popularity.  Moreover, the public disorders lessened the authority of the government.  In March, 1831, the king found it expedient to dismiss Lafitte, and to appoint Casimir Perier, an abler man, to succeed him.  Lafitte was not great enough for the exigencies of the times.  His business was to make money, and it was his pleasure to spend it; but he was unable to repress the discontents of Paris, or to control the French revolutionary ideas, which were spreading over the whole Continent, especially in Belgium, in which a revolution took place, accompanied by a separation from Holland.  Belgium was erected into an independent kingdom, under a constitutional government.  Prince Leopold, of Saxe Coburg, having refused the crown of Greece, was elected king, and shortly after married a daughter of Louis Philippe; which marriage, of course, led to a close union between France and Belgium.  In this marriage the dynastic ambition of Louis Philippe, which was one of the main causes of his subsequent downfall in 1848, became obvious.  But he had craft enough to hide his ambition under the guise of zeal for constitutional liberty.

Casimir Perier was a man of great energy, and liberal in his political antecedents, a banker of immense wealth and great force of character, reproachless in his integrity.  He had scarcely assumed office when he was called upon to enforce a very rigorous policy.  France was in a distracted state, not so much from political agitation as from the discontent engendered by poverty, and by the difficulty of finding work for operatives,—­a state not unlike that of England before the passage of the Reform Bill.  According to Louis Blanc the public distress was appalling, united with disgusting immorality among the laboring classes in country districts and in great manufacturing centres.  In consequence there were alarming riots at Lyons and other cities.  The people were literally starving, and it required great resolution and firmness on the part of government to quiet the disorders.  Lyons was in the hands of a mob, and Marshal Soult was promptly sent with forty thousand regular troops to restore order.  And this public distress,—­when laborers earned less than a shilling a day, and when the unemployed exceeded in number those who found work on a wretched pittance,—­was at its height when the Chamber of Deputies decreed a civil list for the king to the amount of nearly nineteen millions of francs, thirty-seven times greater than that given to Napoleon as First Consul; and this, too, when the king’s private income was six millions of francs a year.

Such was the disordered state of the country that the prime minister, whose general policy was that of peace, sent a military expedition to Ancona, in the Papal territories, merely to divert the public mind from the disorders which reigned throughout the land.  Indeed, the earlier years of the reign of Louis Philippe were so beset with difficulties that it required extraordinary tact, prudence, and