quest; she would not dare without the approbation of England; and England would never consent that her rival should make any territorial acquisitions. Perhaps if Charles X. had continued in power he might not have presumed or dared to enjoy the advantages, which a righteous cause and the fortunes of war had placed in his hands. But times are now changed; and France, probably, would no more hear to any remonstrances of England on the subject of Algiers, than if King William should propose to reclaim all that Henry of Monmouth gained, or his son lost, in the heart of France itself. England manifested the same weakness of nervous irritability in regard to our acquisition of the Floridas; but we have abided the murmurings of her journalists, with as little scathe as they have inflicted on the French in regard to Algiers.

For ourselves, and as Americans, we repeat that, in our conception, not only France herself is to derive advantage from her retaining possession of the whole territory of the Regency, and colonizing it as a French settlement, but Africa above all may hail it as the dawn of her restoration to the advantages of civilization, and the world in general have a right to view it as an auspicious event. It may excite the commercial jealousy of England, who is not particularly unwilling to have the monopoly of all foreign markets, and the exclusive privilege of establishing colonies, factories, and military posts along the coasts of Europe and Asia, Africa and America. But for that very con

sideration it is important to us, and to all other commercial nations, that France should extend her commerce and strengthen her marine, in order that England may never again recover that overwhelming maritime ascendency, which, previous to the last war, encouraged her to such extraordinary abuse of power in the oppression of neutral nations. To those, who remember the nautical history of England for the last forty years, and who have observed the great increase and prosperous condition of the French military marine at the present time, this will appear to be no unimportant aspect of the subject. And the advantage, which all mankind are to derive from the seas being forever cleared of the lawless Barbary cruisers, is too evident to require illustration or proof.

But as to Africa, so long given up to the domination of roving savages, for what better are the wild Arabs?- so long known to us only as the officina servorum for all nations, so long debarred of the blessings of Christianity and of its handmaiden civilization, what may not Africa reasonably expect from the establishment of an extensive French colony upon her Mediterranean shore? She may look, in the first place, to see the renovation of a portion of the agricultural wealth, the population, and the commerce of ancient Mauritania. And when the Numidians have been tamed by the authority of France, the interior of Africa will become accessible to the researches of intelligence and the progress of improvement.

Hitherto the exertions of beneficence have been directed to the western shores of Africa; and those exertions have been wasted in vain under the burning skies of the line, along a shore fatal to life by reason of the deleterious qualities of its climate, and amid hostile tribes brutified by the effects of the slave trade. In those noxious regions, noxious both morally and physically speaking, European colonies either perish of disease, or, like some of the little Portuguese settlements, assume the hue of mind and almost the hue of body, proper to the indigenous races. A broad cordon of malignant influences of every description seems to be drawn out along this unhappy coast, impenetrable almost to the hopes and efforts of humanity. But place a European people in Barbary, and circumstances change. The deserts of Northern Africa are a trifling obstacle to the approaches of civilization towards the centre of the Continent, when compared with the horrors of its Atlantic border. France will have the power, from this vantage ground, to push the innumerable benefits of European refinement into the heart of Africa. She will have the power, and we trust she will have the inclination, to do all this; but whether she has the inclination or not, if she retains Algiers, the mere indirect influence of her presence cannot fail to be serviceable. And we should therefore exhort her by all means to make good her footing in Algiers, even if it were not for her own great and immediate advantage.

And judging according to all the ordinary rules of human action, it is not to be presumed that France will voluntarily relinquish her hold on a conquest fairly acquired, and which it is for the general good of mankind she should retain, when the strongest considerations of her own individual interest are in unison with everything but the hypochondriacal apprehensions of England. Here is a rich and fertile territory, within three days' sail of Marseilles, fitted to produce all those vegetable treasures, which render the West Indies such a mine of wealth. France has been gradually stripped of one colony after another, until a few small settlements in America are nearly all she retains. England has robbed her of her colonial possessions in the Indian seas, and of the Canadas. She was compelled to sell Louisiana to us as the only means of rescuing it from a like fate. Hayti slipped off her authority during one of the fever fits of the Revolution. In Algiers she may found a colony calculated in some measure to indemnify her for her manifold losses of this description. And the arrangements begun by General Bourmont, and continued by his successor, General Clausel, all point to the permanent possession of the country. The Dey was conveyed to Italy in a French ship, and the Turkish troops were also removed; the tributary chiefs and local governors formerly subject to the Dey were notified that the French had assumed the entire authority of their late master; and courts of justice, with all the other incidents of regular government, were es

