mr. Williams was scarcely different from what might have been expected at his hands; but that the minister should sit still and hear one of the noblest-hearted of England's nobles traduced, without putting the traducer to shame by a rebuke at least as telling as that wherewith he rewarded Mr. Disraeli's attack on Mr. Bonham, this is to us the most distressing feature in the case; and we believe that by the whole of the Conservative party it is so regarded. However, the Duke of Newcastle, and his high-minded son, are quite capable of defending their own cha racters, both in public and in private. And, though the latter hold office under government, the fact of his doing so he being a new mannowise controverts the opinion which his father seems to entertain, that acts and speeches which were held to be meritorious twelve years ago are now remembered as legitimate bars to ministerial favour and patronage. The Duke of Newcastle has not even been restored to the expensive honour of the lieutenancy of the county, from which the Whigs removed him. As to any more substantial mark of ministerial friendship, his grace is too thinking a man to look for that. He belongs to a class whom Sir Robert Peel will not advance. However, he commands the respect of all parties, and this must be his consolation. London:-Moyes and Barclay, Castle Street, Leicester Square. HISTOIRE DU CONSULAT ET DE L'EMPIRE, PAR A. THIERS.* cu THE publication of these volumes has created a perfect fureur in France, and excited no mean riosity on this side of the Channel. Nor is the interest merely European. The literary curiosity of the New World has stalked or steamed over the wide waste of the Atlantic, and the booksellers of the Broadway have run a race of rivalry with the Tarliers and Melines of Brussels, the Brockhauses and Flugels of Leipsic, the Cormons of Madrid, the Dunckers and Humblots of Berlin, and the Colburns and Chapman and Halls of our own capital. Why is this? It is because the publication of these volumes is as much, or even more, a political than a literary event. France, the spirit of that revolution, which is now nearly sixty years old, still pervades the breasts of millions and millions of men, and among the younger generation, commonly called La Jeune France, the predominance of the Napoleonic principle of military glory seems to be the alpha and omega the chief aim and object of their political programme. It is because the work of M. Thiers stirs In up these fierce passions, which since 1840 had lain smouldering, that it is regarded as a welcome vade mecum to every troubled, to every unquiet, to every restless, to every turbulent spirit. As in his former work, L'Histoire de la Revolution Française, M. Thiers espoused the cause of the Revolution, so in the present he constitutes himself the apologist and exponent Napoleon Buonaparte, whose real of that stratocracy represented by object was European domination, not French freedom. In thus acting in 1845, M. Thiers has certainly returned to his first love, and again put forth, in middle age, the principles which he first propagated nearly a quarter of a century ago in the Constitutionel. It was Mignet and Thiers, both born in the same town and nearly in the same year, both educated in the Lycée of Marseilles, and both students in the same class in the Ecole de Droit of Aix, in Provence, who resuscitated anew the theories and principles of the first French Revolution, and rallied the French people round the doctrines and opinions of Manuel and Laffitte. The work of Mignet on the French Revolution is more severe and succinct, more chaste and classic in style than the production of his friend and contemporary; but Thiers, late Prime Minister of France, Member of the French Academy, and of the History of the Consulate and the Empire of France under Napoleon. By M. A. Institute. Translated by D. Forbes Campbell, Esq., with the sanction and approval f the Author. London: Henry Colburn, and Chapman and Hall, 1845. VOL. XXXI. NO. CLXXXV. Ꮮ Ꮮ proceeded boldly on from illegality to violence. The pretext for their interference was the protest, called "a summoning of the citizens to revolt and rebellion." Seals were placed on every press which had printed the document. The National, then under the management of Thiers (who had seceded from the Constitutionel), was one of the first placed under the hands of the police. Thiers and his fellow-labourers protested against this further illegality, and at length only yielded to the supremacy of force. The presses were brokon in the contest, but were soon repaired, and again at work, throwing off hundreds of thousands of the proclamation and protest, which spread like wildfire through all the quarters of Paris, and thence, without delay, to every province in France. The office of the National now became the head-quarters of insurrection; and there was written, by the hand of the then editor and author of these volumes, that famous article in favour of the Duke of Or leans, which boldly called on the nation to pass from one dynasty to another. Early in August, Louis Philippe was called to the throne of France; and now it was necessary to do something for the writer, who, ten years previously, had commenced his career at the Constitu tionel-who, seven years previously, had rallied the opinions of public men to the principles of the first Revolution in the two volumes of his history-who, in 1825, 1826, 1827, and 1828, had continued to write in the same strain-who, in 1828, had founded the National- and who, in 1829, had run the risk of losing his head, by the boldness and vigour of his proceedings. It was true the Nation had called, with unexampled eagerness, for a new edition of his History of the Re rolution, which was soon exhausted; it is less popular and dramatic, and wants the fervid vigour and revolutionary temperature and glow of the more diffuse, declamatory, and dangerous work of Thiers. The production of Mignet has, perhaps, secured to its author an immortality of renown; but it has had in its day, and it has now, less vogue among the great mass and body of Frenchmen than the work of the ex-minister for foreign affairs. Both these able writers saw, so early as 1828, the inevitableness of a second revolution, and herein they had more foresight and political perspicuity than the writers of the Doctrinnaire school. These latter thought that the legitimate dynasty might be made compatible with representative government; whilst Thiers and Mignet looked to a revolution as a thing that must come within a given time. The work of Mignet had been already fairly launched, and the tenth and last volume of Thiers had but a short time appeared, when, on the 8th of August, 1829, Charles X. made Polignac premier. This was an appointment so evidently against the wishes of the nation, that every mode of legal opposition was eagerly sought by the chambers and public writers. Benjamin Constant, then in "the scar and yellow leaf"-for he was, physically speaking, prematurely worn out, and declining in political renown was of opinion, that the public service should be stinted, by reducing the credits allocated to the army, marine, civil servants, &c. Thiers, in the National, combated this opinion, properly contending, that this was punishing the public service for the faults of the government, and proposed the bolder and more decisive expedient of voting the different sums allocated, and rejecting the whole budget. Such a vote presented the advantage of bringing things to a crisis. Two alternatives were then only possiblea change of ministry, or a coup-d'état against the charter. The blind and obstinate monarch chose his course. The ordinances of July were issued. A vigorous protest, the joint production of Thiers, Rémusat, and Cauchois Lemaire, appeared next morning in all the journals. The government had now drawn the sword from the scabbard, and young but, after the 9th of August, the author had a right to look for something better than reward as a writer; for, by his courage and capacity, he had vindicated a claim to some voice in the management of public affairs. The first intention was, that he should, like his friend, Mignet, attached to the office of foreign affairs; and, as a preliminary step, the Duke de Broglie and Baron be |