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Hon. Mr. McGee followed Mr. Buchanan. But the occasion was not one of those on which he could best display his gifts of oratory; for in such a debate as the one now engaging the attention of the Assembly, there was no room for imagination, or figures of rhetoric. He began by saying that the motion was hostile to Montreal, and that the accusers of that city were those whom it had rejected. He failed to see that, in the transaction before the House, there was any ground for condemnation. He thought it was unmanly to make an attack on one member of the Government on account of a matter that took place five years ago, during the existence of another Government. He informed the House, that although the assault was specially directed against one member yet all the members of the Government would feel bound to stand by him; and, throughout this controversy, make the case their own. Whatever the decision of the House might be, he had no doubt that the verdict of the intelligent public opinion of the country would be that the present motion was both frivolous and vexatious.

The debate went on, and the wave of speech swelled, and now and then threatened to break into the bitter spray of personality. The hour was now growing late, but the debate showed no signs of coming to a speedy conclusion. Mr. Cameron, a friend of the Government, sought to neutralise, by an amendment, the motion of Hon. Mr. Dorion.

The Hon. George Brown, here raised a question of order. It was to the effect that an amendment to an amendment to go into committee of supply, could not be received. The Speaker decided in favour of the objection raised by the Hon. George Brown. The motion of Mr. Dorion was opposed by the Hon. John Rose, a speaker who always won upon the House by his suavity and good temper. Mr. Rose-now Sir John Rose was a Conservative in politics, and

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as such had held office. But he was not now in the Ministry. He was a fluent speaker, and his good temper often served him in cases where argument would have been demanded of other men. He rose to oppose the motion of Mr. Dorion. He styled it unfair and unnecessary, and argued that it was wrong to endeavour to fix responsibility on Mr. Galt.

After some remarks from Messrs. Rankin and Street, the Hon. John A. Macdonald rose. He is a master in the art of swaying the feelings of his followers. His speech had in it more of the pathetic than the defiant or recriminative. He accepted Mr. Dorion's motion as amounting to one of want of confidence; then raising his voice and looking first toward his own back benches, and then glancing across the House at the Opposition, he said :-"We are a band of brothers and will stand or fall together."

Mr. Cartwright announced his determination to oppose the motion of Mr. Dorion, He was followed by the Hon. Mr. Galt. There was nothing of the apologetic or the timid in his speech. He declared warmly that, though the object of the motion was to drive him from public life, it would not accomplish that intention. Mr. Thomas Ferguson, one of their most staunch friends, came to the defence of the Government and was followed by Mr. Scatcherd. The hour was now half-past eleven, and as soon as Mr. Scatcherd resumed his seat, there arose cries all over the House "divide, divide," " call in the members, call in the members." The Speaker, after waiting for a few moments to see if any gentleman wished to address the House, gave directions to call in the members. At this moment the excitement on the floor of the House was so great as to reach the utmost verge of Parliamentary decorum. In the public galleries, so absorbing was the interest, that not a sound could be heard from the hundreds who occupied them.

The members are in their places, and the

Clerk of the House begins to take the vote. First, he calls out the names of those on the Government benches; then the names of the members on the opposite side. He then sits down to add up the numbers. For the few moments during which the Clerk is engaged over his list, there is profound silence in every part of the building. The hush of expectation is almost painful in its depth and intensity. A few seconds pass, and then the Clerk rises to his feet and announces the result: "Yeas, 60; nays, 58." These words were the doom of the old Constitution.

The Hon. John A. Macdonald rose, and said: "I move that the House do now adjourn." The motion met with no opposition; all were silent, and at a quarter of an hour before midnight the Speaker left the chair. The sequel to this vote is briefly told. On the afternoon of the next day, as soon as the House had assembled, Attorney-General Macdonald stated on behalf of himself and his colleagues that, after the vote of last

night, they considered their position was so seriously affected, that they had felt it their duty to communicate with His Excellency on the subject. He then moved an adjournment of the House until next day. Hon. John Sandfield Macdonald pressed for further information as to the course the Government intended to pursue. But Hon. George Brown pleaded that, in view of the difficulties with which the Government had to contend, the House should allow them ample time for deliberation, The motion for adjournment was carried.

The result of the matter was that a correspondence began between the Government and the leader of the Upper Canadian Opposition. Thence came a Coalition, entered into solely for the purpose of extricating the Province out of the constitutional embarrassment arising from the equal political strength of parties. Then followed the Quebec Conference; then Confederation.

LOVE IN DEATH.

From the Poem of Catullus-" Ad Calvum de Quintilia.”

IF aught we do can touch the silent bier,

If death can feel and prize affection's tear,

Thy wife, my friend, cut off in beauty's bloom,

Joys in thy love, more than she mourns her doom.

TRANSLATIONS AND SELECTIONS.

THE END OF "BOHEMIA."

An Essay on the part played by Literature and Journalism in the recent Events in France. By E. CARO. Translated and abridged from the "Revue des Deux Mondes" for the "Canadian Monthly."

