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that pricedarpermanent and in variable duty upon the foreign grain which might enter, excepting that the duty should be higher upon grain imported in foreign ships than in French vessels. toioitua

of His majesty shall be humbly requested to cause to be presented to the Chambers a projet of a daw containing the following provi. sions bad at l

the combinations being such as to make it inevitable that the majority of the players must be losers; but he asserted that it had been less injurious during the last year than at any former period, and added that it was in the year 1825, that the riches and prosperity of the country had reached their greatest height. The fact is, that the lottery was too productive a source of revenue to be dispensed with; 1. In future, there shall be and the passions of the Exchange, for the whole realm but one single and the Palais Royal, were too limit for every kind of grain, under powerful for la France morale. which foreign corn cannot be im ported for internal consumption. 2. The limit of importation of greaim ofteq

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1990 bail 3. The average price of all the regulating markets designated by the law of the 4th July, 1821, shall be officially published every month, without distinction of the above four classes. troburg 28

Among the politicians of France there existed the same difference of opinion regarding the value of protecting and prohibitory duties on the importation of foreign products, twhich reigned in Britain; and the agriculturists of Essex or Sussex were scarcely more eager to be shielded by legislative enactments than were those of France. The bdistressed state of agriculture 3 was frequently alluded to during the session and, after the budget had been voted, the chamber of Deputies took the state of the Cornlaws into consideration, in secret committee. A committee which had been appointed to inquire into the effects of the importation of foreign bcorn presented a report, in which they expressed a formal wish that the government would make use of the power vested in it by the existing law of 1819, immediately 5 5. The exportation shall be to secure a more extended protec- prohibited when the average price ation to native-grown corn against bofcorn shall have attained the importation from abroad. The limit fixed for the importation." committee then proposed the fol- In discussing the law imposing lowing resolutions, embodying arthe duties of the customs, many plan for the future regulation dofopinions were expressed, and many the corn trade, adopting the system propositions made, approaching to of monthly averages, fixing a price a more liberal system of commercial at which importation should be intercourse, and others again off a baltogether prohibited, andimposing, very opposite character. The high when corn should have risen above duties on wood, iron, and foreign

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"4. There shall be received, upon the importation of foreign corn, a permanent duty, by metrical quintal, of twenty-five centimes by French ships, and of two francs by foreign ships. This duty shall be raised to fifty cents for flours in the first case, and to four francs in the second case.

wool, were severely attacked, as checking the exchange of commodities, and provoking other countries to make reprisals. An unsuccessful attempt was made to reduce the duty on iron one half. The restrictive measures, which prevented the exportation of wines into Belgium and other northern countries, and by laying on articles to be imported in return a duty which excluded them altogether, were particularly inveighed against; and M. Riboul said, that if this prohibitory system were persevered in, the inhabitants of some departments would soon be obliged to renounce every kind of exchange, and consume the whole of their own produce. On the other hand it was wished to augment the duty on foreign linens; and an amendment was moved containing an impost which would have been equivalent to a prohibition, but the more moderate views of the minister of finance prevailed. He maintained, in point of fact, that the French linens required no protection, because even in foreign markets they were preferred to those of every other nation; and several members allowed that the cotton manufacture stood much more in need of being guarded against competition.

In her commercial regulations, likewise, France followed the example of Britain, in departing from the jealous system of discriminating duties, and trading upon principles of reciprocity. In the month of January a commercial treaty was concluded between her government and that of England, by which the vessels of both countries were put upon the same footing. The ships of either country, departing from or entering into, the harbours of the other, were to pay no higher rate of tonnage, pilotage, light

