The treatment inflicted upon the generals arrested in the morning of December 2d was still more disgraceful.  Cavaignac, Lamoriciere, Bedeau, Changarnier, the conquerors of Africa, were shut up in these infamous cellular vans, which are always inconvenient and become almost intolerable on a lengthened journey.  In this manner they were conveyed to Ham—­that is, they were made to perform more than a day’s journey.  Cavaignac, who had saved Paris and France in the days of June—­Cavaignac, the competitor of Louis Napoleon at the last elections, shut up for a day and a night in the cell of a felon!  I leave it to every honest man and every generous heart to comment on such facts.  Such were the indignities offered to eminent men.

Let me now review the series of general crimes.  The liberty of the press is destroyed to an extent unheard of even in the time of the empire.  Most of the journals are suppressed, those which appear cannot say a word on politics or even publish any news.  But this is by no means all.  The Government has stuck up a list of persons who are formed into a “consultative commission.”  Its object is to induce France to believe that the Executive is not abandoned by every man of respectability and consideration among us.  More than half the persons on this list have refused to belong to the commission; most of them regard the insertion of their names as dishonor.  I may quote, among others, M. Leon Faucher, M. Portalis, First President of the Court of Cassation, and the Duc de Albufera, as those best known.  Not only does the Government decline to publish the letters in which these gentlemen refuse their consent, but even their names are not withdrawn from the list which dishonors them.  The names are still retained in spite of their repeated remonstrances.  A day or two ago, one of them, M. Joseph Perier, driven to desperation by this excess of tyranny, rushed into the street to strike out his own name, with his own hands, from the public placards, taking the passers-by to witness that it had been placed there by a lie.

Such is the state of the public journals.  Let us now see the condition of personal liberty.  I say again that personal liberty is more trampled on than ever it was in the time of the empire.  A decree of the new power gives the prefets the right to arrest, in their respective departments, whomsoever they please; and the prefets, in their turn, send blank warrants of arrest, which are literally lettres de cachet, to the sobs-prefets under their orders.  The Provisional Government of the Republic never went so far.  Human life is as little respected as human liberty.  I know that war has its dreadful necessities, but the disturbances which have recently occurred in Paris have been put down with a barbarity unprecedented in our civil contests; and when we remember that this torrent of blood has been shed to consummate the violation of all law, we cannot but think that sooner or later it will fall