WE

E have just escaped a new species of bar- | barism-a lettered barbarism, for, let it be well known, this last assault upon civilization was nothing else. Its sinister army was headed by writers, some of whom were men of talent, wits even who had enjoyed a certain renown, and could still hope for one more hour's celebrity on the Boulevards. This is one of the peculiar features of the recent events. Till then the insurrectionary battalions had generally been recruited amidst the working population, under the command of ordinary barricade generals such as Barbès, or of veteran conspirators like Blanqui. This time, we see appear at the head of this mock-government, a list of names belonging originally to the civilized world, to literature, science, and the schools. The statistics of the liberal professions which have furnished their quota to the Commune of Paris show that the profession of medicine, the public schools, the fine arts, go hand in hand with an abundance of unavowable professions. The men of letters however prevail; we find them everywhere in the Commune and its surroundings. The troupe, that for two months gave such lugubrious performances at the Hotel de Ville, was chiefly composed of journalists, pamphleteers, and even novelists. It was indeed a gypsy literature that thus invaded the government. The "Bohème" was officially born in May, 1850, in a preface by Henry Murger; and it was again in May, 1871, that we saw it fall on the bloody pavement where it had played its part in an ignominious tyranny. And yet, it had entered the world in a most inoffensive manner: it began with a burst of laughter in a garret. After twenty-one years of a life which soon ceased to be innocent, and wherein idleness and vanity vied for

the upper hand, it found its end behind a barricade, and breathed its last in a cry of despair and rage, leaving to the world an abhorred name and a moral enigma, which we will here endeavour to solve.

This Bohemian life did not originate with Henry Murger; he only discovered it, and revealed to us its little mysteries. He presented it so full of innocent gaiety, so charmingly careless, so delightfully indiscreet, that one would have been ill-natured indeed to cross such fine spirits, ever ready to fly off in songs at the first sunbeam, or at the first breath of spring. The critics and the public agreed in bidding the writer and his work welcome, and "Bohemia" was accepted as a sprightly revelation.

Around the Luxembourg and under its lilac trees gathered, years ago, a group of writers without reputation, painters without commissions, and poor musicians, who, united by the bonds which a wandering companionship generally forms, dreamed together in the small circles where they met, of fortune and brilliant destinies. Along with these chimeras they indulged also in the very positive satisfaction of demolishing any already established renown, growing reputation, or consecrated talent with which they happened to meet. These men, closely examined, were in reality very pitiable objects. They considered themselves the martyrs of art, and their historian, to conceal the rather distressing side of their existence, throws into it mirth, spirit, sentiment, above all, that supremely irresistible grace which covers all deficiencies-youth. Thus far " Bohemia" was comparatively an innocent institution : its gypsy heroes were only rebels against art whose austere worship they desecrated by their follies,

and whose high conditions

thought, continuous effort, dignity of life-they
ignored. After them came the rebels against
society, the so-called "réfractaires," and the
comparative innocence came soon to an end
How was the transformation brought about?
Simply thus a needy literature became, by
a fatal transition, a literature of envy. Already
in the first stages of "Bohemia" we see the
germs of evil passions; inability aggravated by
idleness, exasperated by absurd pretensions,
sharpened into a kind of a perpetual irony
against every thing that labours and rises;
lastly, a fixed determination to consider no one
more in earnest than themselves, and horror
of common
sense pushed to a systematic
infatuation. Transport now these instincts of
the literary" Bohemia" into the midst of the
political world, into the heated atmosphere of
passions and the hatred they engender; add
to it the fixed idea of reaching by all possible
means the summit of power and fortune, the
deplorable emulation which the spectacle of
triumphant ambition and scandalous riches
excite in certain minds: throw all these seeds
into bilious temperaments, into restless and
scoffing minds, into consciences long since
hardened against scruples of any kind, and you
will see what deadly harvests will spring up.

seriousness of so like a challenge to fate,-fate which sufers no immoderate prosperities, and always chastises them through their own excesses-that there was cause enough for patriotic anxiety. The Paris of M. Hausmann, the Bois de Boulogne seen on horse-race days, the insolent ostentation of the wealth of France spread before the eyes of jealous Europe in the Palais de l'Exposition; in short, the excess of luxury and of expenditure lavished by the hands of improvident power in evident complicity with a large portion of the nation, called indeed for rebuke; and it is not to be wondered at that austere indignation should have aroused the country to a sense of its danger. But that the very men who had most contributed to the decay of the people's morals and reason by the amiable recklessness of their works and ideas should come out as its reformers, was rather startling. Was their wrath genuine? Were they indeed inspired by a feeling of morality superior to the one they condemned? We have a right to inquire. Satire is of real worth, and produces the desired effect only when it springs from the higher regions of the soul, and from a love of justice. The Juvenal who is not a stoic is hardly much more than a declaimer. No, these redressors of wrongs were, as time as proved since, nowise animated with the desire of making virtue reign in the land. There was first the passion for the easy popularity which polemics, and especially abusive polemics, procure in a country like France; and as success increased, these selfstyled philanthropists took advantage of it. How convenient and agreeable to overthrow one order of things and build up another, where one would have a chance of becoming master and tyrant! Little did these men care for liberty or the assertion of popular rights; all they aimed at was the despotism of the crowd in the place of the power overthrown; they hoped to rule through and with the people. The real name of this Nemesis was not justice but envy.

