INTRODUCTION (continued 2)

This was stated, with great good sense and commendable courtesy towards the French Government responsible for the absurdity, by the Italian Premier, Signor Crispi, in the Chamber of Deputies at Borne, on June 25, 1887.

In reply to an interpellation of Signor Cavalotti, addressed to the then Foreign Minister of Italy, Signor Depretis, as to the intentions of the Italian Government with regard to the Universal Exposition of 1889 at Paris, Signor Crispi, then Minister of the Interior, made a striking speech (Signor Depretis being then ill of the disease of which he eventually died), in which he lucidly and forcibly gave the reasons of the Italian Government for declining to take any official part in the matter. He plainly intimated his conviction (which is the conviction, by the way, of a great many sensible people not premiers of Italy) that the business of Universal Expositions has been possibly overdone. But, without dwelling upon that point, he went on to show that it would be foolish for Italy to isolate herself from the other great powers by taking an official part in this particular 'Universal Exposition.' To the plea of Signor Cavalotti that liberated Italy ought to unite with France to celebrate 'the principles of 1789,' Signor Crispi thus replied; 'I agree with the honourable member that we are sons of 1789. But I must remind him that 1789 was preceded by the glorious English Revolution, and by the great American Revolution, in both of which had been manifested and established the principles which have subsequently prevailed throughout the world.'

Whether the treatment of the Sovereign Pontiff at Rome by the government of United Italy, since 1871, has been entirely consistent with the principles of the 'glorious English Revolution,' or of the 'great American. Revolution,' I need not now consider. But that all the living political doctrines of which intelligent Frenchmen mean to speak when they talk about the 'principles of 1789' are the American political doctrines of 1776, and the English political doctrines of 1688, admits of no question. As to this, Signor Crispi was absolutely right, and it is creditable to him, as an Italian statesman and an Italian patriot, that he should have thus early and publicly declined to attach the liberty and the independence of Italy as a bob to the tail of an electioneering Exposition kite at Paris in 1889. To France and to the French Republics—first, second, and third—Italy owes a good deal less than nothing. To two rulers of France, both of them of Italian blood, the first and third Napoleon, she owes a great deal. But her chief political creditor, and her greatest statesman, Cavour, drew his political doctrines, not from the muddy French pool of the 'principles of 1789,' but from the original fountains of 1776 and 1688. Had Cavour been living in 1887, to answer the interpellation of Signor Cavalotti, he might, perhaps, have defined more sharply than it was given to Signor Crispi to do, the real relations between the French Revolution of 1789 and the national developments of modern Italy. Had the French Revolution of 1789 been left to exhaust itself within the limits of France, it would probably have ended—as the friends of the misguided Duc d'Orléans almost from the first expected to see it end—in the substitution of a comparatively capable for a positively incapable French king upon a constitutional French throne. In that event it would have interested Europe and the world no less, and no more, than the Fronde or the religious wars which came to a close with the coronation of Henry of Navarre. It was the fear of this, unquestionably, which drove the conspirators of the Gironde into forcing a foreign war upon their unfortunate country. The legend of Republican France marching as one man to the Rhine to liberate enslaved Europe has much less foundation in fact than the legend of Itsatsou and the horn of Roland. It is a pity to disturb historical fables which have flowered into immortal verse, but really there was not the slightest occasion, so far as Europe was concerned, for France in 1790 to 'stamp her strong foot and swear she would be free.' M. de Bourgoing's admirable diplomatic history of those days makes this quite clear. No power in Europe objected to her being as free as she liked. On the contrary, England, even in 1792, was both ready and anxious to recognise the insane French republic of that day, and to see the French royal family sent away to Naples or to Madrid.

Pitt was too far-sighted a statesman not to be well aware that the commerce and the colonies of such a French republic were the natural prizes of English common sense and English enterprise. Nor was Austria indisposed to see the House of Bourbon, which had successfully disputed the supremacy of Europe with the Hapsburgs, humiliated and cast down.

The French Revolution became Titanic only when it ceased to be a Revolution and ceased to be French. The magnificent stanzas of Barbier tell the true story of the riderless steed re-bitted, re-bridled, and mounted by the Italian master of mankind, the Cæsar for whom the eagle-eyed Catherine of Russia had so quietly waited and looked when the helpless and hopeless orgie of 1789 began. The Past from which he emerged, the Future which he evoked, both loom larger than human in the shadow of that colossal figure. What a silly tinkle, as of pastoral bells in some Rousseau's Devin du Village, have the 'principles of 1789,' when the stage rings again with the stern accents of the conqueror, hectoring the senators of the free and imperial city of Augsburg, for example, on his way to Wagram and to victory twenty years afterwards!

'Your bankers are the channel through which the gold of the eternal enemy of the Continent finds its way to Austria. I have made up my mind that I will give you to some king. To whom I have not yet settled. I will attend to that when I come back from Vienna.'

