Louis Napoleon has been converted to Free-trade, and is about 
to inaugurate a new era of peace. He can hardly fail to be enrolled 
as a member of the Society of Friends,”*’ and the year 1860 will, in 
the annals of Europe, be recorded as the year 1 of the 
Millennium. This extraordinary news going the round of the 
London Press dates its origin from a letter of Louis Bonaparte 
published in the Moniteur, dated Jan. 15, 1860, and addressed to 
Mr. Fould, Minister of State.? The first effect of the letter was to 
send the Funds down at Paris and to send them up at London. 

Now, before all things, it seems necessary to scrutinize somewhat 
closely the corpus delicti—that is, the Imperial letter—upon which 
the whole superstructure of the new era is about to be reared. 
Louis Bonaparte informs Mr. Fould that | 

“the moment has arrived for applying ourselves to the means of giving a 
greater development to the different branches of national wealth.” 

The almost identical announcement” appeared in the Moniteur 
of January, 1852, when the Coup d’état inaugurated the era of the 
Crédit Mobilier, the Crédit Foncier, and other Crédits ambulants.? 
And this is not all. Since that eventful epoch, every yearly financial 
bulletin issued under the auspices of the French autocrat has laid 
all its stress upon and proved by an awful array of official figures 
the circumstance that the Empire had been as good as its word, 

and that, under its fostering sway, all the branches of national 
industry had taken an immense development. 

Thus one finds himself in a fix. Either the proclamations of the 
Coup d’état were untimely, and the financial bulletins issued after 
the Coup d’état were spurious, or the present proclamation is a 
mere hoax. 

At all events, this much appears incontrovertible, on the own 
showing of the new Imperial manifesto, that the economical 
benefits which French society was to derive from the resurrection 
of Bonapartism belong not to the past, but to the future tense. Let 
us, then, see by what new contrivance the happy economical 
change is to be brought about. 

In the first instance, Louis Bonaparte tells Mr. Fould, who must 
have been somewhat startled at the profound discovery of his 
master, that “our foreign commerce must be developed by the 
exchange of products,” a stupendous truism, indeed. Foreign 
commerce consisting in the exchange of national products for 
foreign products, it cannot be denied that, to develop French 
foreign commerce, the exchange of French products must be 
developed. The principal result which Louis Bonaparte expects 
from the new development of French foreign commerce he is 
about to start, is “to spread prosperity among the working 
classes,” the which, as implicitly confessed by the man of the 
Coup d’Etat, and as shown by recent French writers (see, for 
instance, the works of the late Mr. Colins’), have visibly decayed 
within the last ten years. Unhappily, one great fact strikes the most 
superficial observer. French foreign commerce has made immense 
strides from 1848 to 1860. Amounting in 1848 to about 875 
millions francs, it has risen to more than double that sum in 1859. 
An increase of commerce by more than 100 per cent in the short 
space of ten years, is a thing almost unprecedented. The causes 
that have brought about that increase are to be found in 
California, Australia, the United States, and so forth, but certainly 
not in the archives of the Tuileries.” It appears, then, that 
despite the immense increase of French foreign commerce within 
the last ten years—an increase to be traced to revolutions in the 
markets of the world quite beyond the petty control of the French 
police—the situation of the mass of the French nation has not 
improved. Consequently, there must have been at work some 

agency powerful enough to frustrate the natural results of 
commercial progress. If the development of French foreign 
commerce accounts for the apparent ease with which the second 
Empire has been allowed to indulge its expensive vagaries, the 
prostration of the nation, despite its doubled exports, betrays the 
cost at which that Imperial ease is purchased. If the Empire could 
not have subsisted without that development of French foreign 
commerce, that commercial progress has failed with the Empire 
to bear its legitimate fruits. 

The Austrian Emperor, having banished the deficit from his 
States by dint of a ukase, why should Louis Bonaparte, by dint of 
another ukase, not command the increase of French foreign 
commerce? Still he apprehends some hitch in his way. 

“We must first,” he says, “improve our agriculture, and free our industry from 
all interior impediments which place it in a position of inferiority.” 

