"The time is now fast approaching when the pecuniary resources left in the treasury at the revolution will be exhausted. The old loan has ceased to be paid up. The new loan remains a barren failure. The regular taxes are paid with reluctance, and are not paid beforehand except in Paris. The additional impost of 45 centimes (near 50 per cent on the direct taxes) is positively refused as illegal by the rural districts and provincial cities. The stock of bullion in the Bank of France decreases, and, in short, the progress of financial ruin goes steadily on. We pointed out some weeks ago the exact and inevitable course of this decline, and we now read in a French journal of repute the precise confirmation of our predictions:—'We are now,' says the Journal des Debats, 'but two steps removed from a complete system of paper-money; and if we enter on that system, we shall not get out of it again short of the total ruin of private persons and of the state, after having passed through the most rigorous distress; for it would be the suspension of production and of exchange.' The plan proposed, though not yet sanctioned by the Provisional Government, seems to be a general seizure and incorporation with the state of all the great financial and trading companies, such as the Bank of France, the railways, the canals, mines, &c., and the issue of a vast amount of paper by the state on the alleged credit of this property—in short, a pure inconvertible system of assignats. Monstrous as such a proposal appears, we are inclined to think that the rapid disappearance of the precious metals will render some such scheme inevitable, and it will be the form given to the bankruptcy and ruin of the nation."—Times, 14th April.

In the midst of these woful circumstances, the Provisional Government does not for a moment intermit in the inflaming the public mind by the most fallacious and false promises of boundless future prosperity from the adherence to republican principles, and the return of stanch republicans to the approaching assembly. In the same able journal it is observed,—

"We have now before us a handbill entitled the Bulletin de la Republique, and printed on white paper, the distinctive mark of official proclamations, headed, moreover, with the words "Ministère de l'Intérieur." This document is one of those semi-officially circulated, as we understand, by M. Ledru Rollin, for the purpose of exciting the Republican party. A more disastrous appeal to popular passions, and a more delusive pledge to remedy all human sufferings, we never read; for after having laid to the charge of existing laws all the miseries of a poor man's lot, heightened by inflammatory description, the working classes are told that 'henceforth society will give them employment, food, instruction, honour, air, and daylight. It will watch over the preservation of their lives, their health, their intelligence, their dignity. It will give asylum to the aged, work for their hands, confidence to their hearts, and rest to their nights. It will watch over the virtue of their daughters, the requisite provision for their children, and the obsequies of the dead.' In a word, this exceptional and transitory power, whose very form and existence are still undefined, announces some necromantic method of interposing between man and all the laws of his existence on this globe—of suspending the principles of human nature, as it has already done those of society—and of changing the whole aspect of human life. No delusions can be so enormous: the word is too good for them—they are frauds; and these frauds are put forward by men who know well enough that the effect of the present crisis already is, and will be much more hereafter, to plunge the very classes to whom these promises are made into the lowest depths of human suffering."—Times, 14th April.

One of the most instructive facts as to the ruinous effect of the late Revolution on the best interests of French industry, is to be found in the progressive and rapid decline in the value of all French securities, public and private, since it took place. It distinctly appears that two-thirds of the capital of France has been destroyed since the Revolution, in the short space of six weeks! Attend to the fall in the value of the public funds during that brief but disastrous period:—

French 3 per cents. 5 per cents.
Fr. Ct. Fr. Ct.
18257635July 231817690July 29
18298616Dec. 518219060Nov. 2
18308535Jan. 181822950Sept. 5
18317050Dec. 2182410480Feb. 5
18348550Nov. 3018281090Sept. 4
18408665July 22182911065Mar. 4
18448565Dec. 2218319830Dec. 15
18458640May 20183511036Feb. 4
1846850Feb. 2818371110Sept. 5
18478030Jan. 218411175Sept. 4
1848470Mar. 15184412630Mar. 4
18484127Mar. 28184711940Feb. 22
18483567April 1184811675Feb. 22
18483464April 518489750{fell to 80 Mar. 7.}
18483310April 1418486580April 2
1848510April 12

La Presse, March 12, and Times since that date.

