Finances and Public Credit of Austria. 461 and upwards. Stamps are required on a variety of mercantile and private papers, sales, bills of exchange, playing-cards, and similar things. Some of the charges are unequal and impolitic. Documents without the necessary stamps are void. The stamps for appointments to public functions, as benefices, privileges, and titles, run from 1000 fl. for the diploma of noble, to 12,000 fl. for that of prince. A councillor pays 100fl., and a privy councillor 6000 fl., different sums being fixed for intermediate grades. The stamp duty on patents is regulated by the time they are conceded, one year being 25 fl. increasing to 440 fl. in all for fifteen years, the longest term for which they are given. This is an impolitic and unjust tax in any country. In Prussia the stamp duties press heavier on trade than in Austria. The gross produce of the five foregoing heads of indirect taxation is from recent official returns, 79,000,000 fl., the expense of collecting nearly 13 per cent. In Prussia it averages about 10, and in France 16 per cent. The Post produces in Austria 2,400,000 fl.; in Prussia 400,000 fl. less, while in France, deducting the expense of the administration, the product is 7,632,000 fl.* There are only two classes of charge, a single letter weighing of an ounce, or 8.75 grammes of France, is charged for ten miles 6 kr., beyond that distance 12 kr. The Prussian charges are graduated from 3 kr. for one, up to 12 kr. for a hundred miles the single letter. Weights up to 100 lbs., as well as silver and gold, are charged by weight and value according to a scale generally lowest in Austria. Thus 10,000 fl. in gold, weighing 13 lb. 12 oz. carried 100 miles is charged in Austria 34 fl. 53 kr.; in Prussia 133 fl. 20 kr., or 98 fl. 27 kr. more. The Lottery, another head of indirect taxation, brings in about 4,000,000 fl. to the state. This demoralizing source of revenue, existing also in Prussia, needs no further description; wherever adopted it is a certain indication of financial weakness. The total net amount of Austrian taxation we have already given. The following table will afford some idea of the vast and extravagant machinery by which it is kept in activity. In 1839 there were 73,543 individuals of all ranks employed and paid for civil services alone, or 1 in every 494 persons, and adding 52,728 miners and workmen, 1 in 266 inhabitants. Their salaries and emoluments reached 34,730,624 fl., and the expense of the government officials was 12 per cent. of the entire revenue. The following table on the separate provinces, with their revenues, retainers, and emoluments, is interesting. * The receipts of the post for France in 1841, give a sum of 45,543,000 francs; the expenses were 25,698,000; leaving a profit of 19,845,000 francs. The reorganization of the Austrian finances is necessary for her security; reform knocks loudly at her door; the means are within her reach; her resources are great, but the system complex and expensive. The clog of bureaucracy hampers her progress, and makes the smallest change slow and difficult of execution. An inclination is said to exist on the part of the government to ameliorate or even abandon the formal mode and tedious routine hitherto pursued, and of the success of energetic endeavours for either purpose there can be no doubt. Placed between Russia and Western Europe the independence of Austria is most important to the latter, but she must be rich and powerful as well as independent to preserve her position, with jealous neighbours about her, and barbarism on her eastern frontier. It is well to know that the material is not wanting, that before long the change so desirable may chance to be effected, and the Austrian revenue made to produce 200,000,000 fl. without increased pressure upon the population. M. de Tegoborski has done a great service to the public by his work, which will not be read unprofitably. We suspect he possesses much better information than his book discloses upon a good many points, and more than all that in his heart he is a convert to free trade principles-how indeed could a writer of sound judgment and reflection be otherwise? Of his non-declaration of such an opinion it is not difficult to comprehend the reasons. ART. IX.-Le Duc de Bassano, Souvenirs Intimes de la Révolution. et de l'Empire. Recueillis et publiés par Madame CHARLOTTE DE SOR. (Personal Recollections of the Duke of Bassano, of the Revolution, and of the Empire. Collected and published by Madame DE SOR.) Brussels. 1843. THIS is a poor, paltry book, compiled by a warm-hearted woman, evidently with the best and kindest intentions. It is not necessary, perhaps it would be neither fitting nor decorous, that we should too curiously pry into the relations of good neighbourhood or of friendship, or haply of something more tender still, existing between Maret, Duke of Bassano, and Charlotte de Sor. With these, as we have nothing whatever to do, we desire in no degree to meddle. The book, for aught we know or care, may be the offspring of friendship, of gratitude, or of a tenderer passion; but the inquiries of our readers, no matter what the moving spring of the lady, will naturally be, does this worthy woman tell any thing new-does she throw any unexpected light on the character of her hero, or in doing him honour, at all open to our view more distinctly or more vividly the thorny path of public affairs? We regret to say she does not; and we do not, therefore, very well see the necessity under which Charlotte de Sor lay in putting her pen to paper to produce this rifacimento. The career of Maret is as well known as the progress of any capable, industrious, plodding, subservient short-hand writer deserves to be. Honour he obtained in his day. and some share of wealth with a dukedom to boot, and with these, he and his ought to have been, if they are not, satisfied. Had he been born in England he might have been a kind of second-rate Gurney or Cherer, making his 5000l. a year, labouring hardly by night and by day in houses of parliament and courts of law, spending all the while his 8007. a year, and therefore dying far richer than he did as a peer of France; or he might have turned law reporter like Peckwell, and having accepted an Indian judgeship, died forgotten in a foreign land; or he