And, as the faithful record of the Drei Mohren tells us, 'Messieurs the senators withdrew, much mortified, and not at all pleased.'

Nevertheless, when the conqueror kept his word, and having made a king of Bavaria to give them to, gave them to the king of Bavaria, Messieurs the senators, with a suppleness and a docility which would have done credit to Debry (who after proposing, as a republican, to organise 1,200 'tyrannicides' and murder all the kings and emperors of the earth, begged Napoleon to make him a baron), made haste to come and prostrate themselves before the new Bavarian Majesty and to protest that until the fortunate day of his arrival to reign over them they had never known what real happiness was.

If there is one thing more certain than another in human history, it is that but for the English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776 the world in general would know and care to-day very little more about the French 'principles of 1789,' and the French Revolution, and the First French Republic, than the world in general knows or cares to-day about the wars in the Cevennes or the long conflict between the Armagnacs and the Bourguignons.

Napoleon crumpled up the 'principles of 1789' and the Revolution and the Republic in his iron hand, and flung them all together into a corner. He meant that France and the world should think of other things. In 1810 Paganel, who, having been a 'patriot' of the Convention, had naturally become a liveried servant of the Emperor and King, thought he might venture to compose a 'Historical Essay on the French Revolution.' He dedicated it to the Imperial Chancellor of the Legion of Honour, and he wound up his preface with these words: 'And thus at last we see without astonishment, after this long series of errors, misfortunes, and crimes, the Republic disappear, and France implore the Supreme Being to vouchsafe to her the one great and potent genius who in these difficult circumstances was able to lift her up, to defend her, and to govern her!' The heart of Louis XVIII. would have been touched by the grateful humility of this repentant wretch. But the Emperor simply kicked him downstairs. He forbade the book to be published. The whole edition was put under lock and key, and never saw the light till liberty came back to France, with the white nag and the Bourbon lilies, in 1815. Surely here is a fact worth noting!

Had this first history of the French Revolution, written as Paganel, a member of the Revolutionary Convention, wrote it, been published under the First Republic, the author would infallibly have been sent to the guillotine. Writing it under the First Empire he was merely snubbed, despite his fulsome adulation of the Emperor. His book was finally given to the world under the restored historic monarchy in 1818!

In 1811, Chateaubriand, having been elected to succeed Marie-Joseph Chéniér, the brother of the republican poet André, murdered by the First Republic, as a member of the Institute, prepared a speech on the Convention, to be read before that august body. Napoleon heard of it and, without troubling himself to look at it, forbade it to be delivered. 'It is well for M. de Chateaubriand,' he said, 'that it was suppressed. If he had read it before the Institute, I would have flung him into the bottom of a dungeon, and left him there the rest of his natural life!'

Napoleon knew the First Republic thoroughly. He had measured all its men, and all its records were in his hand. He could not get into or out of his carriage without treading on some incorruptible 'patriot' prostrate between its wheels with a petition for a préfecture, a title or a pension. The crimes and follies of the First Republic had made France and the world sick of its name. Its true story was a tale of shame and humiliation, not fit to be dragged out into the blaze of the glory of Imperial France.

The First Republic was the deadly enemy both of liberty and of law. The conduct of its first envoy to the United States would have justified Washington in locking him up. When a stop was put to his mischievous impertinences, he preferred exile in America to the chance of the guillotine at Paris, and his name died out, I believe, curiously enough, with one of the chief instruments of the notorious Tweed Ring in New York.

The first shots fired in anger under the American flag after the peace of 1783 were fired against cruisers of the French Republic captured in the West Indies by American men-of-war, to put an end to the ignorant and insolent attempt of what called itself a government at Paris to issue letters of marque on American soil against English commerce.

So grateful was France to the Emperor for restoring the reign of law, that she never troubled herself about liberty, and but for the indomitable defence of constitutional liberty and national independence which England maintained, often single-handed, from the rupture of the peace of Amiens to the victory of Waterloo, the very names of the chief actors in the odious and ridiculous dramas of the Revolution would have long since faded, as Napoleon intended they should fade, out of the memory of the masses of mankind.

VII

How little confidence the Government of the Third Republic really felt in the efficacy of the 'principles of 1789,' and of the 'Centennial Exposition,' to save it at the polls in 1889 from the natural consequences of its intolerance and its corruption, was instructively shown by the absolute panic into which it was thrown by the election at Paris of General Boulanger on January 27. Here, at the very threshold of the great electoral year, rose the spectre of the 'man on horseback'!

