372

GENERAL REGISTRATION ACT-BUDGET.

[1836. legislature to the passing of the Bill which permitted Marriages to be. solemnized in the presence of the district-registrar. To the other Bill no stickler for antiquity could prefer the parochial registry established by Secretary Cromwell exactly three hundred years before this measure was to come into operation, to one general system which under responsible officers should supersede the variable entries of sixteen thousand parishes, so often lost or mutilated, and so difficult to be referred to even when properly preserved. The important office of Superintendent-Registrar was created by this statute. The Poor-Law Unions were divided into districts for which Registrars were appointed, with a Superintendent-Registrar in each Union. The regulations by which a complete registration of births and deaths is accomplished are now familiar to every father and mother, and every occupier of a house in which any birth or death may happen, who are bound to furnish information of the fact to the Registrar. Mr. Porter, in his valuable "Progress of the Nation," says, "The establishing of a department for the systematic registration of births, marriages, and deaths, in England and Wales, has been of great use in the examination of questions depending upon various contingencies connected with human life." Certified copies of the entries of births and deaths are sent quarterly by the Registrar to the Superintendent-Registrar, and by him to the Registrar-General. It is from this source that we derive the knowledge of many most interesting facts connected with the progress of the population -facts which the scientific knowledge and the literary skill of the heads of the Registrar-General's department have redeemed from the ordinary dulness of statistics to constitute some of the most attractive reading of the public journals. The Registrar-General's Annual Report enables the legislature to form a tolerably accurate estimate of the increment of the population in the decennial intervals of a census.

In this session there were two most important changes proposed by the Government with reference to journalism and the general commerce of literature. On the 20th of June the Chancellor of the Exchequer moved "that the duty payable upon every sheet whereon a newspaper is printed shall in future be one penny." The newspaper stamp for many years had been four-pence. Amongst the opponents of this measure one county member complained that already the mails were so heavily laden on a Saturday night with newspapers that it was hardly safe to travel by them. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had anticipated that the penny stamp would produce quite as much as the fourpenny stamp. "If he is right," said sir Charles Knightley, "then the quantity of newspapers must be more than trebled, and if so, there must be a tax raised for their conveyance." The proposition of the Chancellor of the Exchequer was carried by a majority only of thirty-three, and with some alterations finally passed the House of Lords. The other measure was a reduction of the duty on paper. Lord Francis Egerton, himself a man of letters, in presenting a petition before the government proposition was introduced, claimed for this subject the best attention of the House on account of the effect which the state of the law produced on literature, especially upon cheap literature. By the Act to repeal the existing duties on Paper, which received the royal assent on the 13th of August, the varying duties according to the class or denomination were merged in one uniform duty upon all paper of three halfpence per

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FOREIGN POLITICS-BELGIUM-SPAIN.

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pound. The relief to the publishers of cheap works was as timely as it was important. We may instance that it came to save the "Penny Cyclopædia" from extinction in the fourth year of its struggle against heavy loss, under the opposing conditions of paying at the highest rate for literary labour, and selling at as low a rate as that of works in which the quality of the authorship was a secondary consideration.

The great interest of events at home after the French Revolution of 1830, has precluded us from giving even a passing notice of foreign politics. Since that time, indeed, the peace of Europe had not been materially disturbed so as to influence the political action of the British Government. Belgium had quietly settled down into a Constitutional Monarchy, subsequently to the fortunate period for that country when priuce Leopold of Saxe-Coburg was chosen king in 1831. In that year the boundaries of the new kingdom were defined, and the peaceable possession of his territory was guaranteed by the five great Powers to this most sagacious and discreet of sovereigns. The stability of the Belgian monarchy appeared to be still more effectually secured by the marriage of king Leopold in 1832 to the eldest daughter of Louis Philippe, king of the French. At the close of the parliamentary session of 1836, it was lamented in the king's speech that Spain was the only exception to the general tranquillity of Europe; that the hopes entertained of the termination of the civil war in that country had not been realized. Under the treaty of Quadruple Alliance, whose object was the restoration of internal peace in Spain, Great Britain had afforded to the queen of that country the cooperation of a naval force. Ferdinand the Seventh, who died in 1833, had left by his will his infant daughter Isabel as heir to his throne. The queenmother, Christina, was appointed queen-regent. The brother of Ferdinand, Don Carlos, immediately disputed the title of Isabel, maintaining that by the Salic law females were excluded from the sovereignty of Spain. The civil war which ensued lasted till 1840. The partisans of Don Carlos were then finally defeated; but the contest was attended with so many circumstances of bitter and cruel animosity, that the Spanish nation became greatly demoralized, and the old glories and prosperity of the country appeared to be altogether passing away. The intervention of our government, and the whole scope of the Quadruple Treaty of 1834, were the objects of severe parliamentary censure. The British Legion, under the command of lieutenantgeneral sir De Lacy Evans, which acted with the consent of our government in aid of the queen of Spain, accomplished some brilliant exploits, and was generally successful against the Carlist troops; but these triumphs were bought with severe losses. The intervention of Great Britain, whether direct or indirect, excited little sympathy at home; for popular opinion was gradually reaching the conviction that the safety and prosperity of our country were best maintained by leaving foreigners to fight out their own quarrels, always provided that the honour of the nation should not be compromised by apathy or inertness.

