feeble tongue might win far greater glory than a Cicero or a Demosthenes.

Even within the last fifty years the multiplication of books has made a vast difference. There was a time when an eloquent speech would carry the whole House of Commons with it. Now it is the rarest possible event for a vote to be turned by a speech. Most members have got up the subject from books, and come to a deliberate opinion before they enter the House, and the rest who lack industry or talents to do so, have pledged themselves blindly to follow their leader. Here we believe we have the chief cause for the decline of oratory. We live in a reading and not in a hearing age. There is less demand for the commodity in the market and consequently the supply is less.

But there are many who assign a far different reason. Education, they say, is at fault. A man is no more born an orator than he is a cobbler. For either profession he must be trained; and a purely classical or mathematical education will not turn out an orator any more than sending a boy to the national school will make him a cobbler. Now, this is a very shallow view of the meaning of education; which has for its object, as we take it, not the making men lawyers, statesmen, or orators; but to turn out such machines as shall by subsequent training fulfil the particular functions for which they may afterwards be required. Facts have proved that a man who has received a general education and never opened a book on law till he has passed the age of twenty-three, will make a better lawyer than one who has worked at law from his infancy, and learned his alphabet out of Blackstone. This is the mistake into which the students of American Universities run. They can, if we may believe one of their number, talk fluently on any given subject, at however short a notice, and are ready and willing to discuss philosophy, theology, or politics with the first stranger they meet; but a Yule man finds serious difficulty in translating Cæsar, and is completely floored by a sentence of Thucydides. In our English Universities we pursue an exactly different course. It is an axiom that classics and mathematics are the best means for developing the human mind. In these the highest rewards are offered, and the highest excellence is obtained. To the study of extraneous subjects, very properly, little encouragement is given. For if any one, after devoting his energies to these, fail to be successful, he will rarely, if ever, succeed in any other branch of learning. Moreover, distasteful as these may seem to some, what can be more useful than the moral as well as the intellectual training brought out in the mastery of them?

But to return to the point whence we started, we would fully admit that no man is born an orator.-Men of the highest genius have been incapable of expressing their thoughts fluently either publicly or privately, and the greatest orators have acquired their eloquence and mastery of language by slow and often painful efforts. We have seen a senior classic and high wrangler utterly dumb-foundered by a girl just escaped from the school-room, and we remember at a debate of the Cambridge Union Society one of the cleverest men of his year being made a laughing-stock of, without having a word to say in his defence, by a man who afterwards failed to satisfy the very moderate requirements of a "poll" examiner. In the excellent life of George Stephenson there is a story told, illustrating very well how the stronger side is often beaten by the weaker through want of words. In an argument on the properties of coal with Dr. Buckland, Stephenson was decidedly worsted. Knowing that his was the true view of the case, and annoyed at being beaten, he explained what he meant to have said to Sir William Follett, in private, who agreed to be his spokesman. The subject was a second time brought on the tapis, and to Stephenson's immense joy Dr. Buckland was thoroughly silenced.

Since such are the disadvantages under which a man who is unable to speak in public labours, it is the height of folly to despise oratory, and assert that, because rhetoric is often used in a bad cause, it is unwise or wrong to use it in a good one. But we contend that self-education alone is wanted for this, and that it cannot be taught by any methodical process. First let a man have something worth telling, and then let, him see how best he may tell it: it is better to have a bare rock to stand on than a cloud-capped castle built on the sand; any one would choose rather to live on bread alone, than on all manner of sweets and dainties without bread. At both the Universities, and at some of the large public schools there are debating societies, in which, however low the standard of speaking may be, any one can acquire confidence, and the power of feeling the pulse of an audience, two indispensable requisites for a successful orator; and yet but a small number avail themselves of this advantage. Many men know that they will have to speak in after life, but the University not requiring them to speak in public, they defer their first attempt until they have, instead of an indulgent audience, a bench of rivals to hear them, and public opinion outside has to judge of their efforts. A man who is a moderately good classical scholar is already in possession of considerable advantages, since the immense amount of translation from the dead languages into English,

first object is to carry it out in practice: since this was in reality the object of the Holy Alliance, now, fortunately, numbered among the follies of the past, its efficacy during its existence having been on a par with its sanctity. This fact however, instead of confirming the theory, only supplies an additional proof, if any were wanting, of the utter unfitness of these rulers for the positions in which, as they say, the wisdom of God, but as some persons uncharitably believe, the folly of man permits them to remain.