Certainly General Boulanger was not Napoleon Bonaparte. The Government, which had itself put General Boulanger on horseback, knew the strength and the weakness of the man himself. But it was the legend, not the man, they dreaded. If the French people, or even if Paris, really believed in the legend of Boulanger—and this tremendous vote of January 27 looked very much like it—it mattered little what the real value of the man might be, the legend would make him master of France. That would mean for the Third Republic the fate of the First Republic and of the Second, and for the men who had identified it with their own fanaticism and folly, and greed, and incapacity, a long farewell to all their greatness!

As for the eventual results, what mattered these to them?

The Universal Exposition might collapse, or it might be opened by General Boulanger on his black horse, instead of President Carnot in his landau. What did that signify? But it signified much that the men who had invented President Carnot were not likely to make part of the cortège of General Boulanger.

It is no exaggeration to say that from January 27, 1889, the Government of the Third French Republic was openly and visibly given up by night and by day to one great purpose alone—and that purpose was, not to glorify the 'principles of 1789,' not to celebrate the Republic—the grand statue of the Triumph of the Republic, destined to be set up with great pomp in the sight of the assembled human race, was actually left to be cast in plaster of Paris, no functionary caring to waste a sou on putting it into perennial bronze or enduring marble—no! the great dominant, unconcealed purpose of all the leaders of the Republic was, in some way—no matter how, by hook or by crook—to conjure that spectre of the First Consulate, riding about, awful and imminent, on the black horse of General Boulanger!

Perhaps the high-water mark of this quite unparalleled and most instructive panic was the appearance, towards the end of the last parliamentary session, of M. Jules Ferry, the author of the odious 'Article 7,' the man who after hesitating—to his credit be it said—originally to propose that ministers of religion should be absolutely forbidden to teach the children of France in her public schools, at last succumbed to the vehemence of Paul Bert, the Condorcet of this modern persecution, and became the acknowledged leader of the war against Liberty and Religion—in the tribune of the Deputies, there to urge, and indeed to implore, the Conservative members to make peace with the persecutors, and save them from the peril of Boulanger!

The scene of that day in the Chamber of Deputies was not one to be forgotten. The aspect and the accents of the Republican leader were at times absolutely pathetic with the pathos of unaffected terror. It was difficult to believe, whilst listening to him, that he could really have 'five millions of professed atheists' at his back, encouraging him to extirpate Christianity, root and branch, out of the land of France!

Not less striking, in quite another sense, was the grim and stony silence with which the appeal of the Republican leader was received by the Right, representing, as the Third Republic has chosen to make the Right represent, the Religion, and with the Religion the Liberty, of France.

It reminded me, I am sorry to say, of the way in which a naturally amiable and considerate householder might be expected to listen to the arguments of an adroit and accomplished burglar showing cause why he should be locked into the plate-closet to protect him from the police.

M. Jules Ferry's offer was to suspend the application to certain religious bodies of the interdict fulminated against them by himself and the Republican Government. At last he paused, evidently oppressed by the steady, unresponsive gaze of his hearers.

Then the silence was broken!

'Do you speak for the Government?' called out a fiery deputy of the Right.

M. Jules Ferry hesitated a moment and then replied, 'No! I speak for myself; but there are many who think as I do!'

'You!' came back the hot response. 'You! bah!—you are nothing!'

The real response came later, on September 22, when, in his own town of St.-Dié, the chief of the Opportunists, despite all the efforts of the prefect of the department and of the local authorities to carry him through, was beaten by a Monarchist. Obviously M. Ferry had heard how things looked from his committee at St.-Dié when he made his fruitless appeal to the Eight in the Chamber!

Finding that nothing was to be expected from any cajolery of the Right, or any transactions with the outraged and awakened Christianity of France, the Government at last gave up the control of the impending elections unreservedly into the hands of M. Constans of Toulouse, of whom I have already spoken. To him, as Minister of the Interior, all the machinery of politics was abandoned. Every prefect in France became an electoral agent to do his bidding.

For the first time too, I believe, even in French administrative history, all the employees of the post-offices and the telegraph offices were transferred from the control of the Director of Posts and Telegraphs to the direct control of the Minister of the Interior.

Under his control they still remain, and it is now proposed to attach these services permanently to the Ministry which manages the elections. Can anybody fail to see what this means?

At the suggestion of M. Constans, too, the Government resolved to attack the spectre. It determined to drive General Boulanger out of France. It is not easy to feel much sympathy with General Boulanger, who while Minister of War put into execution against the Comte de Paris and his family a most iniquitous decree, exiling them—for no other cause than the fact that they come of the family which made France a nation—from their country and their homes. But the proceedings which the Government of President Carnot took against General Boulanger were of such a character that the Procureur de la République, who was first directed to carry them out, withdrew from his post. Before they could be consummated by the arrest of General Boulanger, he suddenly left France. Into the subsequent action of the Senate, constituted as a 'High Court of Justice' to try him, I need not here enter.

