as to my counsel, they may go on if they are free, but if they are to be restrained by your limits, I forbid them to speak, You see," he said, turning to M. Berryer, who was anxious to continue, "that it is a decided thing. I had rather have no defence than one chalked out by my accusers.'

"Then," said M. Bellart, "we waive our right of reply; if the defence is at an end, so is the accusation. We have only to demand the judgment of the Court."

"Have you any thing to add?" said the chancellor, turning to the prisoner and his counsel.

"Nothing whatever," replied Ney, in rather an impatient tone.' *

The Chamber was then cleared, and the peers alone remained in deliberation; the result of their deliberation, and of the attempts afterwards made to obtain a pardon, are too notorious to require repetition.

The execution of Ney was one of the grossest faults of the Restoration his crime was great, but, as we have seen, it was not premeditated; only a few hours elapsed between his active fidelity and his treason; it was the effect of the pressure of circumstances of extraordinary difficulty and perplexity on a mind unaccustomed to balance conflicting motives. If Ney had been a man of higher education, he would have felt that no motive justifies a failure in honour. But he had been trained in revolutionary camps; the only fidelity to which he had been accustomed was fidelity to France, and fidelity to the Emperor. He was now required to become an emigrant from the one and an opponent to the other; he was required to do this, though he believed the cause of the Bourbons to be irretrievably lost, and the reign of Bonaparte an inevitable calamity. No one can doubt what his conduct ought to have been; but no one can wonder at what it actually was. It must be added, that his treason was really harmless; no opposition on his part could have retarded, by a single hour, the entry of Bonaparte into Paris. If he had followed the example of Macdonald, he must have shared his fatehave seen his troops join the usurper, and then have fled across the frontier; the only consequence would have been, that Bonaparte would have had one brave man less at Quatre-Bras and Waterloo. Under such circumstances, his execution, even if it had been legal, would have been impolitic. Public opinion would have sanctioned his degradation, perhaps his banishment, but not his death.

But the judgment under which he suffered was manifestly

* Procès, No. iv. p. 37, 38, 39. Berryer, vol. i. p. 376.

illegal. Royalist as he is, M. Berryer is so convinced of this, that he accounts for it by the irrational supposition, that it was extorted from the King by the allied powers for the mere purpose of degrading the French army. Ney was included in the words and in the spirit of the convention. To deny validity to the convention because it was entered into with rebels, was to affirm the execrable doctrine, that faith is not to be kept in civil war. To deny its validity because it was not formally accepted by the King, was to add fraud to oppression; for what can be a baser fraud than to accept the benefits of an agreement and to refuse its obligations? There was not a human being to whom that convention was so beneficial as Louis. If it had not been effected-if, after the slaughter of 25,000 of its defenders, Paris had had to endure the horrors of a town taken by assault, could Louis have retained a crown so recovered for a longer period than while English and Austrian troops occupied his capital and his country? Louis owed to that convention his throne as an independent monarch. When we recollect this, it is unnecessary to refer to the well-known fact alluded to by M. Berryer, that Louis did expressly recognize the convention, by appealing to it in order to prevent Blucher from destroying the Pont de Jena.

As is usually the case with political crimes, it received its retribution. The recollection of Ney's death was one of the principal causes of the unpopularity with the army which haunted the elder Bourbons; and fifteen years afterwards, when, in their utmost need, they had to rely on the army for support, that recollection precipitated their fall.

We have said that the trial of Ney exercised an unfavourable influence on the subsequent fortunes of M. Berryer. He had obtained from the King the fullest permission to act for the prisoner a permission which might have been supposed to be unnecessary to an advocate filling no office under the crown; but, though the permission was granted, the act was registered as an offence. It was thought, too, that he had too much identified himself with his client. In his honest indignation against the restriction imposed on the defence, he had ventured to call it a denial of justice; and, what was worse, in consequence of the recollections which the term excited-a revolutionary proceeding: this seems never to have been forgiven. The result was, that he was excluded under the Restoration, as he had been under the Empire, from the Conseil de Discipline and the dignity of Bâtonnier, an exclusion to which he attaches what seems to us an undue importance.

The subsequent life of M. Berryer contains no facts sufficiently interesting to lead us to dwell on them. In 1825 he visited

London, on business connected with the administration of the estate of a French subject who died in England. He was charmed, as might have been expected, with his reception by Sir Coppley, (aujourd'hui Lord Linthurst,) Atthorney-Général,' (we copy literatim ;) gratified by the respect paid to him when he appeared in court; and amused by finding there people en perruque à la Louis XIV. He ascertained, he says, that his reception was meant as a return for that with which Lord Erskine had been honoured, at a sitting of the Cour d'Appel of Paris. This, however, we can assure him is a mistake. It was scarcely possible that any one of those who rose in Westminster Hall to welcome a distinguished stranger, could have heard how Lord Erskine had been treated twenty years before in Paris; and it must be added, that the mere announcement of M. Berryer's name was a sufficient passport to the attention of a British bar.

