too late to act upon it, because there was no man bold or strong enough to tell the truth to the supreme democracy, which shares with absolute kings the privilege of being approached with bated breath and flattered into ruin. To this hour, this poor stricken people is addressed in the language of courtiers, as if its ministers and journalists were its slaves; and it is hard to say who will assume the invidious duty of breaking the spell.

The Government of National Defence in France is represented by two men, General Trochu in Paris and M. Gambetta at Tours. No man has a higher character for personal rectitude and virtue than General Trochu. Unambitious, he has never sought the terrible responsibility which has been thrust upon him; and he could give no greater proof of patriotism than his honest resolution to serve his country and to defend the capital in conjunction with men whose political opinions have nothing in common with his own. Whatever be the result, he is one of the heroes of duty. We doubt not that he has performed a most arduous task with conscientious devotion; but he has shown no signs of the inspiration of military genius, and nothing in his past life had given him any opportunity of displaying it. M. Gambetta is a man of a different mould. He has the energy of revolutionary times. He probably shares the opinion-we think an erroneous one-that the cause of the Revolution was saved in 1794 by the violent measures of the Terrorists; and though we believe him to be entirely free from their execrable indifference to bloodshed, like them he would not hesitate to resort to almost any means of promoting his ends. The Terrorists were men who believed in the strength of violent governments, and who held very cheap the restraint of law. In the name of liberty they claimed to exercise the most arbitrary and unlimited power. This race of politicians is not extinct in France. In some of the great cities they are formidable by numbers, and when the war is over they will still present a formidable obstacle to the re-establishment of a regular government in the country. The first step to the re-establishment of such a government would evidently be the election of a National Assembly, empowered to re-constitute the State on a legal basis. To that measure, however, M. Gambetta is strongly opposed. He has done all he can to induce his colleagues to postpone it. He apparently distrusts his own ability to retain the power, conferred upon him by the mob of Paris, in presence of the representatives of France; and he prefers to exercise, as long as he can, a power which is unlimited because it has no legal character or basis. Nothing can be more absurd

or more akin to the conduct of the Republican commissaires of the first Republic than M. Gambetta's interference with the military commanders who still remained to France and his language throughout has been systematically mendacious. The ascendency of such a man at such a time, who supplies the want of statesmanlike wisdom by declamatory energy, and aspires to be a Danton without the scaffold, is singularly characteristic of the revolutionary state of the country. He too is a child of 1792, destined probably to found as little as his predecessors, and not to equal either their momentary greatness or their unforgotten crimes.

M. Guizot, in whom age does not chill the fervour of patriotism or shake his faith in Parliamentary government, has recently addressed a letter to the members of the Government of National Defence, in which he does ample justice to their exertions to save the country. But he proceeds in these remarkable terms:

'Beware of illusions: in the present state of affairs, and of yourselves, you are not equal to your task. The present war has, and can have, for us, no other object but peace; and you are doubtless well aware that the country desires peace, when it can be obtained with honour. But the enemy, in order to treat for peace, and the neutral Powers, in order to second us in obtaining it, require to have before them a complete and effective government, with a serious prospect of duration, and one which may be relied on to execute the treaties it may sign. You have neither that strength nor that character. You are an incomplete and provisional power. You have even been obliged, by the investment of Paris, to cut your government in halves— one for Paris, the other for the provinces; and these two fractions of government, materially severed from each other, have not always exhibited the same political aspect, whatever may be their mutual goodwill the spirit of order predominates in that of Paris; the spirit of concession to disorder in that of the provinces.

'Nor can it be denied that under this government, by reason of its division, the most important questions are decided-resolutions of peace and war, levies of the people, and national loans-by one or two persons without debate, without publicity, and by the sole authority of this or that individual. What is this but another form of personal government, without responsibility subject to the control of debate, and without any pre-existing securities to the country?

'Evidently nothing but a National Assembly, freely elected by the whole country, can put an end to a state of things so imperfect, so irregular, so precarious. Such an assembly can alone, by its debates and its decisions, realise and cover at the same time the responsibility of those who are in power, and give the government the union, the support, and the strength which it requires-requires at home and abroad, for peace and for war. What is now desired, what is now demanded of the Republic, as it was formerly demanded of the Constitutional

Monarchy, is the government of the nation by the nation. No negotiation can be carried on without it. Where, but in a National Assembly, capable of transporting itself to any part of the territory and causing the influence of its presence and the sound of its voice to be everywhere felt and heard-where else, I say, shall we find that common centre and source of action necessary to give effect to the will of the nation?'

We cordially concur in these sentiments; and we would fain cherish the hope which M. Guizot expresses that such an Assembly will again bring forth from obscurity into light and power those estimable and able men who once formed the nucleus of the Government of France-men who are not fitly described by the name of any dynastic party, but who are at once conservative and liberal, asking nothing of the Government but to restore peace and order, the authority of the law, and a certain measure of freedom. Unhappily, M. Guizot himself admits that this worthy portion of the community has almost always shown itself too timid or too submissive to offer an effectual resistance to those who either trample on liberty in the name of order, or sacrifice order to what they term liberty. The history of the French Revolution has been the history of the conflict of these two extremes. The juste milieu, as M. Guizot perseveres in styling his own party, has fared but ill between them. And even now, for the reasons we have given at some length in this article, we entertain but a faint expectation that the moderate and intelligent men of the middle classes will recover strength and energy enough to rescue the country from the grasp of the ignorant and the violent. Yet that is the problem to be solved before France can be restored to permanent peace, prosperity, and freedom.

