Some months since a committee at the head of which was Leverrier, the astronomer, reported to the French Chambers in favor of a telegraphic apparatus submitted by Mr. Bain. Messages were transmitted between Paris and Lille, at the rate of 1500 letters per minute. In accordance with the report an apparatus was placed upon the line between Paris and Calais. The dispatch of the Paris correspondent of the Times of Dec. 5, was transmitted by this apparatus at the rate of 1200 letters a minute, in a character perfectly legible. On the first of March the French telegraphs are to be opened to the public. By the proposed tariff a message of 300 words from Paris to Calais, 235 miles, will cost about nine dollars.
Guizot, has prefixed to the republications of his treatises on Monk and Washington two characteristic prefaces, in which the opinion is more than hinted that what France wants at present is Monk, the restorer of Monarchy, rather than Washington, the founder of a Republic.
A Life of Toussaint Louverture, by M. St. Remy, a native of Hayti, has been published at Paris, of which La Semaine says: "Toussaint Louverture, the heroic personification of the black race, was one of the most extraordinary men of modern times. A son of a race hitherto oppressed, filled with a noble emulation, and desirous of sculpturing the figure of some of those great men who have fixed the destiny of their country, has commenced the pious task with the history of this old slave, whose genius raised him to the rank of general of the French army in St. Domingo. The sophisms of the partisans of negro slavery have too long held up to ridicule the efforts made by a people of African origin to take rank among civilized nations; and it belonged to a man of color to prove by an illustrious example that the Deity wished but to vary his works, not to establish a hierarchy of subjection, by giving to the skin a color black or white. The great crime of Toussaint was that of having bravely resisted Leclerc, who came to reduce again to slavery a country which had been made free. On the 8th of October, 1801, Bonaparte said, in a proclamation addressed to the inhabitants of St. Domingo: 'The Government has sent to you General Leclerc. He brings with him a large force to protect you against your enemies, and the enemies of the Republic. If you are told, these forces are destined to deprive you of your liberties, do you reply, The Republic will not suffer them to be taken from us.' On the 2d of May, 1802, slavery was re-established by a decree under the same signature. When he was embarking aboard the vessel which was to convey him to Europe, Toussaint uttered these words: 'In overthrowing me, they have only overthrown the trunk of the tree of the liberty of the blacks. It will spring up again, for the roots are many and deep.' He was a true prophet; for of 50,000 soldiers successively embarked for St. Domingo, not a fourth part ever returned to France. The old troops of Moreau, who had covered themselves with glory upon the banks of the Rhine, were decimated in that fratricidal contest, in which both parties fought, singing the Marseillaise Hymn. But, says M. St. Remy, 'while the mulattoes and the blacks mingled together, fought for their freedom, the First of the Blacks died of inanition on the 27th of April, 1803. The rats, it was said, had gnawed his feet.' From the commencement of his captivity, Toussaint had repeatedly written to the First Consul that he might be brought to trial; but his letters, replete with touching simplicity, remained unanswered. The man who had once held in his hand the destinies of the American Archipelago, was but an old Negro, torn from his wife and children, buried alive, and condemned, by an implacable policy, to death. And so died Toussaint Louverture, who, born a slave, was in turn a brave soldier, a victorious commander, an intelligent administrator, and an enlightened legislator. The Constitution which he gave to Hayti, before the arrival of Leclerc, shows him to have been fully aware of the wants of his country. He proclaimed civil and political equality, and encouraged agriculture and commerce, by abolishing monopolies; and in view of what is now taking place in Hayti, we may be astonished that this old slave was more enlightened than those who have succeeded him in the government. We have not pretended to give an analysis of the work, but the facts we have recounted may serve to give an idea of the interest which attaches to this new publication of M. St. Remy, who has been heretofore known by his History of Hayti."
A Treatise on the Theory of Constitutional Law, by M. Berryat St. Prix, is spoken of as a work of great interest and ability. It is preceded by a General Introduction, setting forth the fundamental principles of Constitutional Law, and the characteristics which distinguish it from Administrative Law. The author then proceeds to treat in detail of the difficult question of sovereignty, traces the history of the numerous changes in the political relations of France, and analyzes the ten or a dozen different Constitutions which have succeeded each other. A parallel is drawn between the new Constitution and its immediate predecessor, and that of the United States. The questions of the natural right to property, and of the right to labor are also discussed.
