The Paper Tax.—The Emperor's Letter

London, Aug. 7, 1860

The great faction fight of the session, which came off yesterday night, in a full House of Commons, proved a failure in the scenical sense, although it was a triumph in the ministerial sense. Mr. Gladstone's resolutions[a] for reducing the customs duties on paper to the level of the excise duties—some slight charge being added to the customs duties to counterbalance the incidental inconveniences of the excise duty—were carried by a majority of 33. But the House of Commons had it all their own way. There was the arena, and there were the gladiators, with their retainers behind them, but there was no audience worth mentioning. Before the battle had commenced, its issue was known and its bulletin promulgated. Hence the indifference of the public. The coalized parties, forming the so-called "Great Liberal Party,"[327] notoriously sway a Parliamentary majority, so that a defeat of the Cabinet could only have proceeded from a split in the ranks of the majority. This point, however, had been settled in Lord Palmerston's official residence, whither he had summoned the liberal members of all shadows and shades. The resolution itself proceeded from the Manchester fraction of the Ministry, Lord Palmerston having only been able to retain the support of Messrs. Gladstone and Milner Gibson by pledging himself to raise Mr. Gladstone's resolution to the rank of a Cabinet question. He had betrayed them by his management of the Paper Duty Abolition bill. This time they had bound him over to a certain line of conduct. The regular Whigs were the only fraction of the majority suspected of hatching treasonable designs; but the harsh voice of their master and the menace suspended over their heads of a new dissolution of Parliament sufficed to bring them back to the stern behests of discipline. Thus many hours before the curtain was drawn, all London had become acquainted with the exact result of the party trial, and, save the habitues of the Strangers' Gallery, nobody cared to assist the sham-fight at St. Stephen's[328]. It was indeed a rather dull affair, enlivened only by the sweeping oratory of Mr. Gladstone, and the highly finished pleading of Sir Hugh Cairns[b]. Mr. Gladstone tried to represent the opposition raised against his bill as a last desperate stand made by Protection against Free Trade. When he sat down, the cheers that drowned his concluding words, seemed to hail him as the true chief of the liberal party, of which Lord Palmerston is the by no means beloved despot. Sir Hugh Cairns, on the part of the Conservatives, proved by close argumentation, and with great analytical power, that the reduction of the customs duty on paper to the level of the excise duty was in no way stipulated for by the commercial treaty with France. His antagonist, Sir Richard Bethell, the Whig Attorney-General, had the bad taste to show ill temper at the success of his rival, to sneer at Sir Hugh's "forensic eloquence,"[c] and thus to draw upon his own devoted head a regular volley of Tory interruptions.

The great faction fight of the session being over, whole flocks of honorable members are sure to desert the House, so that Lord Palmerston, by the sheer process of exhaustion, may now succeed in passing any little bill he has set his heart upon—i.e. the monstrous Indian bill for the amalgamation of the local European army with the British army[329]. If any new striking proof were wanted of the depth of degradation Parliamentarism has reached in England, this Indian bill and the treatment it received in the House of Commons would afford it. Every man in the House, of any authority on, and any experience in, Indian affairs, had opposed the bill. The majority themselves confessed not only their complete ignorance, but they betrayed their dark suspicions as to the ulterior views of the framers of the bill. They could not but confess that the bill had been smuggled into the House under false pretenses; that the most important papers indispensable for a just appreciation of the case had been fraudulently withheld; that the Indian Minister[d] had introduced the bill despite the unanimous dissent of the Indian Council, a dissent which, by an open infraction of the new constitution bestowed upon India in 1858[330], he had omitted to lay on the table of the House; and lastly, that the Cabinet had not even attempted at showing any reason for driving, toward the end of the session, and after the withdrawal of every measure of import, with such indecent haste, a bill through the House which, in point of fact, radically changed the British Constitution by an immense addition of patronage to the crown, and by the creation of an army that, in every practical respect, would become independent of the vote of supplies. Still, this bill may now be carried, the chiefs of both factions having, as it appears, come to a secret understanding with the Court.

Louis Napoleon's letter to his beloved Persigny continues to form the chief topic of conversation here and on the other side of the Channel. It seems that, in the first instance, the protest of the Porte against the Syrian expedition, as originally planned between France and Russia[331], met with a strong support on the part of Austria and Prussia, while Lord Palmerston, having just singled out, during the fortification debates, Louis Napoleon as the great object of British suspicion, could not but throw his weight into the balance of Turkey and the German Powers. It appears, moreover, that the Man of December got somewhat frightened, not only at the dictatorial tone assumed by Russia, but still more at the sneers circulated in the saloons of the "anciens partis"[e] and the low murmurs audible in the Faubourgs in regard to the "alliance Cosaque".[f]

To make the latter palatable to Paris, a far greater complication of things must have been arrived at. Under these distressing circumstances, and in an evidently uneasy state of mind, Louis Napoleon penned his letter, several passages of which are highly perfumed with the scent of the ludicrous.

An Englishman may indulge in a downright laugh at the phrase addressed by Louis Napoleon to Lord Palmerston: "Let us understand one another in good faith like honest men as we are, and not like thieves who desire to cheat each other"; but the exquisitely bad taste blended with the power of ridicule of the original French "entendons nous loyalement comme d'honnêtes gens, que nous sommes, et non comme Des Larrons qui veulent se duper mutuellement",[g] can only be appreciated by a French ear. No Frenchman can read that passage without being reminded of a similar sentence occurring in the famous play of "Robert Macaire".[332]

I subjoin some data for a comparison between French and English state expenditure[h]. According to the provisional or prospective budget, the total revenue of France for the year 1860 is estimated at 1,825 millions of francs, or £73,000,000 sterling, derived from the following sources:

The English revenue for 1859 (the financial accounts for 1860 have not yet been issued) was as follows, in both cases round numbers only being given:

The comparative public expenditure of the two countries was as follows:

From the last tabular statement it will be seen that the interest on the public debt is in Bonapartist France rapidly mounting to the British level; that Continental centralization keeps the Army and Navy at a cheaper cost than insular oligarchy; that one Louis Napoleon wants for his private expenses twice and a half more money than a British sovereign; and finally, that in a bureaucratic country, like France, the cost of collecting the revenue grows at a rate disproportionate to the amount of the revenue itself.

Notes