Suffice it that after a canvass organized in this fashion and in this spirit, and prosecuted by the Government with remorseless energy, the elections held on September 22 and October 6 have left the relative strength of the Government and of the Opposition in the new Chamber substantially what it was in the Chamber of 1885. This, in the circumstances, can only be described, in the language of one of the ablest Republican journalists in Paris, M. Jules Dietz of the Journal des Débats, as 'an escape from a disaster.'

The repulse of the assailants at the Redan did not save Sebastopol for the Russians. The margin of the proclaimed majorities by which many of the Government members of the new Chamber were returned, is so very small as to suggest of itself the pressure, in a very practical and concrete form, of the hand of authority on the returns at the polls. In twenty cases these majorities ranged from 6 to 200 votes.

In one case, in the Seine Inférieure, the details of which were given to me by persons of the highest character, with perfect liberty to use their names, the Government member was declared by the prefect, after two adjournments of the counting, to have been returned by a majority of 173 votes on a total poll, which proved upon examination to very considerably exceed the total number of voters registered in the district!

But, taking the general return of the votes cast at these elections as authentic, it is perfectly plain that the Monarchical party in France is stronger to-day than it was in 1885, and that the Republican party is weaker in France to-day than it was in 1885.

In 1885 the strength of the two parties stood as follows:—

Republicans of all shades4,377,063

Conservatives and Monarchists3,608,578

————

Republican majority768,485

In 1889 the strength of the two parties stands as follows:—

Conservative Monarchists3,144,978

Boulangists629,955

————

3,774,933

Opportunist Republicans2,980,540

Radicals981,809

Socialists90,593

————

4,052,542

Republican majority277,609

Here at once we see a falling off in the Republican majority, between 1885 and 1889, of no less than 490,876 votes. This is certainly significant enough when we remember that in 1885 the Monarchists did not everywhere and openly attack the Republic as a form of government, while in 1889 the issue was admitted on both sides to involve the existence of the Republic as a form of government.

But this is not all.

When we compare the total of the votes cast in 1885 and 1889, we find a diminution of no fewer than 788,821 votes. If this proves anything, it proves that the voters of France care very much less about the stability of the Republic in 1889 than they did in 1885. And this farther appears from the further fact that the falling off in the total of votes cast affected the Republican vote of 1889 much more seriously than it affected the Monarchical vote. Indeed it did not affect the Monarchical vote at all. On the contrary, while there was a positive falling off from the Republican vote of 324,521 between 1885 and 1889, there was a positive increase of the Monarchical vote, between 1885 and 1889, of 166,355.

How is it possible to weigh the meaning of these figures fairly without seeing that a form of government which exists in France only in virtue of a majority which a change of 140,000 votes in a total poll of 7,827,475 would have turned into a minority, can hardly be said to rest upon as firm a basis, for example, as that of the Third Empire, with its plebiscitary majority of seven millions in 1870 responding to its majority of seven millions in 1852?

Take away from the narrow Republican majority of 1889 the public functionaries, high and low, now counted in France by tens of thousands, with all who depend upon and are connected with them; give to the ballot in France the sanctity, freedom, and security which it has in England; compel the public authorities in France to abstain, as they are compelled in England to abstain, from direct interference with the exercise by the voters of the right of suffrage, and the evidence is overwhelming which goes to show that the Third Republic would be voted into limbo to-morrow!

VIII

To say this is to say that the Third Republic does not exist in France by the will of the French people; and this I believe to be absolutely true. The Third Republic exists by virtue of the control which its partisans have acquired of the administrative machinery of the Government, or, in other words, by virtue of political corruption and intimidation. So great has been the multiplication of functionaries great and small under the Third Republic, that it is not easy to get at an accurate estimate of their numbers. The best information I have been able to obtain leads me to believe that, exclusive of the military and naval forces, not less than two hundred thousand adult French citizens now draw their subsistence from the public treasury. This represents a population of at least a million of souls, so that we have nearly one in thirty of the inhabitants of France subjected to a direct or indirect pecuniary pressure from the central authorities at Paris. So openly is this pressure exerted under the Third Republic, that the Government of M. Carnot did not hesitate, during the Universal Exposition, and not long before the Legislative Elections began, to bring up no fewer than some thirteen thousand of the mayors of France to Paris at the public expense. There they were entertained—still at the public expense—with a sumptuous hospitality, which proves that, however orthodox the Republican Atheism may be of M. Constans, the Minister of the Interior, he has not yet struck the blessed St. Julian out of his calendar, at least when he is spending the money of the French taxpayers on his guests.

