ART. IV.-Mémoires d'un Ministre du Trésor Public.-4 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1845. (Not published.)

THE autobiography of a Chancellor of the Exchequer or a Paymaster-General is a subject not lightly to be approached by ourselves or incautiously imposed on the patience of our readers. We engage then at the outset to pass by the chronology of departed budgets and to forswear the mysteries of double entry. We shall neither linger at the receipt of custom nor perplex our pages with the tableaux of what is termed a 'financial situation' -but, leaving these scrinia sacra, endeavour to draw some attention to the personal history of a statesman who has seldom been surpassed for good sense and integrity.

The work before us was commenced in 1817 as a record of the actions of a well-spent life, and it includes a large quantity of notes taken at the time from the conversations of Napoleon, besides an extensive selection from his administrative correspondence. A great judge of mankind, who has himself passed alternately through the fascination of the Emperor's genius and the indignities of his resentment, assures us that upon the whole no known memoirs give so accurate a picture of his peculiar qualities and defects in the transaction of civil business. This book still remains unpublished, though completed by its author before his death, and even printed under his directions. It was his will that the work should be considered the private property of his excellent wife during her survivorship, and accordingly it is to the personal courtesy of Countess Mollien that we owe this opportunity of anticipating the judgment of the public on the eminent abilities and the estimable character of her husband.

We have seldom had the good fortune to meet with a more genuine production in this branch of literature: and we mean by that expression not only the indisputable authenticity of the work -a point not always to be overlooked in French memoirs-but the absence of theatrical display, the truthfulness of impressions, the modesty and good faith which pervade this narrative of so many great and strange events. M. Mollien brought to the service of his country all the qualities most opposed to the prevailing illusions and excesses of his epoch, and to the showy but ephemeral grandeur of the government to which he belonged. The world was convulsed by a paroxysm, but nothing could shake his stubborn arithmetic. He lived through a storm of revolution, bankruptcy, violence, and war, with unshaken fidelity to the traditions of authority, with the nicest regard for the obligations of public credit, with an inflexible adherence to right as the sole

basis of permanent power, and with undisguised apprehensions as to the result of the imperial policy. Throughout that eventful era Mollien was always the drab-coloured man, constant at his desk with his pen behind his ear. His sedate remarks and his sinister forebodings, in the midst of so much waste and riot, remind us of the unheeded steward in Hogarth's picture of the Rake's Progress. Nothing could inflame his imagination or subvert his principles; and whether shouts of victory or the crash of defeat rolled beneath him, he remained in unshaken composure, until Napoleon himself ejaculated one day in 1814, Mon cher, il n'y a plus d'Empire.'

He lived for esteem rather than for renown; and the services he rendered to the Imperial Government were not the less important because they were unostentatious and frequently unavowed. He retained those qualities of personal dignity, and a sense of public duty, to which revolutionary governments are commonly most fatal; and he held extremely cheap that adventurous and haphazard spirit which formed the chief greatness of his contemporaries. For this reason, however, these volumes are deficient in the minuter sketches of private life usually expected from Memoirs. The personal narrative of the writer is reduced to a slender compass, and he only alludes to the principal occurrences of his own career as much as is indispensably necessary to explain his connexion with public events. In a word, he led what is termed a life of business, and even his memoirs are written with as much conscientious labour and precision as a report on the state of the Treasury. They deserve, therefore, to rank above the class of personal reminiscences of the Empire to which they might be supposed to belong; and from the remarkable soundness of the economical principles which Count Mollien professed, as well as from his acute analysis of the resources of Napoleon's government, they may form a valuable addition to the libraries of statesmen.

In spite of all that has been said of the state of French society before the outbreak of the Revolution, and of the destructive influence which the eighteenth century had already exercised upon the fundamental principles of religion and order, that Revolution undoubtedly found in the prime of life a race of men whose equals France has not produced at any subsequent period-and the generation it sacrificed stands far superior in energy and solid ability, if not in intelligence, to the generation formed after its own image. To that race of men, whose representatives were ere long to sit as sovereigns on the benches of the Tiers, young Mollien belonged. He was the son of a merchant at Rouen, born in 1758, in that class of life to which,' as he says, 'I should myself have chosen

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to belong, since it is neither tormented with envy nor apt to inspire it-voluntarily dependent on the laws, but dependent only on mankind by reciprocal duties.' Having gained some prize at the University of Paris, the reversion of an under clerkship in the Treasury was promised him by a friend of his father; and in the mean time he pursued the study of the law. At this period his father took occasion to address to him some judicious remarks on the receipt of those professional emoluments which secure independence in life, but which Mollien's juvenile delicacy fancied to be inconsistent with his own dignity; and the parental admonition was terminated by placing in his hands a copy of Smith's Wealth of Nations.

'PROPERTY,' said the old man, is a word which I never pronounce without respect, and I confess I have found no work which defines it exactly as I comprehend it. The elder jurists consider it chiefly as an affair of transfer and inheritance; but my notice was lately drawn to an English book, in which I find, though not a special treatise on property, more extended notions of its elements, of the circumstances which affect it, of the ties it establishes amongst men, to whom it affords under so many different forms the sole matter of exchange. I recommend this author to your meditations; he has imagined nothing, but he has observed everything; his theory is exact, not conjectural; it explains the mechanism of society as Newton explained the solar system-by proving it. Such a book ought to be in the hands of all who take any part in public affairs, and especially of those who direct them. I am an old man, yet I can scarcely name a minister who has studied or who would have applied these principles. Perhaps the writer speaks to his readers in too high a tone, for it is not by contempt that false opinions can be effectually attacked; but as you, my son, are not called upon to enlighten or to govern others, it is for your own guidance that I exhort you to study the doctrines of my English author, whom I regret to find extremely superior to the economists of France. Be prudent enough not to use what you may find in it as a means of censure on our own government, but regulate your personal conduct by its maxims.'-i. 57.

