disciplined, we can admit at once the necessity of removing him if there was any suspicion of his good faith; but, on the other hand, it really seems that the poor parvenu chemist, whatever secret reasons he may have had for not more decidedly rejecting the mission, had no connexion with the émeutiers; that he was adverse to the Socialist agitation; and that he might rather have been (as M. Marie desired and expected) a useful ally against insurrection. It seems to us, moreover, that men of common sense must have seen that, if there was (as is very probable) any evil spirit in the ateliers. the treacherous kidnapping and mysterious and tyrannical abstraction of Thomas would be certain to accelerate and give a peculiar character of passion and vengeance to the apprehended explosion.

But whether the removal of Thomas was justified by any evidence possessed by the Government against him or not, which we have no means of knowing, their conduct exhibited (putting its tyranny out of the question) a very discreditable degree of duplicity and bad faith. The insidious part played by Trelat, on the morning of the 26th at the ateliers, and in the evening in his own apartment, seems to us personally disgraceful and his public conduct afterwards appears equally dishonest. It may be supposed that Thomas's sudden and unexpected disappearance must have created a great sensation amongst his family and friends at the atelier, when all that was known was the one line which the Minister conveyed to his mother, an hour or two after his departure, saying, that he was gone on a mission to Bordeaux.' We need not recapitulate the various steps taken that night and next day by the chief officers of the ateliers to obtain some explanation of their chief's sudden absence and some official assurances of his personal safety. Suffice it to say, that they applied that very night to two or three other Ministers, who had not even heard of the event, and were stupified at it.' some delay and negotiation, they obtained, by a threat of a general resignation of the whole staff of the ateliers, an apologetical admission from M. Trelat that

After

' in the measure taken with respect to M. Emile Thomas there was nothing that could at all affect either his character or his honour, or diminish the justice due and done to his public services.'-p. 304. And on the 30th of May, in answer to a question put to him in

It is stated subsequently, that of the five members of the Executive, only one, Garnier-Pagès, was in the secret; that it was he that sent the first telegraphic despatch, without the knowledge of any of his colleagues; that it was only when the answer came back that Recurt, the Minister of the Interior, in whose department the telegraph properly is, kuew of it; and that Dr. Recurt immediately communicated the fact to the other four members of the Executive, and obtained their sanction for anuulling the first message.-p. 321.

the

the National Assembly, relative to Thomas's resignation, Dr. Trelat stated from the tribune

• What I can assert is, that what was done was done freely; that the new and important functions of brigading the workmen of the departments of the Landes and the Gironde were confided to him because he was conversant with such matters, and that they were given and accepted freely and voluntarily.'-Moniteur, 31 May.

The Minister chose to forget all that had passed in his own cabinet the night of the 26th-the guard round the house-the commissary of police inside-the anticipation of resistance-his own désolation' at being obliged to use force-and, finally, the two police officers and their loaded pistols!

There need no epithets to stigmatize such manifest falsehood! But is it not wonderful that--while France has been for above sixty years making Constitutions, of which the professed basis has been the overthrow of Bastiles, the abolition of lettres de cachet, and generally and emphatically the security of individual liberty -that, we say, in all these experiments they never should have thought of any effectual provision in the nature of our Habeas Corpus! They imagine that they have been imitating our institutions, while that particular one, which is the most essential of all, and indeed the true basis and safeguard of English liberty, has totally escaped them.

While Thomas's friends in Paris were endeavouring to obtain some light into the causes of his disappearance, he, from Bordeaux, addressed, first to the Executive Government, and then, obtaining no answer from them, to the National Assembly itself, a protestation of his innocence of any species of misconduct, and an urgent petition for a full inquiry into his case. But the Assem

bly was in no bumour to attend to such small matters, and covered M. Trelat with applause' when he, on the 14th June, stated from the tribune that—

'his inexperience in office had perhaps betrayed him into an act that might seem arbitrary; that he had acted more like a physician than a Minister (plus médecin que ministre); that, having an order to arrest M. Thomas in his pocket, he had preferred the gentler course of getting him away without absolute force.'

With this explanation-which, though manifestly contradictory of the Minister's former declarations, M. Thomas asserts to be equally false-the Assembly was abundantly satisfied; and a few days after ensued those terrible events which, though intimately connected with the case of Emile Thomas and the ateliers nationaux, swept away all desire of hearing anything more about either him or them.

But those events are the moral of the story.

Urged

Urged on by the increasing numbers, expense, and agitation of the ateliers, and encouraged by the ease with which they had got rid of Emile Thomas, the Government adventured to promulgate in the Moniteur of the 21st of June the decree which had been communicated to Emile Thomas on the 24th of May, and which was the cause of all the subsequent confusion. The decree, as we have already shown, was in itself very harsh, unjust, and unconstitutional; but its promulgation now was, as some of the Ministers had pronounced it a month before, an insane provoca

tion to insurrection.

That very night the delegates of the Monceaux ateliers, who had been, under Thomas, the adversaries of the delegates of the Luxembourg, entered into a strict alliance with them, and general meeting of the united corps of workmen was appointed for the 22nd, when their delegates, with one Pujol at their head, waited on M. Marie at the Luxembourg, were rebuffed by him with more courage than consistency or prudence, and the insurrection of the 23rd of June immediately followed.

