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    Critics are cue legislators , cne mages ana ponce of literature They do not make laws—they interpret and try to enforce them — Edinburgh Review . ^

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    We have been burnt at Oxford ! Not publiclythat is a martyrdom to come—but in more than one common room , as we are credibly assured . Servetus was roasted for less ; Giordano Bruno crackled among the fagots for maintaining the existence of an infinity of worlds ; and what could the header expect from these extremely small parodists of the Middle Ages , after proclaiming and acting upon the principle that discussion should he perfectly free , that the beliefs of men were sacred and deserved every respect ? We have spoken

    plainly , fearlessly ; but we have also allowed those who oppose us to speak their differences as plainly . Our object is Truth , and quite naturally we are burnt at Oxford . Happily , Oxford has so completely lost its ancient influence that its anathemas have no longer the effect even of exciting vulgar curiosity . Powerless to create , it is powerless even to destroy . Yet , although Oxford as Oxford is a type of intellectual inefficiency in this age which it so strenuously opposes , Ox ' ord , in spite of herself ,

    sends iorth men of whom England is proud . The Leader should be the last to overlook such a fact , for its pages are too often enriched with the contributions of those who love their Alma Mater , though she regards the career of her sons very much in that spirit of philosophic sagacity with which a hen beholds her foster-brood of ducklings make instantly for their element , the water . What do you think is the private opinion those ducklings entertain of their vicarious parent ?

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    George Sand is said to be writing her Memoirs . If this be so , we have an explanation of her long silence and an explanation very welcome to all her readers ; for , perhaps , no living woman has had so rich and strange an experience of life , while , certainly , no living writer has such genius to portray it . Curious it has been to trace the progress of opinion in England with regard to George Sand . The hand that traces these lines was among the

    very first , if not the first , to proclaim the sincerity of a writer so shamelessly calumniated , the genius of a writer so ignorantly criticised . Within a few years that opinion has spread from circle to circle , ever widening in influence , till at last , we find the works of George Sand , whom it was infamy to read , now delighting the leisure hours of the highest personage of the realm . We could name the the command

    works specially singled out by royal . We record the fact with pleasure , as honourable to Queen Victoria , who in so many things sweeps out of the narrow limits of bigotry , and as honourable to George Sand , for it is her genius which has made the conquest of prejudice . We trust that English women will no longer turn up eyes of sanctified horror at the mention of an author read by their Queen !

    The last number of La Revue des Deux Mondes contains an article by Philarete Chasles , on America and its Future , full of excellent matter , in which he points clearly enough to the radical inferiority of the French , politically speaking , to the English and Americans , in their deficiency of selfgovernment , and their craving to have every thing done by the state . In a foot note he gives the etymology of Yankee , which is piquant : it is , he says , nothing but the word English transformed by the vicious pronunciation of the inhabitants of Massachusets , viz ., Yenghis , Yanghis , Yankies He does not claim the honour of the discovery , but merely that of first promulgating it in print .

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    LEDRU ROLLIN ' S FALL OF ENGLAND . Ue la Uecadence de VAngletcrre . Par Ledru Rollin . Tome Premier . A sound critique on British society by an able Yrt-no ) man would be a thing to be received by us as a national boon . The French are good social critics . That very tendency to generalization , that habit of expressing everything in the form of articulate verbal

    propositions , for which , it must be owned , the French are more remarkable than for their conscientiousness in arriving at what they so express—makes any just criticisms that they do pronounce on other nations peculiarly memorable and serviceable . Nor , at the present moment , could the people of England make a better selection of a man to criticise them and their . society than from among the Socialists and Extreme

    Ri public us of Fiance . Setting asidt the ability of these men , their acquired babis of thought , iheii want of all intellectual anchorage in the existing relations of the world , qualify them to propound exactly those terrible and trenchant criticisms respecting the constitution of British society , which , heard and pondered by men amongst ourselves , and reconceived by us according to our insular modes of thinking , are most likely to generate in the midst of us the required spirit of rectification . It was , therefore , with real pleasure that "we saw M . Ledru Rollin step forward as the critic of England . Our single glimpse of this distinguished visitor to our shores since he came amongst us was derived from a friend who said he had seen him smoking a cigar at the top of Sloane-street . Holding by this hint , and hearing also that , of all the exiles amongst us , M . Ledru RolJin was least to be seen in ordinary social circles , we had always pictured him to ourselves as a recluse about Sloane-street , watching moodily the cabs as they passed , and collecting silently out of the

    huge roar of London , and all the more distant hum of English activity that reached his ear , this one sentence , inaudible except to himself : —Mene , Mene , Tekel , TJpharsin ( Mene ; God hath numbered thy kingdom , and finished it : Tekei . ; thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting : Feres ; thy kingdom is divided , and given to the Parisians ) . Hence it was with pleasure that we saw his book advertised ; and even the word Dicadence in the announcements did not surprise us . That we knew to be the foregone conclusion , the hypothesis in whose service and under whose inspiration the materials must necessarily be gathered ; and our only expectation was that by English readers the materials themselves , elaborated in the service of so startling an assertion , might , on that very account , when fairly severed from the assertion , prove the more rich and valuable . We have been wofully disappointed . The book ofM . Ledru Kollin , so far as we can judge from the volume now before the public , is a very shallow performance . We regret to have to say this , not only because we should have been so eager to welcome a good book on England from the party to which M . Ledru Rollin belongs ; but also because our previous conceptions of M . Ledru Rollin himself , especially as derived from his singularly powerful speech in the French Chamber on the Droit au

    Travail , had prepared us to expect good tmngs ma pen . Furnished , as we have now been , by the book before us , with a clearer and more intimate glimpse of M . Ledru Rollin and his views , we shall not be able , while regarding him at any point of his future career , ever to accord him any very high degree of intellectual confidence .