Some curious facts have been stated illustrating the effect of the French Revolution of February upon the circulation of newspapers. It stimulated their publication and sale to an almost incredible extent. It is stated that one single printer, M. Boulé, actually sold for months together between 200,000 and 300,000 copies daily, of four or five different journals of which he was the printer. He had eleven presses at work day and night, and in the course of a short time not only managed to pay off several thousand pounds of debt, but even to make a very considerable fortune. The journals he printed were chiefly what is called Red or Ultra-Democratic; and such was the fureur of the public for them, that the hawkers used to demand "papers" without caring what they were. All the newspapers were paid for in pence, and it was literally sou by sou that Boulé enriched himself.
The four principal cemeteries of Paris contain in all 23,340 permanent tombs. Of these Père-Lachaise has 15,750, Montmartre 4260, and Mont Parnasse 3330. The total number of interments in all these cemeteries since they were opened in 1804, is 1,380,000; so that these four cemeteries contain 300,000 more inhabitants than the living city from which their population is drawn.
GERMANY, Etc.
Carl Ferdinand Becker, the celebrated writer on the Philosophy of Grammar, whose death we noticed in a recent Number of the New Monthly, presents a somewhat singular instance of eminence being attained in a pursuit not commenced till late in life. He was born in 1775, and studied at the seminary for priests at Hildesheim, where he received an appointment, which he subsequently resigned rather than embrace an ecclesiastical life. He then studied medicine, and published several medical treatises. We afterward find him sub-director of the gunpowder and saltpetre manufactory at Göttingen, into the mechanical processes of which he introduced many improvements. In 1813, he was appointed physician to the General Army Hospital, at Frankfort; this being subsequently discontinued, he settled as a private physician at Offenbach. Here his long-suppressed fondness for philological pursuits was renewed; but he had reached his fiftieth year before he published his first grammatical work. The older German grammarians founded their systems upon the bare forms of the parts of speech, while Becker assumed the signification of them, in as far as they are components of a sentence, and serve as the expression of thought, as the foundation of his system. He looked upon language as the organic expression of thought, and all special forms of speech, as the expression of particular relations of thoughts and ideas. By this mode of treatment he avoided much of the dryness and insipidity belonging to mere grammatical speculations, and brought to view the more genial elements of the philosophy of language. His mode of treating his materials was philosophical rather than historical—in which he offers a striking contrast to Jacob Grimm, whose works show an equally familiar acquaintance with the history and the philosophy of language.
Bruno Bauer, the Coryphæus of German Rationalism (unless Strauss may be thought to be a rival for that questionable eminence) whose last work is devoted to the somewhat useless task of proving, with a superabundance of logic and contemptuous irony, that the late Frankfort Parliament effected nothing, and knew nothing, has run through a singular career. He was born in 1809, and in his twentieth year commenced the study of theology at Berlin. Five years later he became private teacher in the University, at which time he belonged to Hegelian school of orthodoxy. The germ of his subsequent views, however, may be found in his "Kritik of the Old Testament Writings," in which he represents "the myths of Judaism in their successive transformations, as a development of the national sentiment of the Jews." He first fairly broke ground with orthodoxy in 1839, when he began to apply his principles of criticism to the New Testament narratives. He commenced with the Gospel of John, which he regarded as a work of the imagination, with but here and there a historical trace—a work merely "founded upon facts." He had, meanwhile, been transferred to the University of Bonn, where he proceeded with his three volumes of criticisms upon the other Evangelists, at the conclusion of which he found he had reached a point which he could hardly have anticipated at the outset. In the first volume he had begged that the judgment of his readers might be suspended, "for however bold and far-reaching the negations of this volume might appear, it would be manifest that the most searching criticism would most fully set forth the creative power of Jesus and of his principles;" and even in the second volume he seems to allow to the main facts set forth in the life of Jesus a historical verity; but at the conclusion of the work he makes it doubtful whether such a person as Jesus ever existed. Bauer now occupied the anomalous position of a theological teacher who represented the Gospels to be mere works of the imagination, possessing no higher historical value than Xenophon's Cyropædia, or Fénélon's Telemachus, characterized Matthew and Luke as stupid copyists of Mark, denounced theologians as hypocrites, and the science of theology as the dark stain upon modern history. It is no wonder that the Prussian Minister of Worship felt himself impelled to inquire of the Theological Faculty, what was the position of Bauer in relation to Christianity, and whether he should be allowed to exercise his functions. The Faculty were embarrassed: on the one