in France, and permitted the officers whom he enlisted to retain their military rank; and that, after the expedition of Ibrahim into the Morea, his treasures had been transported from Alexandria to Navarino, in a French ship of war. In so far, however, as any of these accusations were founded in fact, it did not appear that they could fairly be imputed as matters of blame to the French ministry, although it might well be, that the ministers took no warm interest, and could have no direct interest, in the success of the Greeks. It was true that the treasures of the Egyptian army had been transported to Greece in French vessels; but every officer concerned in that act had been recalled, as well as the commander on the station, and had been punished. Vessels had been built at Marseilles for other potentates equally unchristian as the pacha of Egypt, without objec tion; they had been built for the dey of Algiers, although his object and interest were, to employ them against every Christian power in Europe. The pacha had been allowed to build a frigate and a corvette; but he had been allowed only to build them, not to arm them. If there were agents in France recruiting for him, it was difficult to see how government could restrain them, when their proceedings were justified by the conduct of their very opponents; for surely it would be no observance of the national neutrality, if the government prohibited the agents of Turkey from begging or bribing for their master, while the Greek-committee men, and their agents, were not only collecting men, arms, and money, in every part of the kingdom for the service of Greece, but boasted publicly in

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the legislature of the success which attended their exertions. Sevè, a renegade, over whom France had no longer any power, was the only officer in the Turkish army who had borne a French commission; but several of them were to be found in the ranks of the Greek forces. Government, if it wished to preserve an impartial neutrality, could only grant to both parties, the liberty of doing such things or grant it to neither. The ad-, herents of the Greek cause accused the French squadron in the Levant of various acts of hostility towards the Greek maritime forces; but the reports of admiral de Rigny, who commanded on that station, refuted the charge. According to these reports, of the transports forming part of Ibrahim's fleet, which reached the Morea in November, 1825, some were Austrian, some English, some were Spanish, Tuscan, Sardinian, or American, but not one was French on the request of the admiral, Ibrahim had delivered up to him all the female slaves within his reach, purchased from his own soldiers, and they were sent to Napoli di Romania. An account of the French having fired upon a vessel of the Greek admiral Canaris was contradicted by a declaration under the hand of Canaris himself: from the commencement of the troubles, the French fleet had served as an asylum to upwards of seven thousand Greeks, men, women, and children; it had never carried either troops or money to the Turks in the Morea, and had never fired on a Greek vessel, except on pirates for the defence of French merchantmen. The cannon used in the siege of Missolonghi were not French cannon; the officers who directed the siege were not

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abpower be given to the Crown, fortresses may be sold or pledged for the basest purposes, and the country daid defenceless at the feet of foreigners.These apprehen sions were equally inconsistent and chimerical. It may, or may not, be proper, in a mixed monarchy, to gives the Crown the power of making war, and concluding peace; but when, as in France, it has been invested with this power, it is contradictory to refuse it a right which may often be indispensable to peace. How frequently has the cession of fortresses been the very object of a war, and the condition of a treaty ? Who imagines that, in 1814 or 1815, the allied powers would have desired the sanction of a French legislature to the cession of the left bank of the Rhine to the Netherlands ? Nor is there any danger of kings ever becoming fond of the exercise of such a prerogative. Necessity is the only thing that will compel a monarch to part with his territories or his fortresses; and cases of such neces sity can never be met by any strict and invariable rule. Where necessity does not interfere, public opinion will prevent, or will remedy the operation of other motives; and where no public opinion exists, no formal want of prerogative would be efficient.

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One measure connected with San Domingo placed the French go vernment in a less favourable light. A Mr. Kingston, an Englishman, had rendered great services in 1792 to refugees from the island, and afterwards to the exiles of St. Pierre and Miguelen, whom he had transported, the former from Bermuda to Charlestown, and the latter from Halifax to London, at a pecuniary expense to himself of about 1,100%. He now presented

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arpetition to the Chamber of Deputies, praying to be allowed some remuneration.The committee to whom his petition was referred, admitted his services; they acknowledged that he had not only saved a great number of the French colonists, but had done so at a great pecuniary sacrifice. They recommended to the Chamber, however, not to recognize the claim; because the government had not given a pecuniary guarantee on behalf of the colonists of San Domingo, and therefore was not a debtor to the petitioner; and because the moral obligation had been already dis charged by the government granting Mr. Kingston an advantageous maritime commission. This favour, which was held to have discharged the obligation, had consisted in giving him the benefit of a flag of truce, which, in time of war, was no doubt an advantage; but, hav ing been driven by stress of weather into one of the English West-India Islands, on his voyage from France to the United States, he was taken by a French privateer, and his protection declared void, and his vessel and cargo confiscated, by the sentence of a French colonial prize-court. This was the whole remuneration now set up against a debt incurred thirty-four years before. But the motion for dis missing the petition, by passing to the order of the day, was success➡ fully resisted by M. Alexisde Noailles, and M. Hyde de Neuville, who protested against the government being content with merely doing what might be called strict legal justice, in a case in which it was admitted that the petitioner had saved the lives of so many French colonists, at the expense of his own fortune; and a motion for sending back the peti