    In M . Ledru Rollin ' s argument in support of his dreadful proposition that England " is on its last legs , " three things are to be individually attended to : —First , the evidence on which he professes to found his belief in that proposition ; second , his interpretation of that evidence , or his particular mode of phrasing it , for the instruction of his French

    readers , and for the purposes of his argument ; and third , his reasoning , properly so called , that is , the logical process whereby , having accumulated his evidence , and phrased it to suit his purpose , he seeks to deduce from it the desired conclusion . It will be found , we think , that there is a regular diminuendo of merit in the contents of the book considered as

    distributed according to the foregoing arrangement : in other words , that by far the most valuable portions of the book are those with , which M . Ledru-Rollin has had least to do—namely , the matter , illustrative of English society , that he has extracted from English reports and documents ; that next , in importance , though at a long interval , follows that part of the work where M . Ledru Rollin endeavours to present the purport of those facts in his own langunge as a Frenchman and a man of Republican opinions ;

    and that , decidedly the most worthless portion of all , is that which ought to have been most elaborated , and the rigorous elaboration of which could alone have justified the ostentatious title given to the book —namely , the reasoning whereby M . Ledru Rollin attempts to create in the minds of his compatriots the expectation that our little island , a subject of such interest to France ever since the days of Ceosar , is now positively about to founder and go down .

    The real materials of the book , the facts and particulars relative to English society , on which , taken as a mass , M . Ledru Rollin professes to ground his conviction that that society is decrepit , are already

    before the English public in a mote oompU * e »» nd striking lorm in the jupti .- > i ' to % vviiKh M . L- dru Rollin has copied them , namely , in the Morning Chronicle Reports on the State of Labour and the Poor in Great Britain . About half of the volume already published ( pp . 185-363 ) consists merely of translations and extracts from Mr . Henry Mayhew ' s admirable and now standard series of letters on the state of the metropolitan poor ; and , as the author will probably proceed in the same way with the manufacturing and agricultural districts in the second volume , it may be said with truth that by far the larger moiety of this French demonstration that England is on the decline has been furnished by the

    columns of a daily English newspaper . Turning , however , from , the materials on which M . Ledru Rollin grounds his foregone conclusion , let us see what are his own statements as to the import of these materials . What is that disease under which England is now labouring—that deadly disease diffused throughout her whole system , of which all these Morning Chronicle revelations about the weavers , the coalheavers , the slopworkers , the pickpockets , &c , are but the superficial symptoms ?

    On this point M . Ledru Rollin may be more detailed and explicit in his second volume . So far , however , as we can gather his answer at present it may be summed up in the words aristocratic rule . The whole design of all that portion of the present volume that is not occupied with the extracts from the Mottling Chronicle , appears to be to illustrate this one proposition regarding England , that it is an aristocratic country . The spirit of England is aristocratic ; the institutions of England are aristocratic ; her dealings with , other nations and with the world at large are

    aristocratic . Such is the sum and substance of our author ' s expositions . No other formula for England does M . Ledru Rollin appear to have in his head than this of " The Aristocratic Nation . " Thus : — " One cannot , in fact , comprehend England by recognizing her , in the sphere of official action , as anything else than an oligarchy , under three different faces—the aristocracy of the Crown , the aristocracy of the land , the aristocracy of the counter ; all three united by one interest , subservient to one another , and interlaced in resistance to the flood that could submerge all .

    Thus , the Crown depends at present on the Lords and the Commons . But , in their turn , the Lords depend on the Crown , which can increase thc-ir number , and which keeps them stretched towards the child ' s coral of its favours , its employmrnts , its pensions ; as the Lords also extend their roots even into the House of Commoni , whither it chances that , out of six hundred and fiftyeight members there have penetrated five hundred and broth

    seventy-one persons that are eithr-r sons , ers , grandsons , uncles , sons-in-law , nephews , or cousins of peeis , or officers , functionaries or advocates dependent on Peers or on the Crown . In all this , where is the people , where are the representatives ? This Government is , therefore , nothing else than an aristocratic trinity , indivisible , as well as peparated into three persons , each having its part and its different attributes for the scene of the world . "

    Illustrating this general proposition in detail , M . Ledru Rollin gives us some superficial disquisitions on the different subdivisions of the aristocratic supremacy in England—the Aristocratie Fonciere , ox Landed Aristocracy , the Aristocratie Commerciale , the Aristocratic Politique , the Aristocratie Clericale , the Aristocratie Universitaire , and the Aristocratie Judiciaire . He also exhibits the workings of the English aristocratic spirit in the past history of the nation , as regards Ireland , America , India , and the revolutionary wars of Europe . In the course of this

    elucidation M . Ledru Rollin offers a good many judicious and , though severe , really true critical remarks on English society . Nay , more ; although we conceive this formula of " The Aristocratic Nation , " as applied to England , to be on the whole a lean and meagre one , by no means so literally or so profoundly descriptive of her real social maladiee as some other formula might have been that a deeper consideration of the phenomena of the case might easily have devised ; yet , believing it , as we of the Leader do , to be after all a iust expression of certain vices of the

    system according to which our national edifice is constructed and our national procedure carried on , we willingly accept it , assert with M . Ledru Rollin that England is under aristocratic rule , and proclaim ourselves as belonging to that great and growing power of native English opinion by which this aristocratic rule is even now dally shaken and chipped , and by which , as sure as Time rolls , it will be at last demolished and overthrown . But while agreeing thus far with M . Ledru Rollin ' s definition of what may be called the mechanism of the English constitution , we would yield to none , not even to the organs of our

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    literature .

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    jtiNE i , 1850 . ] Cfte Ueafcer . - ^ i

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), June 1, 1850, page 231, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1841/page/13/