tablished in due form, analagous to the practice of the British in Hindostan. General Clausel having discovered a refractory disposition in the Bey of Titery, a valuable dependency of Algiers situated in the interior of the country at the foot of Mount Atlas, very speedily brought the Turk to reason by despatching

against him a body of French troops, who took possession of his capital, and sent him prisoner to France. Everything, in fine, short of an express declaration of their purpose, indicates that the Government intend to consult the wishes of the whole Nation, in the disposition to be made of their new conquest in Africa.

INTELLIGENCE of the capture of Algiers was conveyed to Toulon in about sixty hours by a steamboat, and thence by the line of telegraphs to Paris, where it arrived on the 9th of July. The King immediately ordered Te Deum to be celebrated throughout France, and he himself attended the service in the cathedral church of Notre Dame. A kind of vertiginous madness appears to have seized on the King, the Dauphin, and the Ministers, from that hour. Elated with extravagant feelings of triumph, they deemed themselves sure of the same easy victory over the People, that they had achieved over the flying Bedouins of the desert. An absurd confidence in the support of the army, an almost insane audacity of purpose, an extraordinary delusion as to the spirit, and temper, and power of resistance, and organization of the Nation, all conspired to hurry on the weak Prince and his headlong advisers to swift destruction. In the course of the four or five days which followed the arrival of the news from

Africa, the Ministers wrought up their courage to the requisite degree of strength, on the faith of their late success in war, and resolved upon those memorable infringements of the Charter, which were to precipitate the King from his throne. It is said that M. Guernon de Ranville and M. de Peyronnet were the last to yield their assent to the meditated coup d'état. They had confidence in their ability as public speakers, and were long disposed to try the effect of discussion in the Chambers. But M. de Polignac proved the evil genius of the Monarchy; for he, who had originally been alone in the nefarious project of overturning the constitution, now succeeded in bringing all his associates into the views of himself, and of the irresponsible advisers, who governed the King.

If they had been a revolutionary committee of old regicides, plotting the assassination of Charles and his family, they could not have conducted their operations with more of guilty stealth and elaborate secrecy. The compo

sition of the Ordinances, and of the Report to the King or justificatory memoir by which they were to be accompanied, was not only executed by them, but even all the transcribing was performed by them, so that no clerk or amanuensis should have it in his power to divulge the portentous mystery. The Nation was amused with the most earnest assurances that no coup d'état was intended, no violation of the Charter, nothing like that, which was already fully decided upon and arranged in all its details; and these assurances were even extended to the foreign Ambassadors, who looked with natural anxiety on the threatening aspect of affairs. Nay, if rumor may be credited, Baron Rothschild, who, by his connexion with the public stocks, had a more direct interest in the question than any person except the Ministers and the royal family, was tranquillized by M. de Polignac with like deceptive declarations. Letters of convocation had been despatched to the Peers and Deputies, summoning them to meet the third of August. In short, a system of elaborate jesuitical duplicity and falsehood was adopted by these royal and noble felons, to conceal the conspiracy until the appointed time arrived for exploding their infernal machine.' Fortunately they cheated and deluded themselves even more than they did the Nation, and thus became the pitiable victims of their own folly and wickedness.

In reflecting upon the events of this period, it seems difficult to understand how any Ministers

could have been so ignorant of the state of public sentiment in France. The subdivisions of the Nation were by no means of the same kind with those of the Chambers. Opinions, to be sure, were in some sense represented by the legislative body; that is, individuals could be found there of each of the great classes of opinion, which divided the Nation. But the legislative represention was far from exact as a picture of the relative force of each party, and gave no sufficient indications of the existence or vigor of the two, which together comprised a majority of the People.

First there were the Ultras, the Emigrés, the Jesuits, the Church and King party, the divine right faction: for faction it well deserved to be called, as well in regard of its violence as the comparative smallness of its numbers. If they were few in number, they were desperate and uncalculating in policy, reckless of consequences and deaf to all argument or counsel. They had built up their project of absolutism with painful industry, and they clung to it with inexpressible obstinacy.