If I may believe what I afterwards heard in more than one provincial town, these worthy mayors (every one of whom, let me observe, exercises a direct personal and official authority over the elections) carried back to his astonished and envious fellow-citizens tales of Arabian, Tunisian, Algerian, and Annamite nights at the Exposition, and on the Champs-Elysées, to which no pen but that of Diderot or of the younger Crébillon could do adequate justice. 'I do not believe the Sultan,' said a clever and amusing lady to me at Toulouse, 'threw open the doors of Paradise so wide to the German Kaiser, at Constantinople, as did our more than liberal M. Constans to the married Mayors of France at Paris!'

On the other hand, at Honfleur, in the Calvados, it came to my knowledge that the local authorities, on the morning of the first Legislative Elections, brought over from another port on the Norman coast, a number of sailors, residents of Honfleur, and entitled to vote there, but absent in the pursuit of their calling. These honest Jack Tars came to Honfleur by the railway, in a kind of brigade, accompanied by a Government agent, who marched them up to the polls, and, having seen their votes safely deposited for the Government candidate, gave each man his return ticket for the next day, and set them all free to spend the interval in the bosom of their astonished and, I hope, delighted families.

From the point of view of the domestic peace of France, this proceeding was perhaps less reprehensible than the Belshazzar's Feast of M. Constans and the thirteen thousand mayors. But from the point of view of the relations between the Third Republic and the deliberate independent electoral will of France, I think it must be admitted that they are, as the people say in the Western States of America, 'very much of a muchness!'

I ought to add that in France the mayors of the chief towns (or chefs-lieux), the arrondissements, and the cantons are nominated by the Government at Paris. The mayors of the communes which owe their corporate freedom to the monarchy are elected, but the Third Republic has taken from them the control of their local taxation for purposes of the highest local interest. I should say also that all the sailors in France are obliged to be inscribed upon lists kept and controlled by the maritime prefects for the Ministry of the Marine, so that their whereabouts may be known or ascertainable at all times.

Americans who understand the institutions of their own country find the true measure of the fitness of a people for self-government in their respect for the authority of a lawful Executive. The fatal mistake has been made by the Third as it was by the First French Republic of confounding respect for a lawful Executive with submission to an Executive controlled by a majority of the Legislature. The fact that the power of the public purse, in a constitutional government, is necessarily confided to the Legislature, makes this mistake fatal—fatal at once to the liberty of the taxpayers who supply the public purse, and of whom the members of the Legislature are simply the agents and trustees, and to the efficiency and integrity of the Executive. I see with much interest, while the sheets of this book are going through the press in London, that this very grave point emerges from a brief correspondence published in the English newspapers between the Chancellor of the British Exchequer, Mr. Goschen, and Lord Lewisham. Lord Lewisham, acting, it would appear, on behalf of a number of English Civil Servants, wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer concerning certain complaints of these servants, embodied in a memorial. In his reply, the Chancellor of the Exchequer alludes to an intimation which seems to have been made by the authors of this memorial of their intention to put a kind of pressure upon the Minister of the Crown through the House of Commons. Upon this Mr. Goschen observes: 'the memorialists should be reminded that their reference to an appeal to their representatives in Parliament, involving, as it would seem, a personal parliamentary canvass to determine the relations between the State and its employés, contemplates a course of action not only injurious to the public interests, but opposed to the best traditions of the Civil Service.'

What the English Chancellor of the Exchequer here most wisely and properly condemns as a mischief a-brewing, has become the jus et norma of 'the relations between the State and its employés' in France under the Third Republic.

The persons charged to execute and enforce the laws in France have come, under the Third Republic, from the President downwards throughout the Civil Service, to regard themselves, and to be regarded by the people, as the mere servants and instruments of the persons deputed by the people to consider what the laws shall be, and to adjust the public taxation to the necessities of the public service. The result necessarily is that the majority of the French Chamber of Deputies under the Third Republic has visibly become an irresponsible oligarchy of a kind most dangerous to liberty and the public weal.

By calling themselves, as they do, the 'party of the appeal to the people,' the French Imperialists show their doubtless well-founded conviction that the masses of the French people are essentially monarchical in their ideas as to the best tenure by which the Executive authority can be held. To believe this, is to believe that the masses of the French people are essentially lovers of order, not of disorder; that they instinctively put the executive above the legislative function in their conceptions of a political hierarchy, and therefore that they are essentially fitted for self-government. In this I am sure the Imperialists are right. But, unfortunately for them, the centralised administrative machinery of government in France by which the French people are now and have for a century past been prevented from governing themselves, though not indeed of Imperial origin, was so developed and perfected by the genius of the first Napoleon as to become identified in a sense with the Napoleonic dynasty.

It is a great misfortune of the French people that all great changes in their political system, no matter how promoted or in what spirit, must be wrought out within the vicious circle of this centralized administrative machinery. The initiative in liberating France from this centralized administrative machinery can only come from within the vicious circle itself. An independent Executive of France made Chief of the State by the popular will, and protected, as the Executive of Great Britain is protected, in the interest of liberty and of the people, by the hereditary principle, might take this initiative and begin the great work of so distributing throughout France the administrative responsibilities and powers now concentrated at Paris as to make the French people for the first time really their own masters.

