PARIS.

Grey River Argus, Volume XXIII, Issue 3486, 22 October 1879, Page 2

PARIS.

♦ [from our own correspondent. J August 30. The dark clouds which have so long hung over trade and industry, appear to be on the point of dissipating ; the breaking has commenced, In the commercial centres, an activity unknown since 1873 is observed. People seem to be plucking up heart of grace. The late bad years have given the death blow to the credit system : " cash with orders," is the principle on which the first houses in France I now act, and short accounts are said to make long friends. In Paris the building trade — and is it the teat for the others — i cannot be better ; the demands for buildHg sites are very numerous, and capital- i ists certainly prefer this mode of investment to cutting Darien canals, and which i yields them a comfortable 6to 8 per cent. 1 on their money. The railway workshops ] continue to afford .steady employment to i 7,480 hands for 13 hours daily, and the 1 major part take no rest on Sunday. The i gas company ia flourishing, founderies t make no complaints, neither do the t carriage and printing businesses. In the t ornamental trades, jewellery, bronzes, n ■&c, work is rather slack than bad. h English and French visitors to the capital s; do not remain a long time, hence hotel- f keepers are in tha dum?is, the monster d proprietors above all. Indeed it is no t secret that hotels of the "grand" cate- « gory are not at all in a money-making h

petition, and the fault is chiefly at tributed to the management being under a boaid, instead of between the hands of an individual proprietor, a practical man . But one of these leviathan inns ia too much for a single individual to direct. 1 have a friend, a shareholder in one of the newest and grandst hotels in the capital, and his constant lamentation ia to have his money back. General d* Galliffet, onco an ardent Bonapartiat and now the most devoted of Republicans, has adopted an innovation which ia very sharply discussed. Entrusted to conduct a series of cavalry movements on a large scale, he has invited his subordinate officers to forward him their observation on the manoeuvres. Thi3 is said to be a blow at at discipline, as the officer has for duty to obey, not to criticise. In no army, and certainly not in the Freuch, has this blind and passive obedience ever existed ; from the dayß of Marshall de Villars to Napoleon I. and Caurobert in the Crimea, their tactics have been ever debated in the camp and the mess-room. Docility is certain to return at the moment of action. It ia not by imposing silence on the soldier that discipline is maintained so much as by giving him a commander in whom he has confidence. Discipline is organised in view of war, and men will be more led to the cannon's mouth when they feel they are directed by officers morally their superiors. Something more is required from an officer than to obey ; he ougtit to possess intelligence to criticise and judge events around him. In 1870 a simple general of brigade belonging to the Prussian service seized, on his own initiative, a favorable opportunity for attacking the French army in retreat from Metz ] hence, the affair of 14th August or the battle of Borny, which exercised auch a considerable influence on the whole of the subsequent campaign. It was the hesitation not to act, save on precise and formal orders, that on 18th August, 1870, reduced the French Imperial guard to immobility at St. Privat. General Galliffet's inovation ia sound ; will lead officers to reflect, to depend on themselves only all carping, school boy observations should be avoided. Importations continue to steadily in crease and exportations to diminish since 1 873. But bad harvests have necessitated foreign purchases of food, and which musl have been effected independent of free trade, treaties of commerce, or forms oi government. However, the position doe! not mean national ruin, as the countrj has had up to 31st July last a surplus revenue of some 90,000,000fr The im portations of wine have increased from r 17,000,000 to 51,000,000fr. ; but they ar< the strong wines of Spain and Italy, anc which are worked up to give body to thoai of France. Coal, described as the "brea< of industry," has not suffered in point o importation, though only now costing one-half what it did in 1873 } there ia ai increase in the importations of wool am woollens, still France exports five timei the quantity of tissues in this materia than she buys. Cotton and silk hav< passed through a crisis, and while apinnen of Rouen and Roubaix are crying aloud for protection, the equally sore-tried sill manufacturers of Lyons and St. Etienm insist on free trade. The French are not sorry at tht increasing coldness between Germany anc Russia, but hope the peace of Europt will not be disturbed for some years yet till France be fully prepared to make hei voice listened. The world would commit a great mistake to conclude that tin French are neither very strong nor verj ready. Their only weak point is th( want of rapidity in the mobilisation oi the troops. To judge by appearances, Switzerland is becoming more and more the Mecca foi summer tourists ; Frenchmen certainlj know more of the beauties of free Helvetia than of their own country. People go to Dieppe, Trouville, Villers, &c, to note the motley multitudes ; thermal stations will outlive seaside resorts, so long as rheumatism, gout, disordered stomachs, and deranged iivers contributed to the summum bonum of human delights } but those who are in search of peace, silence, and obscurity, of tender and consoling sensations, will prefer the far niente ol | Switzerland. How many landscapes I seem to have been created by the caprice of some fairy ; where the very abysses are seducing and the highest and most distant mountains attractive ; there are torrents who 33 cavernous voices charm the heart most rebel to natural scenery, and then to take in slowly the vivifying air from the summit of a mountain, which so expands the lungs as to make one feel some fresh part of them ha 3 been called in requisition for the first time. Further, Switzerland is relatively cheap. It was formerly a maxim, " See Naples and then die." But what future is reserved to the man who die 3 without having seen Lake Leman, without having dined under the green apple trees of Vevey, or visited Lausanne, or strolled for a few hours in Neufchatel ? Measures for founding schools for the seconpary education of girls are being discussed, and when Parliament re-meets next November in Paris, they will be ripe for legislative adoption. Every department of France is to have its normal female school, where the professors will belong to both sexes, and the studies will be so arranged, that those for each year will be complete in themselves, thus enabling a pupil to retire at each stage with advantage. Nearly every modern Bcience will be thaught, and one living language at least. Latin Is omitted, which some regret, as a niditnentary knowledge would enable many a sister to aid her brother, or when a mother, to assist her lads. A good inn ovation will be adopted ; the examinations for the sisarshipa will be held by a special commission appointed by the Minister of Instruction. The chief and best efforts ot the Republic appear to be directed to the diffusion of education in all it 3 degrees and among all classes. Having no political anxieties France is forced to fall back on the comedies played by the pretenders. The Comte de Chambord, is holding and not nolding, a meetIng, with, not his admirers, so much as iia pariizans ; he as usual puts his trust n God, and temporises ; he will await ;he long expected miracle of being restored hey day and the hour of which no one mows. Prince Jerorre writes no nanifesls,. for the moment he signed such, le would have to leave France ; but he peaks through his friends— a plan if ound to be awkward, that can ever be [enied. He has his plan like Frochu : he Republic is about committing suicide ; accomplished, then is the time for itn to appear in ,the p'irple and bees. "

