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Rh G U I Z T 271 Chateau d Eu. In 1845 British and French troops fought side by side for the first time in an expedition to the River Plate. The fall of Sir Robert Peel s Government in 1846 changed thsse intimate relations; and the return of Lord Palmerston to the foreign office led Guizot to believe that he was again exposed to the passionate rivalry of the British cabinet. A friendly understanding had been established at Eu between the two courts with reference to the future marriage of the young queen of Spain. The language of Lord Palmerston and the conduct of Sir Henry Bulwer at Madrid led Guizot to believe that this understanding was. broken, and that it was intended to place a Coburg on the throna of Spain. Determined to resist any such intrigue, Guizot and the king plunged headlong into a counter- intrigue, wholly inconsistent with their previous engage ments to England, and fatal to the happiness of the queen of Spain. By their influence she was urged into a marriage with a despicable offset of the house of Bourbon, and her sister was at the same time married to the youngest son of the French king, in direct violation of Louis Philippe s promises. This transaction, although it was hailed at the tini3 as a triumph of the policy of France, was in truth as fatal to the monarch as it was discreditable to the minister. It was accomplished by a mixture of secrecy and violence. It was defended by subterfuges. By the dispassionate judgment of history it has been universally condemned. Its immediate effect was to destroy the Anglo-French alliance, and to throw Guizot into closer relations with the reactionary policy of Metteruich and the Northern courts. The history of Guizot s administration, the longest and the last which existed under the constitutional monarchy of France, beirs the stamp of the great qualities and the great defects of his political character, for he was throughout the master-spirit of that Government. His first objact was to unite and discipline the conservative party, which ha 1 been broken up by previous dissensions and ministerial changes. In this he entirely succeeded by his co iraga an 1 eloquence as a parliamentary leader, and by the use of all those means of influence which France too liber ally supplies to a dominant minister. No one ever doubted t!n purity and disinterestedness of Guizot s own conduct. Fie dispisod money ; he lived and died poor; and though he encou -aged ths fever of money-getting in the French nation, his own habits retained their primitive simplicity. But he did not disdain to use in others the baser passions from which hs was himself free. Some of his instruments were mam ; he employed them to deal with meanness after its kind. Gross abuses and breaches of trust came to light even in the ranks of the Government, and under an incor ruptible minister the administration was denounced as corrupt. Licet uti alieno vitio is a proposition as false in politics as it is in divinity. Of his pirliamentary eloquence it is impossible to speak too highly. It was terse, austere, demonstrative, and com manding, not persuasive, not humorous, seldom adorned, but condense! with the force of a supreme authority in the fewest words. He has been heard to say that he sel dom had occasion to address the chambers for more than twenty minutes at a time, except when despatches were read. The consequence was that the audience hung upon his words with breathless attention. Not a syllable, not an inflexion of the voice was lost, nothing was repeated ; and when he ceased, it seemed as if the waves of an ocean had been spell-bound by his voice. He was essentially a ministerial speaker, far more powerful in defence than in opposition. Like Pitt he was the type of authority and resistance, unmoved by the brilliant charges, the wit, the gaiety, the irony, and the discursive power of his great rival. Nor was he less a master of parliamentary tactics, and of thoss sudden changes and movements in debate, which, as in a battle, sometimes change the fortune of the day. His confidence in himself, and in the majority of the chamber which he had moulded to his will, was unbounded ; and long success and the habit of authority led him to forget that in a country like France there was a people out side the chamber elected by a small constituency, to which the minister and the king himself were held responsible. A Government based on the principle of resistance and repression and marked by dread and distrust of popular power, a system of diplomacy which sought to revive the traditions of the old French monarchy, a sovereign who largely exceeded the bounds of constitutional power and whose obstinacy augmented with years, a minister who, though far removed from the servility of the courtier, was too obsequious to the personal influence of the king, were all singularly at variance with the promises of the Revolution of July, and they narrowed the policy of the administration. Guizot s view of politics was essentially historical and philo sophical. His tastes and his acquirements gave him little insight into the practical business of administrative govern ment. Of finance lie knew nothing ; trade and commerce were strange to him, and he has been heard to express astonishment at the paramount importance Sir Robert Peel attached to his commercial policy; military and naval affairs were unfamiliar to him ; all these subjects he dealt with by second hand through his friends Dumon, Duchatel, or Marshal Bugeaud. The consequence was that few measures of practical improvement were carried by his administration. Still less did the Government lend an ear to the cry for parliamentary reform. On this subject the king s prejudices were insurmountable, and his ministers had the weakness to give way to them. Being asked after the Revolution of 1848 whether lie thought the action and extra-constitutional influence of King Louis Philippe had been beneficial or injurious to the monarchy, Guizot replied that in the earlier years of the king s reign it had been of great use in strengthening the government and restoring order, but that in the later years it had been injurious to constitutional government and to the monarchy itself. It obviously drew down upon the king that ru- sponsibility which should have rested entirely on his minis ters ; and on the question of reform he was even more to be blamed than they were. It was impossible to defend a system which confined the suffrage to 200,000 citizens, and returned a chamber of whom half were placemen. Nothing would have been easier than to strengthen the conservative party by attaching the suffrage to the possession of land in France, but blank resistance was the sole answer of the Government to the just and moderate demands of the opposition. Warning after warning was addressed to them in vain by friends and by foes alike ; and they re mained profoundly unconscious of their danger till the moment when it overwhelmed them. It was the old old story of a hopeless conflict between a court, obstinately addicted to an effete theory of government, and the ris ing will of a nation, when a little timely and honest con cession would have arrested the catastrophe. Strange to say, Guizot never acknowledged either at the time or to his dying day the nature of this error ; and lie speaks of himself in his memoirs as the much enduring champion of liberal government and constitutional law. He utterly fails to perceive that a more enlarged view of the liberal destinies of France and a less intense confidence in his own specific theory might have preserved the constitutional monarchy and averted a vast series of calamities, which were in the end fatal to every principle he most cherished. But with the stubborn conviction of absolute truth he dauntlessly adhered to his own doctrines to the end. The last scene of his political life was singularly characteristic