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house dues, and other similar exactions, than should be paid by vessels belonging to that other country itself. Goods imported into Britain in French vessels, or into France in British vessels, were to pay the same duties as if they had been imported in vessels of the country to which they were brought, with this exception, that the produce of Africa, Asia, and America, should not be imported from these countries into Britain in French ships, nor from France in British ships, for the purpose home consumption in Britain, but only to be warehoused, or exported; France reserving a power to make a similar declaration. European productions, again, were not to be imported into France in British bottoms for home consumption, unless they had been loaded in some port of the United Kingdom, Britain reserving the right to make a similar declaration against the importation of such goods in French vessels. It was further declared, that all goods which might be legally exported from either country, should pay the same duties, and be entitled to the same drawbacks and bounties, on exportation, whether exported in the vessels of that country or of the other; provided that they sailed directly from the ports of the one to the ports of the other; that no fishing boat, driven into a port by stress of weather, should pay any dues, unless a cargo, or part of a cargo, was there taken on board; and that neither country should grant to any third party greater privileges than by this treaty they granted to each other.

The principles and provisions of this treaty were received with much approbation by the Chamber of Deputies, where they seemed,

however, to be so much misunderstood, that although they were undoubtedly a relaxation of the ancient system of British maritime policy, and had many and powerful enemies in this country as being injurious to its commercial prosperity and its naval power, M. de St. Chemans hailed them "as a first step towards a Navigation act similar to that which had so powerfully favoured the development of the commercial riches of England." They were a first step towards the adoption of principles of reciprocal freedom in commercial intercourse; the Navigation acts were founded upon principles of exclusion and restriction. M. Casimir Perrier wished to improve upon the measure, by imposing upon French vessels coming from Britain into French ports, a duty not exceeding that imposed upon foreign vessels; for by paying less in England, and more in France, than they had done before, the owners would still be gainers, and a large sum would flow into the Treasury. "Suppose, said he, "to take round numbers, that before the treaty our ships paid 3000 francs in England, and nothing on their return to France; a thousand ships, then, paid three million francs in England, and nothing at home. By the treaty, the English have reduced their duty, I will suppose, to 1000 francs, and the French government lays a duty on our own vessels to the same amount. The thousand ships, then, will pay only two millions instead of three, one million to England, and one million to our selves. The owners will gain a million; and our Treasury will receive a million which it did not receive previous to the treaty."

The proposed introduction of

the law of primogeniture agitated Paris much more deeply than any other measure of policy foreign or domestic. No question raised since the Resolution had excited so much popular and adverse feeling; the re-establishment of the censorship would not have been resisted with a clamour and ardour so nearly approaching to what might have been expected in defending at once a personal possession and a national right. The elevation of an eldest son above his brethren seemed to be connected, in the minds of the Parisian public, with the horrors of the darkest times of feudalism, and the insulting tyranny of an exclusive oligarchy; politics and economics were equally unable to convince them that those who are born to have power ought to be able to exercise it in a spirit of independence, and that it is no advantage to a nation that every man should be his own farmer. The journalists and the pamphleteers both raised and repeated the voice of Paris-and Paris is France

that primogeniture was not merely a violation of the charter, which said not a word upon the matter, but the invasion of the ordinary rights of humanity; and an attempt to resume the national domains would scarcely have come more home to every man's supposed interest, or have covered the ministers with more unpopularity. The opposition to it, out of the cabinet, was nearly universal: for it was far from finding unconditional favour in the eyes even of the peerage, whose influence and respectability it was intended to support.

The language, in which the measure had been mentioned in the Speech from the Throne, was moderate and sensible, and had

nothing about it calculated to excite alarm in sober-minded men." The progressive subdivision of landed property," said the king, essentially contrary to the principle of monarchical government, would weaken the securities which the charter has given to my throne and to my subjects. Means will be proposed to restore the agree ment which should exist between the political law and the civil law, and to preserve the patrimony of families, without, however, affect ing the liberty of disposing of property. The preservation of families leads to, and guarantees politi cal stability, which is the first want of a state, and especially of France, after so many vicissitudes." This was a sufficiently correct enunciation of the political virtues of the right of primogeniture. An in finite divisibility of property necessarily leads to poverty, poverty in each member of a family increasing with the number of generations which pass away. The inevitable consequence is, that a hereditary nobility becomes, under such a system, a race of titled paupers; and of all kinds of men, no class can be at once more useless, and more dangerous, both to king and to people, than a poor and privileged aristocracy. Their real wants, and much more the artificial wants incident to their station, render them dependents upon court favour, making them pensioners of the hand that feeds them, and hired servants of that very power which, in a mixed monarchy, they are created to restrain. This is the natural course of things; in every struggle be tween the Crown and the subjects, they will ineline to the former, for their rank, their habits of life, their very vanities are all connected,

