Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, February 18, 1868

FromReview and Herald, Vol. XXXI, No. 10

The Crisis in France.

A REVOLUTION of some kind seems to be inevitable in France. The letters of our Paris correspondent, himself an original Bonapartist, show how great is the discontent even among the early and disinterested friends of the Empire. The prestige of the Emperor is fast waning. Men begin to ask themselves where are the proofs of his greatness. He has carried on three foreign wars since the coup d’état, and where are their fruits? The Eastern question, which he thought to settle in the Crimea, has never been settled a moment since the fall of Sevastopol. It is ready to break out again any day. Italy, in whose behalf he drew the sword against Austria and sacrificed life and treasure without stint, looks upon France as her foe, and upon Napoleon as her dragon. So all that has been lost. In Mexico he has failed to establish a foreign prince upon the ruins of a republic, but succeeded in incurring the hostility of the United States and the distrust of his own people. The last vestige of the kingdom of Poland, in which he encouraged insurrection, has disappeared. He encouraged Prussia to go to war with Austria, in the hope that both would be weakened by the struggle. He was surprised and chagrined to find a new power created by that conflict, whose consequence he estimates at so high a rate that he demands a conscription calling the whole French people to arms. So much for his foreign policy.

At home he has corrupted everybody whose virtue is assailable, and has persecuted the remainder with unceasing malignity. With an army of soldiers, an army of spies, and an army of harlots, he has thus far kept the spirit of the people in subjection. He has made his name a synonym for everything depraved, and has laid the foundations of his dynasty on all the low instincts and base passions of human nature. It is impossible that such a foundation should be stable. The four winds of heaven conspire against it. Crumble it must. The French people, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, are a great nation—far too great to be much longer bestridden by such a criminal. All the signs of the times point to a crisis in the affairs of the Second Empire. The public debt has increased at the rate of ten per cent per annum ever since the fatal year 1851, and now we hear that a new loan of four hundred millions is about to be put upon the market, although the revenues are not sufficient to pay the interest and current expenses of a time of peace. What with more grinding taxes, new conscriptions, severer laws against the press, and a heavier hand on the safety-valve generally, it will be surprising indeed if three more years pass over the throne of Napoleon III.—Chicago Tribune.