In the days of the 23rd, 24th, and 25th of June there were, as has been repeatedly stated, 10,000 killed, and 12,000 of the insurgents made prisoners. The number of killed may probably be exaggerated-though we have lately seen it stated in a respectable Paris paper still higher-but it is certain that there were more general officers killed and wounded than at Austerlitz, and that the prisoners exceeded 10,000.

And so ended, in the greatest slaughter that bloodstained city had ever had to deplore, the attempt of an organization of labour by the State.' M. Emile Thomas's share in it, though very prominent, was in substance very insignificant: the principle had been decreed and promulgated before he thought of meddling with it, and it lasted for a month after him: he only attempted to regularise its internal action; and though he did so with much zeal and some success, we doubt whether it would have not been better for the Government, the workmen, and France, if his organization had not postponed the inevitable accumulation of confusion and difficulties which would have arrested the insatiable principle much earlier in its development. Some slight or even serious dissatisfaction and suffering would no doubt have arisen whenever any check should come to be imposed on the mad pledges of the Provisional Government; but the sooner it had arrived the less fatal it would have been; and at an earlier period something less terrible than the loss of so many thousand lives might have recalled labour into its natural channels.

The lesson has been a cruel one; and we wish, rather than expect, that it may not have been in vain. It has undoubtedly

-r

operated in Paris to sicken for a season even the most disorderly classes of actual émeutes and descentes dans la rue: but we can hardly suppose that the recollection of those Saturnalian days of eight francs a week for no work can be very distasteful to them, or that it can have done much towards correcting the mischievous influences of the so-called 'organization of labour.' In the first place, the Socialists may say with truth that the Ateliers Nationaux were not a fair experiment, nor indeed an experiment at all, of their system-that they were only a makeshift and a juggle on the part of the Government, and a demoralizing seduction of the workpeople; and we believe that, in spite of the increased rigour of the Government, both in prosecutions of the press and in general measures of repression, the doctrines of Communism or Socialism (they are substantially the same) are preached and propagated even more zealously and more extensively than they used to be, though not so publicly or to such numerous audiences. It is in the country districts, formerly so conservative, that the propagandists of those doctrines have now, we are told, the most alarming success. We read every day in

the sober and well-conducted Journal des Débats evidences collected from the provincial press of this spread of folly and demoralization, and it gives us, as a specimen of the rumours and prospects with which these missionaries agitate the country, the following announcement :

'La Sociale-the Social Republic-is at Paris with 200,000 men. It has 300,000,000 of ready cash to distribute amongst the workmen. The Government of Ledru Rollin abolishes all rates and taxes, and we are to have, every man of us, two francs a day even without work.'Deb. 15 Mai, 1850.

When such a paper as the Journal des Débats thinks it worth while to call the serious attention of its readers and the Government to the acceptance which such wild nonsense still finds in France, we may be permitted to doubt whether the great lesson of June, 1848, promises any very durable effect.

ART. VII.-The History of Agriculture in Ancient, Mediæval, and Modern Times. By Chandos Wren Hoskyns, Esq. 12mo. 1849.

EARLY in the eighteenth century Adam Dickson was born

at Aberlady in the county of East Lothian. His father followed the profession of theology and the practice of agriculture, and brought up the son to his own pursuits. A liberal education at the University of Edinburgh qualified him for the former, and

experience

experience on his father's large farm, aided by intercourse with the farmers of that opulent county, who are many of them not unfit to converse with men of letters,' made him an adept in the latter. He was, says his biographer, a man of a very lively apprehension, of an ardent mind, and of a clear and sound judgment.' In 1750 he was ordained minister of Dunse in the shire of Berwick; but even at that early period the anticipatory growlings of the storm, which was destined a century later to rend the Kirk of Scotland in twain, were now and then heard, and an opposition to his settlement was raised among the parishioners of Dunse. Such, however, were the ability, good sense, and engaging temper of Mr. Dickson, and such the candour and generosity of his conduct, that his most sanguine opponents soon became his greatest friends.' Having thus happily surmounted his ecclesiastical troubles, he had time to turn his attention to the spirited exertions which were at that period overcoming, in the county of Berwick, much greater difficulties than had been encountered by the improving agriculturists of his native shire. For several years he vexed his agricultural soul with the books of husbandry which had been published in England, and which were ill calculated for the soil and climate of Scotland.' Moreover, 'many of them consisted chiefly of uncertain speculations on theories not well supported by the history of facts.' By these circumstances and considerations Mr. Dickson was led to 'select for himself a corner of literature for which the habits of his life had peculiarly qualified him. In the year 1764 he published the first volume of a Treatise of Agriculture,' and the second some years afterwards. With this treatise we, with some compunction, acknowledge ourselves to be entirely unacquainted, and must therefore accept the assurance of Mr. Dickson's biographer, that it has ever since been held, not only to be the book best adapted to the practice of the Scottish farmer, but, upon the whole, one of the most judicious and practical treatises on the subject ever published in Britain.' Soon after the completion of this his first work, Mr. Dickson was translated from Dunse to Whippingham in East Lothian, and there he spent the last six years of a life which was accidentally terminated by a fall from his horse. During that period he prepared for publication, by years of anxious study,' a work of considerable interest, of which we propose to give some account to our readers.

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The two branches of Mr. Dickson's education qualified him better than most men who either preceded or have followed him, to trace the analogy between ancient and modern agriculture, and to supply the connecting link. In 1788 this work was printed in Edinburgh by Mr. Dickson's representatives, under the auspices

of