Ye will risk nothing, which differ* from Napoleon 111. who risked all, to save ,aelf, Persigny and other ad venturers from pecuniary ruin. Prince Jerome is thus a pretender without being one— fresh evidence of his character for ultraprud ence. He has no belief in plebiscites, intends to govern by the aristocrrcy, a power that Napoleon 111. despised and set tqe lower classes against. Meantime he will remain republican. The quashing of the Cary verdict haa been well received in France, for the affair was narrowly watched as to the influence and justice of the English nation, v. personal likiDgs in high latitudes. From the first the French never changed their opinion that Captain Carey was merely a scape goat, and that the Prince Louis paid only naturally for his whiste ; the poor boy proved himself to have very little capacity, andj.it is regretable his experiment to gain consideration in the eyes of France, : should have coat the lives of two English soldiers. ■ After defeating the attempt to sacrifice » Carey, it is understood here, that the • Westminster Abbey hobby is to be also ' set aside — no evidence to Bupporfc the ' honors. > Hitherto only churches and kindred i public buildings were decorated with i moral paintings : for the future the walk. * I of national schools shall recieve a patriotic r fresco. The Munlcapility has . at last 1 decided upon enacting 100 chdkts de 5 neceasite for the use of ladies, adjoining 3 the public thoroughfares. 5 Crime is happily not prominent : a non--3 commissioned officer has been sent to an * asylum for stabbing soldiers who declined I to cry, " Vive Henri V!" ; a Bonapartist > baron was found in the same safe place, 3 when the two seconds of a republican a whom he had insulted, called to make c arrangements. The affair of shooting •- the three young student- priests in the -I Meudon Wood, was not a political affair, '* but the revenge of a poacher, who found v the students ever in his way. '1 A friend has shown me some circulars he sent to the capital of Guadeloupe, re5 > turned by the French Post Office with the 8 noting, " does not exist." This beats all the jokes on monsieur's geography. i- A free-thinker demands that the pawn c offices be no longer called Mont de Piete. d it smacks of religion, it Tbe telegraph office declined to forward i- a message commencing with an oath the )f sender asserted that was the only way he js could make his clerks believe he was in y earnest, is _____________