hand, they feared that freedom of inquiry would be trenched upon were he silenced; and, on the other, that the cause of religion would be injured were he allowed to teach. Finally, a middle course was adopted, and he was allowed to teach in the philosophical faculty; and his former friend and admirer, Marheineke proposed that he should be appointed to a professorship, on the ground that he might thus "get his bread, and not be compelled by necessity to write." The next year (1842) the permission to teach in the University was withdrawn, and now commenced a warfare of journals, pamphlets, and books, in which Bauer's colossal irony and cold, trenchant logic shone conspicuous. He proved to his old Hegelian friends, that the true Atheist was their master himself, and strove to force from them the confession that they had either been deceived themselves, or had been willfully deceiving others. In 1843, Bauer closed his career as a writer upon theology by a work entitled "Christianity Revealed," in which he recapitulates all the views he had put forth. This was confiscated by the government of Zurich, where it was published, and his publisher, Fröbel, punished by imprisonment. He now turned his attention to criticism of social and civil affairs, through which we have not space to follow him. He opened a bookstore, in conjunction with his brother Edgar, a congenial, and still more violent spirit, who was subsequently sentenced to a four years' imprisonment, for some publication displeasing to government. Here the brothers published their own works, and became involved in a dispute with the Prussian censorship, and the elder was obliged to modify many passages in a book already printed, before he was allowed to publish it. He commenced an extensive history of the French Revolution, but we can not learn that he brought it further than to the close of the last century. He established a periodical which continued but a year, in which he entered into contest with the "masses, in that sense of the word which includes also the so-called educated classes—the masses, who will not take the trouble to find out the truth by its proofs"—a body including, apparently, in his opinion, every one except himself. The political convulsions of the last two years, have brought out the veteran Ishmaelite in two characteristic works. The first of these, The Revolution of the Burgesses in Germany, is devoted to a bitter and unsparing denunciation of every sect and party, as pusillanimous, and insignificant; and the second, recently published, is a cool and contemptuous dissection of the dead carcass of the late Frankfort Parliament.
The printing and bookselling house of Brockhaus at Leipzig, is one of the most complete and extensive in the world. It was founded by Friedrich Aug. Brockhaus, the father of the present proprietors. He was born in 1772, and was educated for the mercantile profession. He established himself at first in his native town of Dortmund, from whence in 1802 he emigrated to Holland. Here he was altogether unsuccessful, gave up his business, and set up a bookstore in Amsterdam. This was in 1805, when the state of things in Holland was extremely unpropitious for every undertaking of a literary nature. The kingdom was united to the Republic of France, and the French officials, on some pretext or other, confiscated a great part of Brockhaus's stock. Advanced into middle life, and three times unfortunate in business, the stout struggler determined upon one more throw for fortune, and won. Having, while in Holland, obtained the copyright of Lobel's Conversations-Lexicon, he settled at Altona, and devoted himself to the preparation and publication of this work with a zeal and energy that commanded success. He soon felt that Leipzig was the only sphere commensurate with his talents, and removed to the intellectual centre of Germany in 1817. There he established several periodicals, which gained for him both reputation and profit. Among these were the Zeitgenossen, the Literarische Conversationsblatt, which is still published under the name of Blätter für Literarischen Unterhaltungen, and the Urania, for a long time the repository of the choicest gems of German poetry. He also undertook the publication of Ersch's Handbuch der Deutschen Literatur and Ebert's Bibliographischen Lexicon. His greatest enterprise, however, was the publication of the celebrated Conversations-Lexicon, of which he was himself the principal editor, and to which more than two hundred of the most eminent literary and scientific men of the time were contributors. He died in 1823, leaving his business to his two elder sons, by whom it has been greatly extended. The oldest of these, Friedrich, born in 1800, after having made himself practically acquainted with the art of printing, traveled abroad for the purpose of learning all improvements in the art, and upon the death of his father assumed the direction of the mechanical portion of the establishment. The second brother, Heinrich, born in 1804, took charge of the literary and commercial department. They carried on the publication of the great work of their father, of which the ninth edition, into which are incorporated two supplements, which they had previously published under the title of the Conversations-Lexicon of the Present, and the Conversations-Lexicon of the most recent Times and Literature, has just been issued. The establishment of Brockhaus at Leipzig is a fine quadrangular pile of buildings, with an open square in the centre, in which is carried on every operation connected with publication, from casting the type to issuing the completed work.