“The general discussion of the budget gives us the right of making some summary remarks upon each of its provisions. The public debt, however contracted, is sacred. I regret, in common with others, its recent increase; but without recriminations here, as the errors of the first restoration, which produced the 20th March, or as to the fatal landing which came to mingle itself with the progress of a more salutary and less turbulent resistance, or as to the conditions of the last treaty of peace, stipulated exclusively between the powers at war with France and the august ally of those powers, I will confine myself to drawing from the past an important lesson for the future, which is, that it would have cost, as I said at the time, much less to expel the coalition of foreigners than to treat with it; and that, if ever such a state of things should recur, and that, following the example of Napoleon and the provisional government, the rulers of France should hesitate to call out the people _en masse_, it would be alike the duty and the safety of that people themselves to leap to their arms, and combining with one accord the million arms of her warlike generation and devoted youth, to bury beneath them, as she might do, the violators of her independence. “The civil list has been voted for the whole duration of this reign; but when, in consequence of encroachments and dilapidations forty million francs of personal revenue for the monarch and his family begin to be considered as insufficient, it is allowable to look at—I will not say that country of ten millions of inhabitants, where the salary of the chief magistrate is not equal to that of a French minister, but at the monarchical, aristocratic, and expensive government of England; where, nevertheless, the provision for the princes is smaller than in France; and where more than half the civil list is employed in paying the diplomatic corps, ministers, and judges; where the sum for which the king is not bound to account does not exceed a million and a half of francs.... Whatever may have been the losses and the pressure caused by a just defence against the aggressions of European cabinets, and which the ambition of a conqueror provoked, it must be owned, by more than one act of perfidy on the part of those courts, has since immeasurably increased; the enormous amount of the pension list arises from other causes. These are to be found in the rapid succession of the different governments in France, each anxious to create vacancies in favor of its friends; and, above all, in the recent irruption of a crowd of pretenders, all claiming rewards for having, either in will or in deed, in foreign pay or in domestic insurrections, on the highways or in obscure idleness, and even beneath the imperial liveries, manifested or dissembled their opposition to those governments which, each flattered in its turn, are now all called illegitimate. It is thus, that by