During the six years in which Louis Philippe had been king of the French, his reign had not been exempted from solicitudes of a more painful nature than the ordinary cares of monarchs. In the first two years of his rule events had been in some degree propitious to him. The duke of Reichstadt, the son of Napoleon, died in 1832. His presence in France might at any

374

FRANCE-CONSPIRACIES AGAINST LOUIS PHILIPPE.

[1836.

time have raised up a host of Bonapartists, whose movements might have been exceedingly dangerous to the Citizen King. The attempts of the duchess of Berri to excite an insurrection in favour of her son, the duke of Bordeaux, had signally failed. Freedom of debate in the Chambers, and the liberty of the press, appeared the best guarantees for the security of the constitutional government. But the unrestricted power of speaking and writing was not used with moderation. The licence of the press, and the occasional hostility of the Chambers, produced a counter-disposition on the part of the king to struggle against what he believed to be the evils of the representative system. There were constant changes of administration since Lafitte took the reins of government in November, 1830. In 1831 Lafitte was succeeded by Casimir Perier, who had a premiership of something more than a year and a half. From October, 1832, to September, 1836, there had been nine changes of ministry-Soult, Guizot; Soult, Broglie; Soult, Thiers; Gérard; Bassano; Mortier; Broglie, Humann; Broglie, d'Argout; Thiers. In September, 1836, the heads of the cabinet were Molé and Guizot. During these changes, and the consequent excitement of parliamentary conflicts, there had been more than one conspiracy of which the great object was to assassinate the king. The 28th of July, 1835, was the second day of the fêtes to commemorate the Revolution of 1830. Louis Philippe, with his three sons and a splendid suite of military officers, was riding through the line of the National Guard, drawn up on the Boulevard du Temple, when an explosion resembling a discharge of musketry took place from the window of a house overlooking the road. Fourteen persons, amongst whom were marshal Mortier and general De Virigny, were killed upon the spot. A shower of bullets had been discharged by a machine consisting of twenty-five barrels, which, arranged horizontally side by side upon a frame, could be fired at once by a train of gunpowder. The king was unhurt. The police rushed into the house and seized the assassin, who was wounded by the bursting of one of the barrels. He proved to be a Corsican named Fieschi, who maintained that he had no object in this wholesale massacre but his desire to destroy the king. Another attempt upon the life of Louis Philippe was made in 1836, by a man of the name of Alibaud, who fired into the king's carriage, the queen and his sister being with him. A third attempt was made in the same year by another desperado, named Meunier. In the history of such fearful manifestations of wickedness or madness, there is nothing more remarkable than the extraordinary escapes of Louis Philippe as if he bore a charmed life.

More interesting at the present day than these brutal attempts at assassination was the failure of an enterprise which contemplated, without any apparent organization, the overthrow of a strong government by a young man of twenty-five, who relied only upon his name, his abilities, and his daring. Charles Louis Napoleon, the youngest son of Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland, and of Hortense Eugénie, daughter of the empress Josephine by her first husband, had so dwelt upon his boyish remembrances of his illustrious. uncle, that when in 1832 the duke of Reichstadt died, and he became, according to a decree of 1804, heir to the throne, the natural course of his ambition was to assert his claim against one whom he regarded as a usurper. Louis Philippe was always apprehensive of the rivalry of this young man.

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ENTERPRISE OF LOUIS NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

375

He had refused him permission to return to France in 1830. He had farther influenced the government of Rome to order him to quit the Papal territory. Escaping from Italy, he resided with his mother in the Chateau Arenenberg in Switzerland, where he devoted himself to the study of politics and of military science, and became known in Europe as a writer of diligent research and unquestionable ability. Whatever study he pursued and whatever ideas he promulgated had evidently some bearing upon what he implicitly believed would be his great future.

