passed a law early in 1848, placing the principle of universal suffrage under the protection of the tribunals -making it penal to question or discuss it-treating the exposure of its evils and its dangers as sedition and treason. In the next place, as if conscious that their successors would desire to undo their clumsy workmanship, they violated the principle they had laid down, setting universal suffrage, or the government of the majority, at defiance, by enacting that, where the constitution was in question, the many should bow to the decision of the few. Consider for a moment the full extent of this grotesque and insolent absurdity. Every republic, and the republic of 1848 more nakedly than any other, is based upon the will of the majority. It is their sole recognised foundation. An absolute monarchy rests upon the divine right of kings. An hereditary aristocracy rests upon the superior claims and powers of special families. A theocracy rests upon direct religious sanction. But republics sweep all these away. The republic of 1848 ignored and denied them all. Hereditary right, constitutional legality, established institutions, equilibrium of power,-it sacrificed all to the blind worship of THE MAJORITY. No sooner, however, had it done so, than it turned round upon the nation, and said: "The majority is omnipotent, and its authority unquestionable, only to authorise us and to sanction our decrees: we pronounce it powerless to negative or change them. So long as a minority of one-fourth supports our constitution, so long that constitution shall be inviolable." The majority of the

And the men

nation, by the voice of the majority of its representatives legally elected, demands a change in the form of the government. The minority steps in and says, "No! there shall be no such change-neither to-day, nor tomorrow, nor ten years hence, so long as one-fourth of the people or their deputies object to it. We, the few, will control and govern you, the many." who held this language, and considered this proceeding just, are the republicans par excellence! The democrats are the oligarchs. The very men who thus contended for the permanent right of the few to bind the many, were the very men who sprung out of the victory of the many over the few,--whose position, whose very existence, was the creation of the principle they thus repudiated! The constitution which declared itself inviolable and unchangeable, even by a large majority, was the very constitution which was found to be so intolerable that a large majority insisted upon its alteration. Were they to retain and obey a bad law, because that law itself forbad them to repeal it? Whence could anybody derive a right to make such an enactment? With what decency or justice could a constituent assembly, itself the offspring of the victory of the majority over the minority, enact that in future the minority should bind the majority?

If the principle of universal suffrage was thus slightly respected, even by those who asserted it most loudly, the arrangements for carrying it into practical operation were marked by no extraordinary sagacity. Out of the seven or eight million of voters who found

themselves endowed with the franchise, a very large proportion consisted of the peasantry of the rural districts, little cognisant of political affairs, and little interested in party strife. Numbers of them would have no idea how to vote: numbers of them would not care how they voted: numbers more would not wish to vote at all. The rock on which universal

suffrage is almost always wrecked is, the ignorance or the indifference of the great mass of the electors. Thousands of the peasantry never stir from home: hundreds of thousands know no one beyond the limits of their own commune, and never hear the names of obscure or intriguing political aspirants. If, therefore, it were desired most effectually to confirm their indifference to the elections, and to embarrass them in their choice of a candidate, and utterly to confuse their comprehension of the whole transaction, no better scheme could have been devised than to make them vote by departments instead of by arrondissements or by communes, and to call upon them to elect at once, not one man whom they may chance to know, but a whole list of ten, fifteen, or twenty, the names of nearly all of whom they probably never heard of, and of whose respective qualifications they cannot form the most remote conception. A plan like this was sure to throw the virtual choice into the hands of clubs, or knots of political agitators, who would exploiter the great body of the electors for their own purposes and interests; and was likely to end in the great mass of the people retiring from the

exercise of the suffrage in carelessness or disgust. One of the chief evils, indeed, of universal suffrage is, that it never does, and rarely can, give the actual sentiments and wishes of the numerical mass of the population. Those interested in political strife vote; those who are sick of it, or indifferent to it, abstain from voting. Among the working classes this is particularly the case. There is the peaceful industrious artisan, loving work much, independence more, and his family most of all, living aloof from the turmoil and passions of the public world, and whose leisure is spent by the domestic hearth, and in the society of his wife and children. And there is the artisan who considers himself enlightened, who frequents cafés, who reads newspapers, who heads processions, who mans barricades, to whom haranguing is far pleasanter than honest labour. To the first, a day lost at elections is a nuisance and an injury, a supper or a breakfast wanting, diminished wages, an unfinished job, scantier food or clothing for his children or himself. To the second it is a joyful holiday, a noisy spree, a positive indulgence, possibly an actual gain of more than he would have earned in a week by steady industry. The result is, that the first man, whose vote would be of real value and meaning to the community, never gives it: the second, whose vote is worthless and a deception, records it on every occasion; and the nation is as far as ever from having gathered the real feelings and opinions of its citizens. In times of excitement and of novelty, such as the first general

election, or the choice of a president, this evil is not so much felt; but so strongly was it beginning to be feared, that one of the last proposals laid before the late Assembly, was for making it penal to abstain from the exercise of the franchise, for inflicting a fine on all who neglected to record their votes.1

Such being the constitution imposed upon France, but never submitted to the country for ratification, what has been the conduct of the Assembly elected under its auspices? Its whole career has been one series of intrigues against the President, of squabbles among its members, of assaults upon the liberties of the nation, of violations of its trust, and of decisions which gave the lie to its origin and its professions; and it has done more to sicken France with the very name and principle of representative government than any elected body since the days of the National Convention. It was elected under a republic; it was appointed to consolidate and perfect the republic; it commenced life by swearing allegiance and fidelity to the republic ;—yet it was composed in great part of Orleanists, Bonapartists, and Legitimists, who made no secret either of their actual views or of their ulterior designs. Probably not more than 250 members were at any time genuine republicans at heart. The Orleanists visited Claremont, and intrigued for the return of the exiled House. The Legitimists avowedly received their directions from

1 For this sketch of the vices of the constitution we are greatly indebted to two brochures by M. Albert de Broglie.