We shall now leave our readers to draw their own inferences from these phenomena, and to answer as they please the questions -Is not France, as she now exists, the true child, in the third and fourth generation, of the democratic Revolution of 1789? Is not her present failure to be traced to permanent causes, even more than to temporary accidents, which indeed must themselves spring from such causes?

But ere we conclude we cannot but express the profound sorrow with which we witness even the momentary eclipse of the brightest planet in our system. With all the faults of her rulers and the failings of her people, France remains incomparably the most original, ingenious, and vivid of the Continental nations. When we remember what her literature has done for the world in the last three centuries; with what depth of insight and keen edge of discernment she has sounded and

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dispelled a host of errors; with what sagacity she has pursued every path of scientific research; with what lively skill she has popularised the arts; with what energy she has advocated the liberties of mankind, her conquerors of the hour are no more worthy to be named beside her, than the Macedonians were to rival the glory of Athens. She may indeed have been overeager to assert a political influence in Europe; but the influence of her language, of her tastes, of her genius, of her sympathies, and even of her manners, reached and will reach from the Tagus to the Volga.

It cannot be forgotten in this country that the joint influence of France and England in the Western Alliance has been for forty years the mainstay of the Liberal cause in Europe. Paris,' said Lord Palmerston in one of his happiest moments, is the pivot of my foreign policy.' It has been the good fortune of the generation to which we ourselves belong to root out those sentiments of mutual aversion and hostility which had subsisted between the two countries for so many ages. That alone has been by far the greatest and most important fact of this age, for to it we owe, till the present time, the peace of the world and the peace this country still enjoys. In that period of time, a multitude of difficult questions have arisen. They have almost all been solved in the sense desired by the Liberal Government of Great Britain with the active concurrence of France, and without that concurrence we should have found ourselves called upon to withstand alone the policy of the Northern Courts, which has been almost invariably opposed to ours. Thus it was that Belgium was constituted; that by the Quadruple Treaty the succession to the Crowns of Spain and Portugal was fixed in the constitutional line; that Greece was protected against Russian ascendency; that in South America the River Plate was opened; that the rights of European nations were defended in China by the allied armies, and commerce placed under the guarantee of political treaties; that peace was restored in Syria; that the great contest against Russia was carried to a successful issue in the Crimea, and the Black Sea neutralised by the Treaty of 1856; that the independence of Italy was established by the arms of France, but with the cordial concurrence and moral support of this country; and that our own commercial relations with France were opened and extended by a Treaty which has been a beacon of free-trade to the world. During the Indian Mutiny, far from taking any unfriendly advantage of our difficulties, France gave her cordial goodwill to us in that battle of civilisation against barbarism. During the American Civil War the iden

tical policy and conduct of the two States was strictly regulated in concert, and in the affair of the Trent' France declared promptly and unequivocally in our favour. Nor can we forget in this enumeration, that the two countries have repeatedly expressed in common, though unfortunately in vain, their conviction that the destruction of Polish nationality has been the cause of lasting evils to the best interests of Europe, which are apparent in the politics of the present hour.

Occasional differences of policy have at times arisen. France stood aloof from our Syrian intervention in 1840, and from our proposed Danish policy in 1864; she detached herself from us in the Spanish marriages and the Mexican expedition. We think that in each of these cases she was wrong; but these differences produced no permanent evil results, whereas the acts of joint policy we have just enumerated stand and remain for the benefit of the world. In all of them we have had the active co-operation of France. We have not had the cooperation, or the good wishes, of any other European Power.

It would be the height of ingratitude if we could now forget these mutual services, which do honour alike to the Government of Napoleon III. and to the Governments which preceded him. But there is too much reason to believe that we shall not be allowed to forget that the blow which has struck down France, has deprived England of no inconsiderable part of her influence abroad. The maritime strength of this country, when combined with the military strength of France, had a prestige and a force, which proved fatal to the strongest autocrat of Europe, and were not to be openly resisted by his successors. That fortunate combination is for the present paralysed in one of its limbs, and those who suffered by it are not slow to take advantage of the change. Already the diminution of the force which supported the treaties maintaining the independence of the Ottoman Empire, has been supposed to warrant an arrogant demand to set them aside. It is presumed that public law has lost its authority, since the aid of France can no longer be invoked in support of it; and whatever power Great Britain may put forth in defence of what she conceives to be just and right, she has for the present lost the support of her most efficient ally.

In spite, however, of all that is past, France has still the moral energy to carry on this great contest for national independence. Victory is the prize of those who can make war longest and if aught of her ancient spirit remains, she will not treat as long as a stranger treads her soil.