reby its members are
debauched, diseased, rendered insanely furious, and set to cutting each
other's throats, receives no real equivalent for what it parts with. Nor
is it well for ever so civilized a people to be selling its Specie and
mortgaging its Lands and Houses for Silks, Liquors, Laces, Wines,
Spices, &c.--trading off the essential and imperishable for the
factitious and transitory--and so eating itself out of house and home.
The farmer who drinks up his farm at the cross-roads tavern may have
obtained "more for his exports" (of produce from his farm), than they
were worth in the market--at least, it would seem so from the fact that
he has run over head and ears in debt--but he has certainly done a
pernicious, a losing business. So does any Nation which buys more wares
and fabrics than its exports will pay for, and finds itself in debt at
the year's end for imports that it has eaten, drunk or worn out. The
thrifty household is the true model of the Nation. And, thus tested,
France, in spite of her enormous, locust-like Army and other relics of
past follies which the National mind is outgrowing though the Nation's
rulers still cling to them, is this day one of the most prosperous
countries on earth.

But when I hear the aristocratic plotters talk of the necessity of a
Revision of the Constitution in order to restore to France tranquillity
and prosperity, I am moved not to mirth but to indignation. For these
plotters and their schemes are themselves the causes of the mischiefs
they affect to deplore and the dangers they pretend to be bent on
averting. Whatever is now feverish and ominous in French Politics grows
directly out of two great wrongs--the first positive and
accomplished--the law of the 31st May, whereby Three Millions of
Electors were disfranchised--the other contingent and meditated--the
overthrow of the Republic. All the agitation, the apprehension, the
uncertainty, and the consequent derangement of Industry, through the
last year, have grown out of these misdeeds, done and purposed, of the
Aristocratic party. In the sacred name of Order, they have fomented
discord and anarchy; invoking Peace, they have stirred up hatred and
bitterness. Whatever the Social Democracy _might_ have done, had they
been in the ascendant or under other supposable circumstances, the fact
is that theirs has been actually the cause of Order, of Conservatism, of
Tranquillity and the Constitution. Had they proved recreant to the