and, as it were, identified, with its power, and separate them from the sympathies, and modes of thinking, of those who are below them. The monarch, again, finds that the political powers vested in them by the state, instead of being troublesome and efficient restraints upon his prerogative, are admirable instruments for the execution of his plans, and the extension of his authority: under the form of a constitutional legislature, they are the express image of the executive, reflecting from their glittering, but dead, surface, its every feature and motion. Gratuities are bestowed, and offices are created, to supply their wants; the people pay their own enemies; and the constitution gradually breathes its last in that state of political lethargy in which the lineaments of public liberty remain, when the spirit is benumbed and expiring. France had only to look at the condition of her own nobility before the Revolution, to know what a poor and hereditary aristocracy must come to.

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The economical effects, too, of such a progressive subdivision of property have nothing to recom mend it. If it be true that land cannot be cultivated to its utmost productive capacity without a large capital, it must always be receding from that limit in the hands of men whose capital is diminishing, generation by generation, in a geometrical progression. If it be true that it is an advantage to a country to raise the greatest possible quantity of food by the smallest possible quantity of labour, that country cannot be in a prosperous course, where the number of those who raise food only for themselves or their families is perpetually increasing. It was not a blessed time, either in England, or in any

other country, "when every rood of ground maintained its man.". In every great country there must be large properties to supply the sources of any thing like permanent wealth or competency to the people. Where the labour of the whole population is required to raise the food of that population, national wealth can never accumulate, and in proportion to the number so employed is the distance at which the country is removed from national affluence. Hence France, notwithstanding her soil and climate, has never been a rich country, her agriculturists becoming weaker and weaker, poorer and poorer by every successive death of the head of a family. Not above one third part of the population of England, a less fertile land, beneath a more inclement sky, is employed in raising the food of themselves, and eight millions of their countrymen, and yet the national wealth and resources of England are something which, till our own day, the world had never seen. Ireland, by following in regard to her tenants, the system pursued by France in regard to her proprietors, has covered her surface with penury and misery; and, as a state, has become so exhausted as to be scarcely able to bear the touch of taxation. Yet, in the debates in the French chambers, the French legislators gravely lamented that England should have adopted so pernicious a course, and that we were not blessed with the same law of descent which prevailed among themselves.

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The project of law presented to the Chambers was the following 4. In every inheritance accruing, to the direct descending line, and paying 300 francs land tax, if the

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deceased has not disposed of the part which he may devise according to law, this portion shall be given under the title of preciput legal to the eldest male child of the deceased proprietor. If the deceased has disposed of a part of the portion which he may devise, the legal preciput shall be com posed of the part which he has not disposed of. The preciput shall be taken out of the real property of the inheritance, and, in case of insufficiency, out of the personal property.. I alt gai 2. The enactments of the two first paragraphs of the preceding article shall cease to have deffect, when the deceased has formally expressed his will by deedy inter vivos, or testamentaisie & 267

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3. The property which may be disposed of according to the 913th, 915th, and 916th articles of the Civil Code, may be given by ideed, inter vivos, or by testament, chargi ed with the condition of transmito ting them to one of several children of the donee, born or to be born to the second degree inclusively. The articles 1051 to 1074 inclu sively of the Civil Code, shall be observed in the execution of this disposition... em bis 229

Thus, the proposed law fell far! short of the rules established fine this country for its gave to the eldest son of a person dying intes tate, not the whole real estate, but only a limited portion of it. The third article, which gave a power of substituting a second heir, was of the nature of an entail, and yet was so limited as to be absolute freedom of disposal compared with the entails of Scotland, by which the property is tied up in a parti cular line so long as there are heirs of that line in posses This clause, however, though evidentl

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