From the accounts received of the French Ministry, it would
seem that M. Leon Say, the Finance Minister, is the chief strength of the party opposed to any advance of protective duties, and disposed decidedly to lower them ; while M. Wadding- ton, the Prime Minister, leans to Protection, and M. Jules Ferry, the new Education Minister, who has just entered the Cabinet, is a very thoroughgoing Protectionist. For the prasent, the French Radicals are throwing their weight into the Free- trade scale, and it is probable that M. G-ainbetta, who is bent on seeing France materially prosperous under the Republic, favours this policy. At the same time, the Socialists, with whom the Radicals are more or less identified, are not in the least Free-traders at heart, and hence the prospect of Free- trade there is not very safe. Even the wine-growers,—except in the Bordeaux region,—complain that their poorer wines are not let in as easily as they should be even to countries like England, and they are not a little inclined to try the plausible nostrum of reciprocity. True economic ideas are seldom grasped by the mass of the people ;—economic confusions being so very much easier to catch up.
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