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-" Aa 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 Fournalism in the recent Events in France. By E. CARO. WE E have just escaped a new species of barbarism—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 seriousness of 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. 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 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. We have mentioned the two first phases of the French "Bohemia," a suffering and a mili. tant 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 of the last years justified its fears. The physical clubs were nothing else than revolt in a state and moral hygiene of a nation are much more of permanence, or rather revolt on exhibi- | closely related than we suppose: we but indition every evening; and their newspapers, a cate here one of the most dangerous maladies perpetual call to arms in every section of Paris. of our civilization. The absinthe produces in This loud voice of the political "Bohemia" Paris orators and politicians, as the opium in reached much further, and stirred the masses China makes ecstatic dreamers: both amount much more profoundly than the official rhetoric to about the same thing, with this difference, and restrained wrath of the parliamentary Op- that the mute ecstacy induced by the Eastern position. The most famous ringleaders of the narcotic is only a slow suicide, and its victims crowd were Bohemians who had been trained do not inflict upon their country the scourge of for political life in the so-called literary cafés; despotic nonsense and impious madness; their why so called, it were hard to tell. In the his- dream, whatever it is, remains untold; they do tory of recent events we have not taken suffi- not endeavour to realize it over ruins and bloodcient account of that education in eccentric shed. 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 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 arriving at success. They aimed solely at that sordid popularity which might be called the prize of extravagance. They intoxicated each other by speech-making and ready applause. They commenced by being merely artists in eccentricity, and ended by becoming desperadoes. At the same time flourished the press of the revolutionary" Bohemia." It had commenced with the" Marseillaise" and ended with the "Mot d'Ordre," and the "Cri du Peuple." What this press was, may be easily conjectured. The money question played a far more important part in it than the idea question. The traffic in lies and scandals became a lucrative business, and we know of infamous newspaper articles that secured as many as four extra editions a day. the unfortunates who had received no other moral education than the one they found in these books, conducted themselves through real life, as if they lived actually in that world of coarse and corrupting fictions which the sensational novel had created for them. They determined to get along in the world at all hazards, and remove the obstacles they could not overcome. Another influence of which account ought to be taken in the moral history of the last times, is that of the singular philosophies which have invaded and ruled literary Bohemia. To designate them by their true name, and without much ceremony, we shall simply call them Atheism. Heaven forbid I should carry the weighty questions which have divided philosophers into the domain of politics, nor would I insult the doctrine of Rationalism by supposing it destined to become the official philosophy of the Commune! But we cannot deny that its various disciples, the men who prepared the 18th of March, had for many years adopted some of its theories, and these had been boisterously published in their sheets and in their books. A flood of small periodicals, styled literary, appeared and disappeared at different periods, concealing under different names the same monotonous phraseology-the same doctrine repeated over and over again, and paved thereby the way for the slowly advancing En In what such principles finally end, we have seen, and the world still shudders at it. One might trace the gradual descent of some of these journals. They proved schools of public demoralization before they became the secret laboratories and offices of public robberies. The first stage in this fatal descent is marked by an absolute want of seriousness-by a complete disrespect for everything time-honoured by a most fanciful cynicism. The second opens a period of perpetual agitation, and an attempt to revive the reign of terror by abuse pushed to hyperbole, by the most violent polemics sub-cyclopædia of the New School. Around the stituted for a dignified discussion of ideas. In the third stage, the journal becomes the most active instrument of this new reign of terror, which it has so loudly invoked, and for which it has so industriously laboured. We may well ask what influences have brought "Bohemia" to such a degree of moral and intellectual depravity? What has driven to madness and crime these vanities, at first so inoffensive? It may be accounted for in many ways; one of the chief causes, however, is the literary influence of the times; it is that which transformed the literary adventurer into the political adventurer, ready to dare anything in order to acquire wealth or power. Yes, the modern novel may claim a large and heavy share of responsibility in the recent events. The examples it gave of elegant scoundrelism and intellectual depravity, have dazzled and fascinated a number of feeble minds whom the uncertain morality of the society and time in which we live but ill-protected against their own evil propensities. Many of chief of the latter, the capitalist of the sect, gathered the larger brains of the school, the thinkers, all those that had advanced far enough in their studies to handle with impunity dangerous formulas. United with the partisans of Positivism, vagrant disciples of experimental science, they formed a large battalion, well prepared for intellectual struggles, until the hour for political struggles should strike. Among the writers that played in this new Encyclopædia the parts of those who wrote in the former one, endeavouring, as that did, to bring about a social renovation by a renovation of ideas, we can easily recognize the magistrates, the ædiles, the great office-holders of the Commune, and even those of the socialistic Republic ensconced since the 4th of September in some of the municipalities in Paris. The teaching of this school was not purely theoretical, confined to special sheets which no one read, or to that monumental Encyclopædia which but few consulted; it descended briskly |