V.

to accept it on the smallest occasions. In the affair of Mauguin, it confirms in principle the liability of a Representative to imprisonment for debt, but to itself reserves the power of allowing the principle to be applied only to the Representatives whom it dislikes,-and for this infamous privilege we see it wrangling with the Minister of Justice. Instead of utilizing the alleged murder plan to the end of fastening an inquest upon the “Society of December 10,” and of exposing Bonaparte beyond redemption before France and his true figure, as the head of the slum-proletariat of Paris, it allows the collision to sink to a point where the only issue between itself and the Minister of the Interior is. Who has jurisdiction over the appointment and dismissal of a Police Commissioner? Thus we see the party of Order, during this whole period, compelled by its ambiguous position to wear out and fritter away its conflict with the Executive power in small quarrels about jurisdiction, in chicaneries, in pettifogging, in boundary disputes, and to turn the stalest questions of form into the very substance of its activity. It dares not accept the collision at the moment when it involves a principle, when the Executive power has really given itself a blank, and when the cause of the National Assembly would be the cause of the nation. It would thereby have issued to the nation an order of march; and it feared nothing so much as that the nation should move. Hence, on these occasions, it rejects the motions of the Mountain, and proceeds to the order of the day. After the issue has in this way lost all magnitude, the Executive power quietly awaits the moment when it can take it up again upon small and insignificant occasions; when, so to say, the issue offers only a parliamentary local interest. Then does the repressed valor of the party of Order break forth, then it tears away the curtain from the scene, then it denounces the President, then it declares the republic to be in danger,—but then all its pathos appears stale, and the occasion for the quarrel a hypocritical pretext, or not at all worth the effort. The parliamentary tempest becomes a tempest in a tea-pot, the struggle an intrigue, the collision a scandal. While the revolutionary classes gloat