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tion to the minister for foreign affairs, was carried by a large ma jority. The Chamber here rap peared in a more advantageous point of view than the ministers.be A French member of parliament reads his speeches, instead of speak ing them; he does not come to the House with ideas in his head, pre pared to meet the ever-varying and unexpected necessities of debate, but he comes with a pamphlet in his pocket, to read an essay on a given subject, prepared by himself or somebody else, in the solitude of the closet. An attempt was made to get rid of this anomaly of reading speeches by a motion of M. Du hamel, "That no written discourse shall be allowed to be read to the Chamber, bon the chapters, titles, and articles of laws, or propositions submitted for its consideration, but that only notes may be consulted." The proposal was sent to a committee, and the report of the committee was fatal to an innovation which was to give France some chance of possessing parliamentary oratory. The change, said the reporter, would do much harm, and no good Extemporaneous speak ing is not always, or necessarily, the best speaking; and, even if it were, the proposed prohibition of written discourses would not secure it. May there not be some among the orators most admired as extemporaneous speakers, whose inspirations have been only pre tended? Have not their dis courses been too elegant for un studied speeches? If they had wished to deceive us into this be lief, would they not have intro duced some occasional negligen ces? This might be very true; but the committee forgot, that a prohibition against reading what a man has thought, is not a prohi

bition against thinking at all, and collecting the materials for think ing. It is wished," said the rest porter, to avoid long speeches; but it is much more easy to be brief in writing, than in speaking extemporaneously. The writer rejects with care all repetitions of ideas or phrases; he compresses at will his reasonings and his style he chooses at leisure his thoughts and his words. The extempora neous speaker, on the contrary, cannot choose either the one bor the other. What proves that the interdiction of written speeches would not abridge our delibera tions is, the length of the sittings of the English House of Commons. A single orator, Mr. Hume, in the sitting of the 17th March, spoke twenty-eight times, after having spoken forty-one times on the 6th It was probably ignorance which gave the name of speeches to the remarks which pass in the British House of Commons, when the House is in a committee on esti mates-although, even in that sense, the allegation regarding Mr. Hume was inaccurate; but so far was the view taken by the com mittee from being a correct one, that it is of the very nature of written discussion to spin out "the thread of its verbosity finer than the staple of its argument."// To allow written discourses, instead of diminishing the number of members who burn to pour forth their ideas on the assembly, con fessedly goes to extend their line to the utmost limit of the patience of that assembly; for it adds to those who can speak what they think, all those who can read what has been written! The individual essays, too, naturally bes come more prolixthan speeches. The very leisure" with which

the writer composes, leaves him to say every thing that can be said, and creep deliberately into every nook and cranny of his subject; the debater seizes only what impresses itself upon him as important. Accordingly, more real business is done in the House of Commons in a month, than in the Chamber of Deputies in a session. It may be true that the French system enables a man to cull his phrases with greater care, and turn his periods with greater elegance; to give every member of a sentence its proper length, stick every interjection in its proper place, and introduce every metaphor with a due flourish of rhetorical preparation. But it is inconsistent with energy and boldness; it leads irresistibly to a vitiated taste; it ends in that puerile, declamatory, style of oratory (if so it must be called), which has fixed its abode in the French tribune. The French may possibly attain the smooth enamel, and the nice finishing, of the miniature, but they can never reach the power and magnificence of the fresco. If Cicero had been a French deputy, he would have unfolded his manuscript in the tribune, and, holding it to his eyes, would have read out, Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra," with tones and gestures of most extemporaneous preparation. Moreover, it is ridiculous to call that mode of discussion a debate, in which every body reads his own sentiments, but nobody discusses them; in which every one gives his opinion, but no one disputes it; in which all open, but nobody answers or replies. No one advantage of debate is gained; there is no mutual sifting of opinions and reasons. A member mounts the tribune to reply to another;

but as he could not anticipate what that other was to say, his reply never touches on what has gone before. If a ready command of the stores collected by reading and thinking, rapidity of invention, quickness of thought, accuracy of memory, and facility of expression, be valuable mental qualities, the French mode of parliamentary discussion is equally unfavourable to them all.

By a law passed in 1822, for the regulation of the press, it was enacted that "if, in the interval of the sessions, serious circumstances (circonstances graves) should render the measures of guarantee and repression for a moment ineffectual, the censorship may be immediately established by a Royal Ordinance." Such a provision is utterly destructive of the liberty of the press, because it leaves the determination of what circumstances require the introduction of a censorship dependent on the execu tive alone. A very mischievous measure may be carried through in a very short interval; and it may be extremely desirable for the executive to prevent the public press, during that interval, from sounding the alarm. Provisions founded on an anticipated necessity for dispensing with the regular and estab lished law cannot wisely be made standing parts of a form of govern ment: they are prospective bills of indemnity. M. Royer Collard, therefore, had reason on his side, when he wished to modify this law, or at least to fix the meaning of the "circonstances graves," which were to justify the crown in imposing temporary fetters on the press. He wished it to be restricted to "great events, great troubles, extraordinary cases, which could not be foreseen," in short, to something different