thanks to the prodigious public works of the Second Empire, the metropolis of proletarism, the spoilt child of administrative solicitude—more than ever populous, multifarious, and omnivorous.

The consumption of Paris was estimated, more than ten years back, from statistics published by the Prefecture of the Seine, to amount to a full tenth of the total amount of production of articles of food and drink in the whole of France. From this estimate M. Léonce de Lavergne drew the inference that the average ration of eatables and drinkables per head in Paris was four times the average enjoyed per head by the rest of Frenchmen. But if the average feeding of the Parisians is equal or superior to that of other great town in Europe, the alimentation of the peasantry, on the other hand, says the same writer,

any

'is inferior to that of almost any other people. They neither get meat, nor wheaten bread, nor wine; rye-bread, black bread, potatoes, and water, are the food of a good third of the population of France. It is true that, according to the official optimism of the Prefecture of the Seine, they find in the purity of the atmosphere, in the moderate exercise of their muscular force, in the habit of taking regular and temperate meals, elements extremely useful to the equilibrium of the vital functions. Thanks much to the Prefecture of the Seine! But if to these advantages they could add a little modicum of meat and wine, it is probable they might not find themselves the worse for it. Even that country air, for the purity of which they get credit, is often vitiated by low and confined habitations, by the vicinage of dungheaps or of unwholesome marshes.'

The altered proportion of the rural and town population throughout Europe and America, so far as it is due to the natural growth of wealth and commerce, is, as we have said, not in itself to be complained of, but to be duly noted as characteristic of the age. It can only form a grievance when, as the Report before us admits to be the case in France, an agricultural country finds itself, in addition to the already exhausting drain of the flower of its rural youth by the conscription, subjected to the powerful attraction of the best of its remaining labouring hands from the rural to the urban labour-market by the unprecedented public expenditure, under the imperial régime, on the improvement, or rather reconstruction, of Paris and other great towns. 'There has been often expressed during the course of this inquiry,' says the Report before us, the wish to see discontinued, or at least considerably slackened, the public works now carrying on in the towns, which certain persons even go so far as to consider as unproductive.' When ministerial departments go so far' as to place such complaints on record without protest, it would seem that they must have become urgent, and hopes may be entertained that

6

the

the balance of administrative equity between town and country, so seriously deranged, has at last some chance of being redressed.*

Paris is the land of promise (promise often broken-the perennial source of revolutions) to the upper tens of thousands of white-handed aspirants to place, as well as the lower hundreds of thousands of hard-handed aspirants to light work and high wages.

'The excessive multiplication of public offices, combined with the destruction of family professions, caused by compulsory division of property, has profoundly modified the old state of things. Fathers, no longer able to transmit to their children the occupation they have themselves followed, naturally cast their eyes on those official situations, which are now numbered by thousands, and graduated in scale to all ambitions and all appetites. At this day these situations are the principal source of influence, and for the last three-quarters of a century have alone created stable existences in a social state periodically ravaged by revolutions. Private manners and feelings by degrees follow, and even exaggerate the direction impressed on the conduct of families by the force of law and policy. A young man would seem to confess his own inferiority by following his father's profession; and if, in accordance with those deplorable principles which govern the formation of marriage connexions amongst us, he should seek to improve his fortune by a matrimonial alliance, he would indeed put all the chances against him by following the paternal profession, instead of soliciting for some official situation. In this respect, as in many others, French offers a marked contrast to English opinion. In France prudent fathers, now that they are no longer able themselves to create a career for their children in the circle of the family connexion, must seek support from those who have the disposal of official loaves and fishes. No circumstance has more contributed to the abasement of the old character of the Franks. Those who would raise that character in the esteem of other races feel a sort of humiliation in the spectacle of successive French governments, beset by this 'ugly rush' to public functions, and equally powerless to repress or satisfy this new species of mendicity. -Le Play, vol. iii. p. 333.

The chapter in the Report before us on agricultural capital and credit seems addressed in answer to such slashing attacks on the make-believe measures adopted of late years in aid of both, as we find, for instance, in M. d'Esterno's first volume, and which have been widely echoed in the evidence and returns received by the late Commission of Inquiry. Next to the carrioncrow brood of local limbs of bureaucracy and lawyers in the lowest walks of practice, who, on the death of every French peasant proprietor, swoop down on his poor landed leavings, and,

* Since this hope was expressed, Baron Haussmann has abdicated his destructive and constructive omnipotence over the metropolitan prefecture.

in too many cases, divide the oyster amongst them, leaving the simple co-heirs the shells, M. d'Esterno's favourite aversion is la haute banque-the banking monopoly held at Paris, and represented by the Bank of France, and its dog-in-the-manger attitude towards the banking requirements of the provinces, which it will neither supply itself nor suffer to be supplied by others. Of the new privileged classes-bureaucrats, lawyers, bankers-the last, according to M. d'Esterno, are not those who levy the least tribute on the general community. They have contrived to maintain intact the monied monopoly conferred on them-centred in the Banque de France-by the old imperial law of 1807, which prohibits as usurious the direct negotiation between private individuals of loans at a rate of interest above 5 per cent., reserving to themselves (the Parisian banking interest) the privilege of making advances to commerce at whatever rate they please! This law, as M. d'Esterno justly says, is the palladium of usury, the tutelary power of the privileged usurers of the haute banque. While it prescribes a maximum price for a commodity (money) fairly amenable to the laws of trade, like any other commodity, it exempts from observance of that maximum the one special profession which deals habitually in that merchandise! The Bank of France, by its predominant influence in high places, has hitherto succeeded in preventing the establishment of provincial banking establishments on an adequate scale, and with numerous branches, such as Scotland first set the example of in this country:

'In 1837,' says M. d'Esterno, 'I solicited the sanction of Louis Philippe's Government for the establishment of the Bank of Dijon, which would have included several towns in the same district. In addressing myself to M. Lacave-Laplagne, then Minister of Finance, I was innocent enough to point out that the union of several towns in one sphere of operations would liberate provincial commerce from the charge of commission hitherto incurred in the discount of its bills at Paris. The banker-financier answered me at once in a very decided tone, "But we don't want country banks to play the part of the Bank." I had the simplicity to ask Why, and, of course, got no second

answer.'

The Report adventures neither attack nor defence of the Bank of France, and consigns to its Appendix a modest and passing notice of the repeal of the law of 1807 as one of the measures suggested in the evidence taken before the Enquête. But it administers in its text a valuable indirect lesson to the monopolists of the Parisian banking system by a concise and clear account of the banking system of Scotland, and the similar system nearer at hand in the Channel Islands. The Scotch banks,' writes M. Monny de Mornay,

de Mornay, 'cover the whole country with their branches, and those branches, which in 1819 only numbered 96, had reached. in 1864 the imposing figure of 591. For a population of three millions and a half this gives a branch-bank for every 5000 souls. The like ubiquity of these establishments is to be found in the island of Jersey, where 63 banks, or rather comptoirs of deposit and discount, do not issue more than between two or three millions [francs] of notes, but set in motion commercial operations

of ten times that amount.'

M. Léonce de Lavergne attaches only a secondary importance to the mere machinery of banking accommodation in France. The artificial causes which withdraw capital from landed investment lie deeper, in his opinion, than any defectiveness, confessed as it is, of that machinery. The most powerful of these is the attraction held out of late years to large and small capitals by public loans, whether inviting subscriptions in the name of imperial or municipal administrations. Five or six thousand millions of francs have, during the last fifteen years, been diverted from their natural destination to be spent unproductively in military armaments or expeditions, and in works of luxury. These loans to defray war-establishments and town-embellishments have opened the wide and deep wounds through which has flowed the life-blood of agricultural capital. Add to the thousands of millions absorbed in these loans thousands of millions more, which have been sunk in all sorts of delusive enterprises at home and abroad.' M. d'Esterno calls attention to the fact that the Crédit Foncier, one of the two associations started for the special purpose of making advances of capital on landed securities, largely supported by its advances the Société Immobilière of Paris in its enormous building speculations in that city. We all know what has become of its speculations and of its shareholders.

The Crédit Agricole is the most recent association founded for the special aid of agriculture. Without going Without going so far as to say with M. d'Esterno that its sole object was rather to prevent than promote agricultural credit, we must admit that some of its clients and protégés were, to say the least, rather curious representatives of the agricultural interest. Amongst these were the directors of the French opera, the Austrian railways, and the provision trade of Paris. M. de Mornay adduces, in defence of the Crédits Foncier and Agricole, figures to show that a very large proportion of the advances have been made on provincial agricultural and industrial securities. And he retorts on their assailants by hinting that one main reason why agriculture has to pay higher for the advances made to it than commerce, is

that

that agriculturists are not so punctual as mercantile men in fulfilling their engagements.

We have dwelt thus at length upon the results of the Agricultural Enquiry in France, not simply on account of the importance of the subject itself, but also on account of the lesson derivable from the revolutionary experiments and economical experiences of our nearest continental neighbours. That lesson may be stated in few words as a lesson of distrust of legislation aiming to revolutionise all existing proprietary conditions-to produce an universal Utopia of peasant proprietorship-in short, to reform by decapitating the body of interests having a joint stake in the soil. What the example of France shows is, that such legislation may fail to render universal, or even to considerably increase, in extent and prevalence, the form of property which it takes under its exclusive protection, while it is pretty sure to produce such legal and administrative friction in its working as, in many cases, to rub away altogether the petty properties it was meant exclusively to establish, and to end in effecting their ultimate absorption in larger estates,-all the compulsory legal and fiscal intervention in the matter being pure loss to everybody, except indeed swarms of the lowest legal and fiscal functionaries.

ART. V.-1. Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II. By Mrs. Oliphant. London. 2 vols. 1869.

2. Pope's Essay on Man. Edited by Mark Pattison, B.D. Oxford. 1869.

HE Georgian era, though, for the sake of convenience, it is often spoken of as a whole, is capable of being divided into parts, which differ as distinctly from each other as it does itself from the periods which precede and follow it. We do not say as widely, but as clearly. Between the commencement of Walpole's Administration and the accession of George III., between the accession of George III. and the beginning of the Regency, and between this time and the death of George IV., we have three periods of time, each with a character of its own, which, if not differing from the other two as much as all three together differ from the Victorian or the Caroline era, differ sufficiently to make the separate examination of each an interesting and profitable study.

The advancement of Sir Robert Walpole to the dignity of chief Minister may be said to mark the close of the Revolutionary epoch. The two parties of Whig and Tory, as distinct from

Hanoverians