In the midst of these threatening symptoms appeared a curious manifestation which simple minds might well have hailed as remedial. A sudden change is felt in the light literature which heretofore had usually provided the public with small scandals, and hand to hand news. A purifying breath of generous wrath

seemed to have come over the souls of fashionable authors, and there was a momentary hope that the press was going to become a school of morals. Certain ardent novelists who till then had amused the public, turned all at once moralists, pamphleteers, satirists, and well nigh converted the people. To be sure there was cause enough for using the whip against the "French of the Decadence." It would have been useless to deny that this epoch apparently so brilliant, with so dazzling a society, was undermined by a strange evil various in its forms, irresistibly contagious, and that in listening one could hear as it were the vague sound of an approaching ruin. Those insane joys and frivolities, that feverish pleasure-seeking, that mania for immediate fortune seemed

We have mentioned the two first phases of the French "Bohemia," a suffering and a militant stage in the third stage it comes out triumphant. This triumph dates from the elections of 1869. The nomination of Rochefort to the Legislature marks in fact a new era in the destinies of" Bohemia." It is from this moment that feverish clubs are founded, and disturbing

newspapers are spread over the country. These clubs were nothing else than revolt in a state of permanence, or rather revolt on exhibition every evening; and their newspapers, a perpetual call to arms in every section of Paris. This loud voice of the political "Bohemia " reached much further, and stirred the masses much more profoundly than the official rhetoric and restrained wrath of the parliamentary Opposition. The most famous ringleaders of the crowd were Bohemians who had been trained for political life in the so-called literary cafés ; why so called, it were hard to tell. In the history of recent events we have not taken sufficient account of that education in eccentric babble, and extravagance of speech around tables where the most pretentious vanities of the Parisian" Bohemia" were wont to meet ; and yet it seems a fact beyond doubt that many of the episodes of the last sad times can be traced to these gatherings. To give an example of this table talk, we will quote what one of these "Bohemians," well acquainted with Bohemian morals, from having steadily practised them, says in reference to the regular visitors of these cafés :

"After having tramped all day in the mud, they come and plunge up to the neck in discussions. Liquor is called for, and the paradoxes flare up. They want to show that they too, the ill shod and ill clad, are as good as any one else. Conquered in the morning, they become in their turn conquerors at night. Vanity is satisfied; they become accustomed to these small triumphs and lofty babblings, to these endless dissertations and little dashes of heroism. The tavern table becomes a rostrum. They talk there under the gas light the books they should have written by candle light; the evenings pass away, the days pass away; they have talked thirty chapters and have not written fifteen pages."

We have not sufficiently heeded this political generation that had passed its apprenticeship in the cafés of the Cité, and on the Boulevards, and which, on a certain day, spread over all France with its strange morals, its bold tropes, its small stock of learning, its unlimited conceit, its unhealthy flow of spirits borrowed from the glass of absinthe. This perfidious liquor has had no small share in the disorganization of the Parisian brain. The Faculty of Medicine was already alarmed about it when the political events

of the last years justified its fears. The physical and moral hygiene of a nation are much more closely related than we suppose: we but indicate here one of the most dangerous maladies of our civilization. The absinthe produces in Paris orators and politicians, as the opium in China makes ecstatic dreamers: both amount to about the same thing, with this difference, that the mute ecstacy induced by the Eastern narcotic is only a slow suicide, and its victims do not inflict upon their country the scourge of despotic nonsense and impious madness; their dream, whatever it is, remains untold; they do not endeavour to realize it over ruins and bloodshed.

It was in the clubs that these tavern orators first sprang up. Those who watched their meetings with some attention, observers who did not go there as to a show, but as to a clinical lecture, could see that the most applauded orators were of two kinds : intelligent workmen, who had read much, but at hap-hazard, without guidance, overloading their memories with all sorts of indigestible stuff and anti-social declamations, and students, old Bohemians, who had long since abandoned all study and connection with the School of Law or Medicine, to devote themselves to transcendental politics and humanitarian regeneration. Add to this already very respectable group, a few physicians without practice, lawyers without cases, professors without pupils, editors of short-lived newspapers, all the pariahs of the liberal careers, "who carry their M.A. diplomas in their threadbare coatpockets," and you have what constitutes the staff of the clubs which, for the last two years, have amused sceptical Paris and horrified all reasonable people, and who, by disturbing the mind of the nation, prepared the 18th of March. The literary element of these meetings, fully rivalled in radicalism of ideas (if such a name can be given to such things), the oratorical contingent furnished by the working classes.

There was, however, a capital difference between the two. The orator-workmen were men who studied little, and treated these social questions at random; but they were sincere--they acted from a sense of conviction-they brought into the cause what might be called the probity of unreasonableness. The others, the Paris "irréguliers," had not even that excuse. Their folly was a wilful folly; the most insane propositions were to them means of duping the people and

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