might have gone on plodding his wearisome way, day by day, in all the courts of Westminster Hall, and have come to nothing, like and more accomplished men, at last. But having fallen on stormy times, and there being no one to compete with him in his speciality, he rose from grade to grade, till ultimately he became a duke and minister of state for foreign affairs. It will, however, be necessary to enter into a few particulars, to give the reader an insight into his history, but not at any great length. Maret was born at Dijon in 1763. His father was a doctor, and he was marked out to walk in the same professional path, but there was a prize essay to be many Maret contended for at the college of Dijon, the subject being an eulogium on Vauban. Maret entered the lists and obtained the second place, the celebrated Carnot having obtained the first. His father now changed his views and devoted him to the bar. He was called in due season, and admitted to practise at the provincial parliament of Dijon. The old doctor, however, wished for something better than provincial success for his son, and sent him to Paris with introductions to Vergennes the minister, and other persons of high credit. At Paris he followed the course of international law given by Bonchaud, and had the good fortune to be noticed by Buffon, Condorcet, and Lacépède. The death of Vergennes, however, deprived him of a patron, and he was preparing to finish his studies in Germany, when the first revolution broke out. suddenly changed his intention of quitting France. Madame de Sor says he thought, and wisely thought too, he could not follow a more instructive course, or one in which there was more to be learned than the sittings of the States-general. He accordingly established himself, with this view, at Versailles, in a small lodging. He was then in his 25th year. I did not,' said he to Madame de Sor, 'wish to lose a word of what was said, and that was the reason why, with my small means, and having a hole to put my head into in Paris, I went to the further expense of a little room at Versailles.' The young Burgundian was the first to enter the hall of the states every morning, and the last to leave it. Jaded and tired he goes home, but neither to eat nor to sleep, much less to smoke or to drink.-No, he sits down to write out his notes word for word, graphically describing the tone, manner, and gesture of all the speakers. So intent and busy was our short-hand writer that he came to Paris but on the Sunday, the silent sabbath-day at Versailles. On this day of rest he laboured not, but went into society. He talked of his notes, and read some of them. They were raved about like every novelty in Paris, quoted, and praised. Panckouke, the publisher, heard of this nine-days' wonder called Hugh James Maret, sought him out, and proposed that his Parliamentary Report, should be incorporated into the Moniteur,' in which the crafty bookseller was interested. On the recommendation of Mirabeau, Lally Tolendal, Thouret, and others, Maret consented. From this moment, the 'Moniteur,' heretofore declining, had unlimited success. It has been even said that it sold the almost incredible number of 80,000. Maret worked industriously in this fashion for three or four years, and made many thousand francs in an honourable and legitimate way. Bonaparte was some years his junior, and while these things were going on, was grinding geometry at Brienne, An Industrious Short-hand Writer. 465 or spunging cannons clean at Toulon, or gaining a cutaneous disease by seizing the rammer of an artilleryman in the blood-heat of battle. But he had, nevertheless, heard by report of the fame of the reporter, but withal, vaguely, dimly, indistinctly. Years wear away, and the sub-lieutenant of Brienne becomes one of the three Consuls. Then he sends for Maret, questions him with piercing glance about his former labours, and is told that this wonder-working Hugh James, with head and pen for many years had laboured eighteen hours out of the twenty-four! Good night, Maret,' says the brisk, brusque little Corsican, 'I am busy this evening, but working in that fashion, a man may i' faith, be something at last.' Prim pragmatical Maret thought this manner odd. It was certainly quick, unparliamentary, (why should not we say unPeelish?) but it was none the worse for that. To bed goes Maret, his pencils, pens, and note-books, arranged and ruled for the morrow-morning. Up he wakes betimes on that morrow, and reads at the early hour of seven, in the matutinal' Moniteur,' that he is named 'Secrétaire général des Consuls!' What species of a secretary is this, we may be asked? It was certainly something new, even in novelty-loving France. He was not a minister, with his particular department to preside over. His functions did not apply to this or that isolated branch of the public service, but he was a functionary personally present at all the meetings or deliberations or councils, as we might perhaps call them in England, of the three consuls, and took a note of every thing that was said or done. And never was there a happier choice of a note-taker. As good a short-hand writer as that martinet of the Judges, Baron Gurney himself, Maret seemed to be the very genius of abbreviation. With amazing promptitude and fidelity, he seized the quick ideas, and caught the hasty, halfmumbled words of Bonaparte, and jotted them down with unerring accuracy. He had no will of his own, no independent theory, no system, the offspring of a strong mind or an original understanding. His pen was prompt, quick, and obedient. He admired his master so thoroughly, and attached himself so strongly to him, that it seemed as though that powerful being had plucked out of his short-hand writer's breast the faculty of volition, for he only thought, saw, and felt, as the consul to whom he devoted himself' corps et ame.' This was the sort of passive, mute, hard-working machine which Bonaparte longed to find. And he found this man-thing in Hugh James Maret. As the Consular system developed itself, the functions of Maret became more important. Bonaparte was fond of dictating, of thinking aloud, as Hamlet says. His short quick words, his rapid and picturesque ideas, which flew from his lips with the speed of arrows, abounding in striking images and illustrations, |