This paternal exhortation powerfully contributed to give a lasting direction to young Mollien's life. His mind was thoroughly imbued with the clear fixed principles of Adam Smith on subjects then obscure to many of the most thinking men in Europe. He accustomed himself more and more to make the laws and obligations of property the constant subject of his reflections, until they became his rule of conduct and his test of truth. Every question resolved itself at last in his mind into a financial equation; and as, contrary to the prediction of his father, he was called upon to take an important part in the government of the largest empire the world had witnessed since the fall of Rome,

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he presents the singular anomaly of a French minister under the reign of Buonaparte steadily endeavouring to apply the principles of Adam Smith, as far as he was able to prevail against the prejudices of his time and the passions of his master. Shortly afterwards, having relinquished the practice of the law, partly in consequence of the advice of an elderly advocate who sagaciously predicted the catastrophe already impending over the legal profession, Mollien received a regular appointment under the ferme générale, or financial company then entrusted with the collection of the public revenue.

During the seventeen years which he spent in the labours of this department he passed successively under the orders of no less than fifteen finance-ministers, and he had remarkable opportunities of studying and comprehending that extraordinary and increasing series of financial difficulties which at last brought about the dissolution of the monarchy. Financial burdens of far greater amount are now borne with comparative ease-financial difficulties requiring far stronger remedies are now boldly solved. But the French Treasury under Louis XVI. had fallen into the hands of empirics. The excellent intentions of the King were defeated by the feeble instruments he was compelled to choose. Confidence was destroyed, and the machinery of fiscal administration was incurably old, oppressive, and ineffective. A clandestine warfare was carried on against the fiscal authority deputed to the ferme, for in the single year 1783 the contraband of salt was so extensive that 4000 domiciliary visits had been made, 2500 men, 2000 women, 6600 children, 1200 horses, and 56 vehicles had been arrested on the public roads, 200 convicts were sent to the galleys, and out of the 6000 forçats then in the bagnes one-third were sentenced as smugglers. M. Necker declared the interest of the debt of France in 1785 to be 207 millions of livres, but that sum increased by 10 millions before the end of the year, and from 1774 to 1785 the augmentation in the interest of the debt had been 123 millions. But this funded debt," says M. Mollien, was not the only one which Louis XV. had bequeathed to his successor; it was not so much it, as the unfunded debt, left floating and without security, which was deepening the abyss.' It was in a word the accumulated result of dishonesty and procrastination and of unclosed accounts in every department of the Government. In 1785 M. Necker computed this arrear at 250 millions; in 1789 it exceeded 550; and the result of these debts-disguised under the name of outstanding accounts-was to render it almost impossible for the State to contract any regular loan except on most onerous conditions. We advert to these figures, which give a brief summary

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of French finance before the Revolution, because in our own day we are witnessing a repetition of many of the same phenomenaa rapid series of ill-qualified ministers, governing on no financial system, but providing only for the wants of the hour-a huge augmentation of the public stocks, and a still more rapid increase in the floating debt of the nation-yet in the present state of France these evils, which are greater under Louis Buonaparte after sixty years of revolution than they were under Louis XVI. at its commencement, are controlled, and their consequences may be averted, by the great improvement in the system of public accounts and a more equitable adaptation of the incidence of taxation.

Amongst the men then in Paris whose attention was directed to these subjects, long before it was discovered that the laws of finance involve no mysteries but the steady application of a few fixed principles and plain rules of honesty and good sense, was one whose name deserves to be rescued from oblivion. Under Necker's first administration, a Genevese banker, M. Panchaud, who had resided for some time in England, established a house of business at Paris. His operations were large, and not always profitable, but he produced a greater effect on the world by his salon than by his caisse. He talked on financial subjects with singular eloquence, and attacked the calculations of the minister of the day with extreme vehemence. Courtiers, abbés, magistrates, and idlers flocked to hear him, and amongst them were to be found one or two men capable of appreciating the value of such lessons. M. Mollien was one of the youngest of his guests, and with him young Louis, afterwards abbé and baron, the same who, twenty-five years later, under Louis XVIII., restored the credit of the monarchy after the calamities of 1815. M. Panchaud had assisted Turgot to organize the first caisse d'escompte established in France, which was the germ of the Bank of France itself, and he was habitually consulted by Calonne. Under the latter of these ministers a question arose about the reissue of the gold coinage. Panchaud was affronted that his opinion had not been asked, and he found means to place before the King a paper, in which he convicted the Minister of an inaccuracy. The King read the paper, and, handing it to Calonne, told him to answer it if he could. Calonne, whether from malice or from unconsciousness, called upon Panchaud himself to supply the refutation, and the unhappy Swiss was compelled to strangle, one by one, his own arguments, lest he should betray his secret and lose his place. How little prepared for great events,' says M. Mollien, was an administration so obstinate and immoveable in the midst of the light, the wants, and the interests growing from day

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