Certainly no executive holding power by any tenure less independent and secure can ever effect this. That a real basis exists upon which this great work might be carried out in the local life, traditions, ideas and sympathies by which the widely different populations of what used to be known as the different provinces of the Kingdom of France are united among themselves and discriminated from one another, many able and well-informed Frenchmen believe. One of the most hasty and mischievous things done by the infatuated political tinkers of 1790 was to cut and carve up France into arbitrary political departments for the express purpose of disintegrating and destroying those ancient social and political organisms.

This purpose has not been effectually accomplished. What has been accomplished is to superpose upon the ancient organic France another arbitrary and administrative France. This latter arbitrary and administrative France controlled by a legislative oligarchy, which first makes and then uses the French Executive for its own purposes, it is which now calls itself the Third French Republic.

The traits and the tendencies as well as the origin of the Third Republic can be thoroughly studied at Paris. Without Paris the Third Republic never could have existed. It exists now in virtue of the political machinery of which Paris is the centre. That it could not withstand for a day any severe shock given to that machinery was confessed, as I have said, by its own government in the abject panic which followed the victory of General Boulanger at the polls of the capital on January 27, 1889.

The traits and the tendencies of France, on the contrary, must be studied in the provinces. There was always more wit than wisdom in the famous saying of Heine—that to talk about the opinion of the provinces in France was like talking about the opinion of a man's legs—the head being the seat of thought, and Paris being the head. But the saying was uttered during the reign of Louis Philippe, and long before the establishment of universal suffrage by the Second Empire. With universal suffrage and with the development during the past twenty years of the railway and of the telegraphic system throughout France, the importance of the provinces relatively to Paris has greatly and steadily increased. While steam and electricity have, of course, increased the strength of the pressure which an aggressive oligarchy controlling the centralised administrative machinery of the Government at Paris can put upon the opinions and the interests of France, they have also, it must be remembered, increased the power of France to resist and to resent that pressure. They have established return currents, the force of which grows visibly greater every year. The great provincial towns and cities of France, for example, are ceasing to be dependent, as they formerly were, upon the press of Paris for their news and views of which passes in the capital.

There are no such journals yet in any of the French provinces as the powerful newspapers which are to be found throughout the United Kingdom; but there is a steady and very notable growth in the circulation of the more important local journals, and the telegraph brings them the news of the day from Paris long before the Parisian papers can reach their readers. The development of these influences has been checked, and is still checked, by the official control at Paris of the telegraphic system, and it is worth noting here that, just before the legislative elections, the Minister of the Interior, to whom the control of the post office and of the telegraphs had been transferred, caused the telephone offices throughout France to be taken possession of by the officials of the Government, though the negotiations with the private companies owning the telephones for the purchase of them were still incomplete, and though the private owners formally protested against the act.

But though the Government may check and retard, it cannot prevent the development of these influences. France, such as I have found it, full of activity, full of energy, leavened with a genuine leaven of religious faith, irritated by a persistent mockery of the forms of liberty into prizing and demanding the realities of liberty, must grow steadily stronger. The Republic condemned to a policy of persecution and of financial profligacy must grow steadily weaker.

Instead of trying to develop France, or letting France develop herself into a republic, the partisans of a Republic have invented successive republics, each more grotesque and uncomfortable than its predecessor, and insisted on cramming France into them. So far the republics have gone to pieces and France has survived. So intense is her vitality, so tough appears to me to be the old traditional fibre in many parts of the French body politic, that before the great chapter of the Gesta Dei per Francos can be safely assumed to be finally closed, a good many more milliards will have to be spent on that State Establishment of Irreligion and Disestablishment of God which the 'true Republicans' of the Third Republic call 'laicisation.' Long before those milliards can be raised and spent, the Third Republic will come to the bottom I believe, if not of the purse, certainly of the patience, of the French people.

It is already admitted on all hands that so slight a thing as the reappearance of General Boulanger at Paris on September 21, 1889, would have completely reversed the general result of the elections of the next day. The birthday of the First Republic would have been celebrated by the funeral of the Third. The failure of General Boulanger then to reappear may have made an end of General Boulanger, but it certainly did not establish the Republic.

On the contrary, here as we see is the Minister of the Interior, who knows the situation better than any of his colleagues, invalidating election after election in the Chamber of Deputies, and beginning the work of financial reform by demanding an enormous Secret Service Fund to protect the Republic against conspirators!