Soon after his return from London M. Berryer ceased to appear regularly in court; he was entering his 69th year, and began to feel daily contests oppressive. He found, too, his eldest son, by this time a distinguished advocate, often opposed to him; he thinks that this was done by the suitors intentionally, which is not very probable, since it diminished the efficiency of the son as much as that of the father. The result has been, that for some years he has nearly confined himself to chamber business and arbitrations. He continued, indeed, up to the time of the publication of his memoirs, to plead at the bar in causes in which he possessed peculiar information, and perhaps may continue to do so up to the present time. The last circumstance of this kind which he mentions, took place at Rouen in the end of the year 1837; and he tells with pleasure his reappearance, after an interval of sixty years, at the scene of one of his earliest triumphs.

M. Berryer dwells with just pride on the extent and long continuance of his labours. When we consider that his practice embraced every branch of jurisprudence, ecclesiastical, international, civil, and criminal; that he performed the duties of a solicitor as well as those of a barrister; and that he has been engaged in these duties, with scarcely any interruption, for more than sixty years; his readiness to undergo toil, and his power of enduring it, are perhaps unparalleled. He attributes his success to his domestic happiness, and to a natural gaiety of disposition, fostered by the amenity, and, to use his own expression, the joyousness, of the manners and habits which for the first thirty-four years of his life adorned his country. But now, he says, no one smiles in France; he finds himself, between eighty and ninety, too young for his associates, and is forced to repress a thousand sallies which the gravity of the times would not tolerate. He

tells us, that for the same reason he has suppressed the most amusing parts of his Recollections;' and defers his full revelations until a period when the public may be better prepared for them.

He has appended to the narrative portion of his work some propositions on Political Economy and Legislation, the results of his long experience and meditation. We cannot venture to call the attention of our readers to them on any other ground than as specimens of the degree of knowledge on these subjects which has been acquired by a French lawyer, far superior in intelligence to the bulk of his brethren.

He conceives it to be the duty of the government to regulate production, and promote an equivalent consumption. For the first purpose, he thinks that the minister of commerce ought to direct, by a perpetual course of regulations founded on accurate statistical facts, all the proceedings of agriculture and manufactures. For the second purpose, he proposes to check the tendency to systematic economy, which he thinks the great enemy of consumption, by a tax on accumulated capital ;-the amount to be ascertained by requiring from every capitalist a declaration of his fortune, and any concealment to be punished by confiscation. Such a tax he thinks would prevent the parsimony which dries up the channels of circulation. He further proposes to establish in every department a bank, to be managed by landholders, of which the capital should consist of land, and which should issue notes to a corresponding amount; and also insurance companies, to secure the punctual payment of rents, and relieve landholders from the temptation to provide, by annual savings, against irregularity of income-such savings being, in M. Berryer's opinion, unfavourable to circulation. He thinks that eighty-three new peers ought to be created, one for each department; that their dignity should be hereditary, and that its transmission to an unfit person should be prevented by an examination, from time to time, into the moral and intellectual qualities of each successor. He thinks that the tendency in man to better his condition and to change his residence should be repressed. He proposes that no one should be allowed to exempt himself from military service (the great oppression of France) by finding a substitute, unless he can prove that he has always resided under his father's roof, and that it is probable that he will continue to do so; and that no one shall be allowed to serve as a substitute, unless he can show that he has always resided in the parish where he was born. Further, that those who have changed their residences shall be subjected to increased taxation, and that no one shall be eligible to any local office if he have quitted his birth-place.

He ventures to insinuate a regret at the complete abolition of lettres de cachet, and, as a substitute, proposes to give parents and guardians power over children and wards until the age of twentyfive.

He proposes to create courts of equity, with criminal and civil jurisdiction, for the purpose of punishing offences not cognizable by the existing law, and forcing people to be liberal and grateful. Since religion and morality,' says he, have lost their power, they must be supplied by legal coercion.'

Such views, in so eminent a member of the French bar, explain Bonaparte's contempt of advocates!

The work is written in an easy, but rather careless style; and, to the inconvenience of a foreign reader, is full of unexplained technical terms. The great fault of the short narratives of which it is composed, is a perplexed arrangement of facts. To make our extracts intelligible, we have often been forced to transpose

them.

ART. V.-The Laws relating to India, and the East India Company: with Notes and an Appendix. Quarto. Third Edition, London: 1842.

IN N treating, on several recent occasions, of the affairs of British India-of its system of land revenue, its political relations, its commercial wrongs and claims, and its judicial administration -we have studied to divest our statements of all oriental forms and colouring not absolutely essential to their fidelity; and to communicate the information which we desired to impart, in the shape most easily intelligible, and therefore most palatable, to the largest possible number of English readers. We have taken this course, though we knew that it would expose us to the charge of shallowness from those Anglo-Indians who could not see, or would not appreciate, our end; because we have proposed to ourselves, as the one great object of our endeavours, to open the eyes of the people of England to the great value of their much neglected possessions in the East; and to point out to them the means by which, in our judgment, that value may be most largely enhanced, and most beneficially realized. We have not, therefore, addressed ourselves primarily to persons already conversant with Indian affairs; but to that great body-the British public-whose enlightened convictions, and the consequent exertion of whose prevailing influ