That French agriculture is badly in want of improvement, is the 
standing topic of French economists; but how is Louis Bonaparte 
to do the thing? In the first place, he will grant loans to 
agriculture at a moderate “interest.” French agriculture is 
notoriously the concern of more than two-thirds of the French 
nation. Will Louis Bonaparte impose taxes upon the remaining 
third, in order to grant loans “at a moderate rate” to the majority 
of the nation? The idea is in fact too preposterous to be insisted 
upon. On the other hand, it was the confessed aim of his Crédits 
Fonciers to direct loanable capital to the land. The only thing they 
have proved efficient in is not in ameliorating agriculture, but in 
ruining small freeholds and accelerating the concentration of 
landed estates. After all, we have here again the old worn-out 
panacea— institutions of credit. Nobody will deny that the second 
Empire marks an epoch in the development of French credit, but 
that it has overshot the mark, and that, with its own credit, its 
credit-fostering influence has gone to the wall. The only novelty 
seems to be that the semi-official credit machinery having been 
stretched and worked to its utmost, Louis Bonaparte now dreams 
of converting the Government itself into a direct loan-shop. While 
any such attempt must be fraught with immense dangers, it would 
as necessarily collapse as did his grain granaries, intended to screw 
up the prices of corn.” Draining, irrigating, and cleaning the 
ground, are all very good things in their different lines, but their 
only possible effect is to multiply agricultural products. They 
cannot raise, and they are not intended to raise, the prices of 
those products. Now then, even if Louis Bonaparte should find by 

some miraculous methods the ways and means required for those 
ameliorations on a national scale, how are they to mend the 
depreciation of agricultural produce which the French peasant has 
labored under for these five years? But then, Louis Napoleon will 
set about a consecutive amelioration of the means of communica- 
tion. The coolness with which this proposition is made, beats even 
Bonapartist impudence. Look only to the development of French 
railways since 1850. The annual expense for these “means of 
communication” amounted, from 1845 to 747, to about 
175,000,000 of francs; from 1848 to *51, to about 125,000,000; 
from 1852 to ’54, to nearly 250,000,000 (double the expenditure 
of 1848-51); from 1854? to ’56, to nearly 550,000,000; from 1857 
to 59, to about 500,000,000. In 1857, when the general crisis 
broke in upon the commercial world, the French Government 
stood aghast at the immense sums still required for the railways in 
progress or already conceded. It prohibited the railway companies 
from raising, by means of securities, debentures, &c., more than 
212,500,000 francs annually, interdicted the getting up of new 
companies, and circumscribed within fixed limits the work to be 
annually undertaken. And, after all this, Louis Bonaparte speaks 
as if railways, canals, and so forth, were now first to be invented! 
A forcible reduction of the canal dues, which he hints at, is, of 
course, an operation involving the breach of public contracts, 
frightening the capital embarked in those enterprises, and 
certainly not calculated to allure new capital into the same 
channels. Lastly, to find a market for agricultural products, 
manufacturing industry is to be stimulated. Yet, as we have 
already stated, manufacturing industry has made immense strides 
during the second Empire, but with all that, with the unprec- 
edented increase of exports, with the immense development of 
railways and other means of communication, with the exaggera- 
tion of a credit system formerly unknown in France, French 
agriculture Janguishes, and the French peasantry decays. How 
shall we account for the strange phenomenon? The fact that 
255,000,000 of francs are added yearly to the funded debt, not to 
speak of the impost of blood for the army and the navy, offers a 
sufficient answer. The Empire itself is the great incubus whose 
burden grows in a greater ratio than the productive powers of the 
French nation. 

Louis Bonaparte’s prescriptions for French industry, if we 
deduct all that is mere phraseology, or is still looming in the 

future, are simply these: Suppression of the duties on wool and 
cotton, and successive reductions on sugar and coffee. Now, this is 
all very well, but all the gullibility of English free-traders is 
required to call such measures free trade. Whoever is acquainted 
with political economy, knows full well that the abolition of duties 
on agricultural raw material forms a main item in the doctrine of 
the mercantile school of the eighteenth century. These “interior 
impediments” which weigh upon French production, are as 
nothing if compared with the octrois,”*' dividing France into as 
many independent countries as there are towns, paralyzing the 
internal exchange, and barring the creation of wealth by crippling 
its consumption. Those octrois, however, have increased under the 
Imperial régime, and will continue to increase. The diminution of 
duties on wool and cotton is to be made up by suppressing the 
sinking fund, so that the last restraint upon the growth of the 
public debts, although merely nominal, will be done away with. 
On the other hand, the woods are to be cleared, the hills to be 
leveled, and the moors to be drained, by applying to those 
purposes the 160,000,000 of francs said to form the remnant 
disposable from the last war loans, in three yearly installments, 
which will make less than 54,000,000 of francs on an annual 
average. Why, the embankment of the Loire alone, so pompously 
announced by the Imperial Cagliostro some five years ago, and 
then no longer thought of, would absorb the whole sum in less 
than three months. What then remains of the manifesto! “The 
inauguration of an era of peace,” as if that era had not long 
since been proclaimed at Bordeaux. “L’Empire c’est la paix.” *