There are doubtless times when men are so excited that they do reject the control of reason, and when repression by force is absolutely necessary; but, unless a man be so unreasonable as to believe this to be the permanent condition of the French, he cannot believe that the only system possible for permanently governing France is a military despotism; and if any other systems are possible, all are better than this, which has now been definitively adopted: whence we arrive at the serious and significant conclusion that France is governed on the very worst possible principle.

To turn from principle to practice: let us look for example at some of the measures that have marked the last four months ; the most important of them is the "Law of Public Safety," which provides, among other unjust regulations, that anybody who has been interné or expulsé for political causes during the last ten years shall be liable to be so treated again, without trial, at the discretion of the Government; a law which has not been allowed to remain a dead letter, but has been enforced in very many cases: its injustice, although obvious enough, and its virtual effect upon society, will be more fully appreciated if we make a historical comparison regarding it. In 1495 it was enacted as a law of England that, "no man should suffer forfeiture or attainder for taking arms in the service of the King for the time being;" the principle of the law evidently being that men should not be punished for actions, which at the time of their commission were legal; which principle, having been adopted by the good-sense of the nation, was, when the time arrived for a decision on the subject, embodied in the above law: now many persons in France who have fallen under the ban of the "Law of Public Safety" were originally maltreated for resistance to a change of Government, which resistance was, of course, quite legal; nevertheless this law punishes them; so that we learn that at the point where England 360 years ago paused to decide, and whence she advanced to civilization by the path of justice, France, having now paused in her turn, has positively retrograded, and taken a step which

conducts her back to the errors of the Middle Ages. This achievement she owes to the "august mind" of Napoleon III.

And to us it seems also most lamentable that this law was carried in the French Senate by an overwhelming majority; that educated men were content to make themselves the instruments of this grievous oppression. Armies indeed, bodies of ignorant men, are ready, when guided by practised and unscrupulous hands, to be made the means of enslaving their countrymen; but that men of education and refinement should help to commit this great crime, that they should add to the physical force of military power the moral force of the apparent assent of the educated classes, was hardly to be expected. We had indeed thought that the descendants of Mirabeau and Roland possessed some of the wisdom and courage of their ancestors; that they had hearts and hands capable of doing something for their Country's liberty: we find that we had forgotten that they have names capable of being buttered with titles, and pockets capable of being filled with Imperial gold.

The restrictions on the Press correspond in severity with the other repressive measures; no paper is allowed to be published or read in France which contains statements unfavourable to the Government: now either such statements are false or true; if they are false the Government can easily contradict them, and, since it is far wiser under the circumstances to refute than to prevent criticism even if unfair, in adopting a different course is guilty of folly; if they are true, as many of them certainly must be, they ought to be known, and the Government in suppressing them is guilty of dishonesty it cannot avoid being charged with one of these alternatives. Thus we see too clearly that in France there now really exists neither liberty of person nor of speech.

Now so severely is this oppression felt, and so great is the impatience of it on the part of society at large, that we believe that if the French had now to vote whether the Emperor should continue on his throne or not, the majority would be against him, and would welcome on the spur of the moment almost any ruler, even a Bourbon: yet one of the worst things that could happen to France would be the return of the Bourbons, who would most probably give rise ere long to further troubles by their misgovernment; for the later descendants of Henri Quatre, though they failed to imitate his noble conduct in adversity, most religiously followed his example, in forgetting in their prosperity the severe lessons which they had received; Charles the Tenth and Louis Philippe each had a fair opportunity, but the incorrigible