Sooner or later this tragi-comedy must end. It concerns Europe and the world that it should end sooner rather than later, and that it should end with a pacific restoration of France to her proper place in the family of European States. Surely the most imperious necessity of the immediate future in Europe is a general disarmament. No French Republic can possibly propose or accept such a disarmament. No French Empire even could easily propose or accept such a disarmament. For the Republic and the Empire are jointly though not equally responsible for the humiliations and the disasters of the great Franco-German War. The historic French monarchy, restored through a revision of the existing Constitution by the deliberate will of the French people, might propose such a disarmament with a moral certainty that it would be accepted. Would not England necessarily stand by France in such a proposal? And is it not clear that the refusal of Central Europe to accept such a disarmament so proposed and supported would make that alliance with the Russian Empire, which is impossible to a French republic, both easy and natural with a French monarchy?

I should have visited France to small purpose if I could suppose that such considerations as this will much affect the masses of the French people. Their present Minister of Public Instruction, M. Fallières, gave his measure of their average enlightenment on such points when he actually called upon the electors of the Lot-et-Garonne in September to vote against M. Cornelis Henry de Witt because a monarchical restoration would 'be followed by a revival of the droits des Seigneurs, and—by a Cossack invasion!'

But there are many men in France alive to such considerations as this, and these men have many ways of reaching and influencing the political action of the masses of their countrymen.

Such men see the vital relations of the diplomatic position of France to the grave domestic question of the public expenses. It is difficult to ascertain the actual cost of the military establishment of France on its present footing of an armed peace. But French officers of rank assure me that France is now keeping under arms at least 550,000 men, or more than one in seven of her adult male population available for national defence. 'We have more men under arms than Germany,' said a French general to me at Marseilles, 'which is absurd, because the German army for fighting purposes, in case of any sudden trouble with us, includes the armies of Austria, Hungary and Italy—so Germany saves money on her peace footing which we idly expend on ours.' What this officer did not say to me has been said by many other well-informed Frenchmen, that the recent military legislation of the parliamentary majority is demoralising this great military force and threatens its efficiency. The prominent position taken in the new Chamber since it assembled by M. Raynal, a Radical member for the Gironde who held the portfolio of Public Works under M. Gambetta in 1880 and again under M. Jules Ferry, is not of good omen for the army. It was M. Raynal who brought about the fall of General Gresley as Minister of War by an 'interpellation,' founded on the refusal of the War Minister to remove an officer of the Territorial Army because he was a monarchist. And now M. Raynal appears with a project for more effectually establishing the domination of the parliamentary majority by giving it the right to adjourn once a week for six successive weeks, all debates on any 'interpellation' to which the Government may object on 'grounds of public policy!'

While the costly army of France is at the mercy of legislation under such conditions, the navy of France is managed, as appears from a drastic report presented some time ago by M. Gerville-Réache, an able Republican deputy from Guadeloupe, with at least as much regard to politics as to economy. M. Gerville-Réache showed that contracts were given out so recklessly that a supply of canned provisions, for example, had been laid in at Cherbourg sufficient for five years! At other stations supplies of all kinds were bought at prices ranging far above the market rates, and circulars were produced in which successive Ministers of Marine had ordered the commandants at different naval stations to 'expend every sou in their possession' on no matter what, 'before the expiration of the fiscal year, as any excess remaining in their hands would not only be lost to the Ministry by being ordered back into the Treasury, but would allow opportunities for impugning the forecast and judgment of the ministers!' Under such a system it is not surprising that Admiral Krantz, one of the best naval administrators France possesses, should have been forced to withdraw from the Tirard Government to satisfy a political Under-Secretary, M. Etienne.

Is it possible that in the actual condition of France and of Europe such a system as this should last?

If France drifts or is driven into a great European war, one of two things would seem to be inevitable. If the French armies are victorious, the general who commands them and restores the military prestige of France will be the master of the government and of the country. If the French armies are defeated, the Government will disappear in a whirlwind of national rage and despair. 'In that event,' said a Republican Senator to me, 'in that event—which I will not contemplate—the princes of the House of France would be recalled instantly and by acclamation; we should have nothing left but that or anarchy.'

But putting aside the crisis of a great war, what other alternatives present themselves as the possible issues in peace of the system now dominant at Paris?

Of what weight or avail in the policy of the parliamentary oligarchy which calls itself the Third Republic are the counsels of men like M. Léon Renault, M. Jules Simon, M. Ribot, M. Léon Say, who have tried in vain to constitute in France the Conservative Republic of M. Thiers? M. Léon Say left his seat in the Senate before the recent elections and presented himself in the Pyrenees as a candidate for the Chamber, with the well-understood expectation of finding himself eventually put into the presidency of that body. This was to be a guarantee of the Conservative Republic!

Who actually fills that most important post?

M. Floquet, who first distinguished himself under the Empire by publicly insulting the Emperor of Russia in the Palais de Justice during the visit of that potentate to Paris, and who resigned his seat as a deputy for the Seine in March 1871 to share 'the perils and sufferings,' as he put it, of his constituents, the Communards of Paris! For this M. Floquet was arrested at Biarritz and locked up at Paris till the end of the year 1871.

