The present ministry did not, from all we could observe, command the confidence of their fellow citizens, nor do I recollect any one of them spoken of without a reference to some incapacity or disqualification for the office. M. Rogier, the minister of public works, had been a third or fourth rate barrister at Liege, and eked out an insufficient professional income by delivering lectures on French literature. His daring and energetic share in the events which displaced the old dynasty, recommended him to employment under the new, but the office assigned to him, that of the interior, involving the guardianship of trade and manufactures, was one for which he was little suited, either by education or taste, and he utterly destroyed the confidence of the merchants and mill owners, by avowing in one of his addresses to them, that they must be prepared to see “_commerce die a lingering death_,” if it were conducive to the permanence of the new order of things. M. Liedtz, with whom we had an interview this morning, had, like M. Rogier, been a lawyer, but of some standing and eminence in his profession. He had been, we heard, unfavourable to the revolution at its first out-break, but his talents speedily recommended him to the notice of the new authorities, who promoted him to be judge in the district of Antwerp, whence he was transferred to his present office on the removal of M. Rogier, to that of public works. He received us in a suite of very elegant apartments, much superior to those with which our own ministers are accommodated in Downing Street. He is a native of Audenarde, of humble parentage, but of considerable practical acquirements, especially on agricultural matters. He received us most affably, and after some conversation on commercial subjects, reverted at once to his own hobby, by asking after the progress of agriculture in Great Britain. The object of greatest interest with us was the duty which it had been announced that it was in contemplation by the government to impose upon the export of flax, and to which I have before alluded as the extraordinary expedient suggested by the agricultural members of the chambers, in order to protect the hand spinners from being superseded by machinery. The minister seemed fully to understand the absurdity of the suggestion, but still admitted that the “pressure from without” might compel him to introduce a bill upon the subject. He informed us, that a negociation has just been concluded with some speculators in the United States, supported by the Belgian government, with a view to running a line of steam-packets of great power from New York and Philadelphia to Antwerp and Ostend, touching at one of the southern ports of England, and thus it was expected securing a share of the passenger trade, as well as opening, by degrees, a market for Belgian produce in the United States.