It is frequently asked what is to be the end of all these changes, and under what form of government are the people of France ultimately to settle? Difficult as it is to predict anything with certainty of a people with whom nothing seems to be fixed but the disposition to change, we have no hesitation in stating our opinion that the future government of France will be what that of imperial Rome was, an Elective Military Despotism. In fact, with the exception of the fifteen years of the Restoration, when a free constitutional monarchy was imposed on its inhabitants by the bayonets of the Allies, it has ever since the Revolution of 1789 been nothing else. The Orleans dynasty has, to all appearance, expired with a disgrace even greater than that which attended its birth: the Bourbons can scarcely expect, in a country so deeply imbued with the love of change, to re-establish their hereditary throne. Popular passion and national vanity call for that favourite object in democratic societies—a rotation of governors: popular violence and general suffering will never fail to re-establish, after a brief period of anarchy, the empire of the sword. The successive election of military despots seems the only popular compromise between revolutionary passion and the social necessities of mankind; and as a similar compromise took place, after eighty years of bloodshed and confusion, in the Roman commonwealth, so, after a similar period of suffering, it will probably be repeated, from the influence of the same cause, in the French nation.
[Dies Boreales.]
No. III.
CHRISTOPHER UNDER CANVASS.
Scene—Gutta Percha.
Time—Early Evening.
North—Buller—Seward—Talboys.