THE CUSTOMS REFORM. 179 



I shall not stop to point out the difference between the 

 English crisis of 1848 and the French one of the same 

 period. The rural interest is that which suffered most 

 with us also ; but it did not suffer alone all were 

 shaken at once. We witnessed a sudden fall in food 

 not, as in England, because it was too high, but be- 

 cause, industrial and commercial occupations being at a 

 stand-still, the non-agricultural classes had not the where- 

 withal to buy food. Consumption, in all branches, in 

 place of increasing, as with our neighbours, was reduced 

 to bare necessaries ; and in a country where the ordinary 

 quantity of meat and corn was scarcely sufficient, both 

 were found to exceed the resources of an impoverished 

 population. Farming and property, dismayed, found no 

 support from capital as in England, since much of it had 

 been swept away, and the remainder in alarm was sent out 

 of the country or secreted. Happily, by peculiar favour of 

 Providence, the fruits of the earth were abundant during 

 that trial ; for if the least doubt had arisen as to supplies, 

 in the midst of general disorder, we should have seen the 

 horrors of famine associated, as formerly, with the horrors 

 of civil war. 



Returning confidence begins to repair in part these 

 disasters. France once again shows, what she has so 

 often shown, especially after the anarchy of '93 and 

 the two invasions, that she cannot do herself an irrepar- 

 able injury. The more resources she exhibits, in spite of 

 the immense losses she has sustained, the more one is 

 struck with the progress she ought to have realised in the 

 last five years, had she not violently put a stop to her 

 own progress. The receipts from indirect taxation, which 

 is one of the most certain signs of public prosperity, were 

 eight hundred and twenty-five million francs in 1847, and 

 have recovered slowly, after an enormous falling off, to 



