, 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 energy to govern at
all. But the king was equal to the emergency. He showed courage and good
sense, and preserved his throne. At the same time, while he suppressed
disorders by vigorous measures, he took care to strengthen his power. He
was in harmony with the Chamber of Deputies, composed almost entirely of
rich men. The liberal party demanded an extension of the suffrage, to
which he gracefully yielded; and the number of electors was raised to
one hundred and eighty thousand, but extended only to those who paid a
direct tax of two hundred francs. A bill was also passed in the Chamber
of Deputies abolishing hereditary peerage, though opposed by Guizot,
Thiers, and Berryer. Of course the opposition in the upper house was
great, and thirty-six new peers were created to carry the measure.

The year 1832 was marked by the ravages of the cholera, which swept away
twenty thousand people in Paris alone, and among them Casimir Perier,
and Cuvier the pride of the scientific world.

But Louis Philippe was not yet firmly established on his throne. His
ministers had suppressed disorders, seized two hundred journals,
abolished hereditary peerage, extended the