interests, the country people of the provinces were not disposed to listen to argument or reason; and in the discontent at the exorbitant exactions of the capital the jealousy of the departments towards Paris waxed stronger and stronger. Another cause, which added greatly to the increasing apprehension and aversion was the preaching of the communist doctrines in Paris, upon the first establishment of republican principles, and the support apparently given to these wild and spoliating principles by certain members of the Provisional Government itself. If there be any feeling more alive than any other in the breast of the French peasant, it is that attached to the acquirement and the possession of landed property in however humble a form, be it but a small field or a tiny vineyard. If he has any hope, any ambition, any sentiment, which he thinks worth living for, it is the extension, by any and every means, of his small domain. On the fact of this possession are concentrated all the mainspring motives and agencies of his whole existence--in this, his industry, his talent, his cunning, his thoughts, his affections, his very love for his children, to whom he hopes to transmit it. The great _mobile_ of the character of the French peasant is self-interest in this respect. The doctrines, then, which preached that the possession of all landed property by individuals is an infamous spoliation of the _res publica_, filled the country people in the provinces with the liveliest alarm, and contributed to establish a still greater hatred to a state of things that tended to produce results so fatally detrimental to all that they held dear. The Parisian, almost as blindly ignorant of the state of his own country--which, in his theory that Paris is all France, he looks upon with indifference, if not contempt--as he is proverbially utterly ignorant of every other country beyond the frontiers of France, even the most neighbouring--and, in fact, of every thing that touches upon geography or the state of nations, of which he has only the vaguest and most incorrect notions--thought that all his wild fraternity schemes, developed and accepted by those who possessed nothing, in the capital, would be received with enthusiasm also by the "miserable, oppressed, and tyrannised inhabitant of the fields and plains;"--such was the language used, and eagerly caught up. The Parisian soon found, by experience, that he had made a gross mistake. The emissaries sent down into the provinces by the professors and high-priests of communism, or by the ultra clubs, and supported, there is every reason to believe, by the members of the government before alluded to, met only with the most active repulsion. Their Utopian ideas of universal fraternity and spoliation of property were scorned, scouted, and opposed: themselves were hooted, pelted, almost lapidated as incendiary enemies of the peasant. "The innocent and humble inhabitant of