The ordinary relations of the attempt of Louis Napoleon-availing himself of the general unpopularity of the king of the French, to risk the result of a popular commotion to overthrow the Orleans dynasty-have recently received a new interest from the official revelations of M. Guizot. He relates that on the evening of the 31st of October the Minister of the Interior brought to him a telegraphic despatch received from Strasbourg, dated on the evening of the 30th, which announced that about six o'clock that morning Louis Napoleon "traversed the streets of Strasbourg with a party of .. A mist which enveloped the line of telegraph had left the remainder of the despatch uncertain. Guizot and the Minister of the Interior repaired instantly to the Tuileries, where they found the whole Cabinet assembled. All was conjecture. Instructions were drawn up, founded upon many possible contingencies. The ministers remained with the king nearly the whole night, expecting news which came not. During those hours of suspense, the queen, the king's sister, the princes, entered again and again to ask if anything had transpired. "I was struck," says M. Guizot, "by the sadness of the king, not that he seemed uneasy or subdued, but uncertainty as to the seriousness of the event occupied his thoughts; and these reiterated conspiracies, these attempts at civil war, republican, legitimist, and Bonapartist, this continual necessity of contending, repressing, and punishing, weighed on him as a hateful burden. Despite his long experience and all that it had taught him of man's passions and the vicissitudes of life, he was and continued to be naturally easy, confiding, benevolent, and hopeful. He grew tired of having incessantly to watch, to defend himself, and of finding so many enemies on his steps."*

The next morning, the 1st of November, an aide-de-camp of the commandant at Strasbourg brought to the perplexed king and his ministers a solution of the telegraphic mystery. Louis Napoleon, having the support of a colonel who commanded a battalion, had presented himself at the barrack of a regiment of artillery, and was received with shouts of "Long live the Emperor." At another barrack the attempts of the prince upon the fidelity of the troops was repulsed; and he and his followers were arrested by the colone and other officers of the forty-sixth regiment of infantry. The affair was over in a few hours without bloodshed. One only of the known adherents of Louis Napoleon, M. de Persigny, his intimate friend, effected his escape. On ascertaining the result of this rash enterprise, queen Hortense, whose affection for her son was most devoted, hurried to France to intercede for him with the government. From Viry, near Paris, she addressed her supplications to the king and M. Molé. M. Guizot

"Memoirs to illustrate the History of My Time," vol. iv. p. 197; 1861.

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PARLIAMENT-ILLNESS OF THE KING.

[1837

says, "She might have spared them. The resolution of not bringing prince Louis to trial, and of sending him to the United States of America, was already taken. This was the decided inclination of the king, and the unanimous advice of the cabinet." The adventurer was brought from the citadel of Strasbourg to Paris, where he stayed only a few hours. He was then taken to L'Orient, where he embarked on the 14th of November in a frigate which was to touch at New York. The sub-prefect of L'Orient waited on the prince when he was on board, inquired whether he would find any resources when he arrived in the United States, and being told that none were at first to be expected, the prefect placed in his hands a casket containing fifteen thousand francs in gold, which the king had ordered him thus to appropriate. Louis Napoleon remained in the United States till October 1837, when, hearing of the illness of his mother, he encountered the risks of a return to Europe, and was with Hortense at her death. The French government demanded his extradition from Switzerland. The Cantons refused to comply; but Louis Philippe enforced his demand by the irresistible argument of an army, and the prince withdrew to England. The fashionable circles of London regarded him merely as a man of pleasure, and he was popular in country houses from the spirit with which he could follow hounds in a fox-chase. His attempt at Strasbourg had only excited laughter here. He was not generally regarded as possessing any force of character that would justify a lofty ambition.

On the 31st of January, 1837, Parliament was opened by Commissioners. The most important passage in the royal speech had reference to the state of the province of Lower Canada. It is unnecessary here to enter upon the history of those discontents which ended in insurrection. Grievances were removed, and revolts were put down, at no distant period; from which time the course of events may be regarded as a whole. Few of the proceedings of parliament during a session which circumstances had rendered unusually short acquired a legislative completion. Lord John Russell proposed the government plan for introducing Poor-Laws into Ireland. The dissolution of parliament interrupted the progress of the Bill. The Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed a measure for the abolition of Church-rates, which was strenuously opposed, and finally was abandoned by the government. Lord John Russell introduced a series of bills for the further amendment of the Criminal Law. These also were to stand over till another session. Only twenty-one public Acts, none of which effected any important changes, received the royal assent of king William the Fourth.

On the 9th of June a bulletin issued from Windsor Castle informing a loyal and really affectionate people that the king was ill. It announced that he had suffered for some time from an affection of the chest, which had confined him to his apartment, had produced considerable weakness, but had not interrupted his usual attention to business. There was less apprehension of a serious result from it being generally known that his majesty, previous to his accession to the throne, had been subject to violent attacks of what is called the hay-fever. This malady had returned. From the 12th of June bulletins were regularly issued till the 19th. The irritation of the lungs had then greatly increased, and respiration had become exceedingly painful. By the king's express desire the archbishops of Canterbury and