The value of railway stock and bank shares has declined in a still more alarming proportion. Bank shares, which in 1824 sold for 3400 francs, are now selling at 900 francs—or little more than A FOURTH of their former value. Railway stock is unsaleable, being marked out for immediate confiscation. Taking one kind of stock with another, it may safely be affirmed that TWO-THIRDS of the capital of France has perished since the Revolution, in the short space of seven weeks. The fruit of thirty-three years' peace, hard labour, and penurious saving, has disappeared in seven weeks of anarchical transports!! Of course, the means of employing the people have declined in the same proportion; for where credit is annihilated, how is industry to be maintained, before its produce comes in, but by realised capital? How is its produce to be disposed of if two-thirds of the classes possessed of property have been rendered bankrupt? Already this difficulty has been experienced in France. The Paris papers of 13th April announce that seventy-five thousand persons will be employed at the "ateliers Nationaux," or public workshops, at 30 sous a-day, in the end of April—at a cost of 112,500 francs a-day, or 3,375,000 francs, (£150,000) a-month. This is in addition to an armed force of above 100,000 men, paid for the most part two francs a-day for doing nothing. No exchequer in the world can stand such a strain; far less that of a bankrupt and revolutionised country like France. It is no wonder that the French funds are down at 32, and an issue of assignats—in other words, the open and avowed destruction of all realised property—is seriously contemplated.

This is exactly the condition to which France was brought during the Reign of Terror, when the whole inhabitants of Paris fell as a burden on the government, and the cost of the 680,000 rations daily issued to them, exceeded that of the fourteen armies which combated on the frontiers for the Republic. In those days the misery in Paris, the result of the Revolution, was so extreme, that the bakers' shops were besieged day and night without intermission by a famishing crowd; and the unhappy applicants were kept all night waiting during a severe frost, with a rope in their hands, and the thermometer often down at 5° Fahrenheit, to secure their place for the distribution when the doors were opened. There is nothing new in the condition of France and Paris at this time: it has been seen and experienced in every age of the world; it has been familiar to the East for three thousand years. The principle that the state is the universal proprietor, the middle class the employés of government, and the labouring class the servants of the state, is exactly the oriental system of government. It is just the satraps and fellahs of Persia—the mandarins and peasants of China—the zemindars and ryots of Hindostan over again. Exact parallels to the armed and insolent rabble who now lord it over Paris, and through it over France, may be found in the Prætorians of Rome—the Mamelukes of Egypt—the Janissaries of Constantinople. The visions of perfectibility and utopian projects of Louis Blanc, Lamartine, and Ledru Rollin, have already landed the social interests of France in the straits of the Reign of Terror—its practical government in the armed despotism of the Algerine pirates, or the turbulent sway of the Sikh soldiery.

But the contagion of violence, the ascendant of ambition, the lust of rapine have not been confined to the armed janissaries of Paris, or their delegates the Provisional Government. They have extended to other countries: they have spread to other states. They have infected governments as well as their subjects; they have disgraced the throne as well as the workshop. Wherever a revolution has been successful, and liberal governments have been installed, there a system of foreign aggression has instantly commenced. The first thing which the revolutionary government of Piedmont did, was to invade Lombardy, and drive the Austrian armies beyond the Po; the first exploit of constitutional Prussia, to pour into Sleswig to spoliate Denmark. Open preparations for revolutionising Lithuania are made in the grand-duchy of Posen. A war has already commenced on the Po and the Elbe; it is imminent on the Vistula. Lamartine's reply to the Italian deputation proves that France is prepared, on the least reverse to the Sardinian arms, to throw her sword into the scale; his conduct in permitting an armed rabble to set out from Paris to invade Belgium, and another from Lyons to revolutionise Savoy, that the extension of the frontier of France to the Rhine and the Alps is still the favourite project of the French republic. If he declines to do so, the armed prætorians of Paris will soon find another foreign minister who will. France has 600,000 men in arms: Austria 500,000: 150,000 Russians will soon be on the Vistula. Hardly was uttered Mr Cobden's memorable prophecy of the approach of a pacific millennium, and a universal turning of swords into spinning-jennies, when the dogs of war were let slip in every quarter of Europe. Hardly was M. Lamartine's hymn of "liberty, equality, fraternity," chanted, when the reign of internal spoliation and external violence commenced in France, and rapidly extended as far as its influence was felt throughout the world.