How can France hope to find liberty within her own borders, or peace with honour abroad, under the domination of such men?

On December 19, 1888, during a discussion of the budget of 1890 in the French Senate, M. Challemel-Lacour, a Republican of the Republicans, who actually allowed the red flag to be hoisted instead of the tricolour on the Hôtel de Ville of Lyons while he was prefect of the Rhône, and who represented the Republic for a time as Ambassador in London, made a remarkable speech, in which he warned his colleagues of the fate which they were preparing for the Republic. He is one of the three Senators of the Bouches-du-Rhône, and one of the four Vice-Presidents of a body now controlled by the Government, and therefore virtually by the majority of the Chamber of Deputies. He is more than this. An elaborate speech of his, delivered in the Assembly on September 4, 1874, in which he denied the 'right to teach' as threatening the 'moral unity of France,' was the signal of the deliberate war against all religion afterwards proclaimed by M. Gambetta, and since prosecuted by M. Jules Ferry. Out of that speech grew the policy of the Third Republic. Yet what did he say in 1888? He plainly declared his belief that the policy of the Government was driving the Republic headlong to its ruin. He spoke as a Republican, passionately reaffirming his faith in the Republic, and his desire to see it solidly founded in France. 'I conjure you, therefore,' he said, 'to take order, that the Republic may once more become the reign of law; that all may be protected in their persons, in their property, in their faith, not only against disorder in the streets, but against moral disorder, moral anarchy, defamation, calumny, against the fury of an unbridled, uncontrolled, irresponsible press. It is time to arrest the threatening ruin which must affect the humblest lives, if our sad fate be to witness the catastrophe of liberty!'

M. Challemel-Lacour is an orator. The Senate was shaken and roused by his earnest appeal. A motion was made that his speech be ordered to be printed and posted on the walls of Paris. But the night came, and with the night the pressure of the powers indicted by the speech, and so no more was heard of it, and the budget of 1890 was voted by the outgoing Chamber, and the incoming Chamber has re-established in it a Secret Service Fund of 1,600,000 francs for the Minister of the Interior—and the work of 'invalidating' the elections of troublesome deputies goes merrily on, and in the remote valleys and hills of France poor village curates are mulcted of half their humble stipends for the offence of calling upon their parishioners to vote for the candidates who do not attack their religion.

From this intolerable position there are two obvious ways of escape. One is the familiar Parisian way of the barricades. That way is not likely to be tried in the interest of liberty or of law. The other is the way which France sought to adopt in the recent elections, of a deliberate Revision of the Constitution, now hopelessly perverted into the instrument of a parliamentary oligarchy. The actual Government has just prevented a Revision in the interest of a Republican Dictator, which after all must have been more or less a leap in the dark out of a window.

As between the only available window and the only available doorway of a dwelling in flames, it is intelligible that an emotional inmate, with the smell of the fire on his garments, should make for the window. But, the window being barred, what should restrain him from walking rationally out of the doorway? Any one of a dozen possible emergencies may compel a Revision of the Constitution—and any Revision of the Constitution now must mean either a Radical revolution, or a restoration of the hereditary Executive. Either of these would be a doorway; for France would know whither either of these must lead. M. Thiers, it is said by persons who ought to be well informed, might have led France thus out of a doorway in 1871, and into a restoration of the Monarchy. M. Thiers was an exceedingly able man, but it is hard to see how he could then have gone about to achieve this result. France in 1871 was still a conquered country occupied by the German armies. The Third Napoleon and his son were both then living. The Comte de Chambord was then in the strength of his years. The Comte de Paris had not then taken the steps which he afterwards took with so much wisdom and moral courage, to make an end of the rupture between Henri V. and the House of Orléans.

The situation now is materially changed. The Imperialists are divided between Jerome the father and Victor the son. The Royalists are united. The France of Henri IV. and of Charles X. is represented to-day by the grandson of Louis Philippe. The vox Dei and the vox Populi meet in him as they met in the Prince of Orange when England, forty years after the criminal catastrophe of 1649, was driven by the flight of James II. into seating William and Mary, the grandson and the granddaughter of Charles I., upon the abdicated throne.

How can an independent Executive ever be restored in France excepting in the person of Philippe VII.? Had the Revolution of 1830 never occurred he would now by the ancient law of succession be King of France and Navarre. Had the Revolution of 1848 never occurred he would now be King of the French under the Charter. If the era of revolutions is ever to be closed in France, must it not be by an Executive who shall be at once King of France and King of the French—King of France, as representing the historic growth into greatness and unity of the French nation; King of the French, as representing the personal liberties and the private rights of every citizen of the French commonwealth?