cally refreshed
by a constant vision of the Statue of Liberty triumphantly standing in
New York harbor.

Royalism, conservatism, concentrationism, moderate republicanism,
opportunism, radicalism, ultra-radicalism, socialism, and heaven knows
how many other "isms" besides, exist in France to-day, and make it
hard for any ministry to carry on the government. Numerous
disintegrating influences are ever present, and political convictions
are seldom sufficiently decided for any ministry to form a stable
majority.

Though France has had the experience of two previous experiments in
republican forms of government (the one set up in 1792, and the second
established in 1848), they were such mere makeshifts and so very
short-lived that they could not have taught the country very much of
the real genius of republican institutions. The centralization and
tyranny of centuries brought revolt and hatred of the past, but did
not prepare the people for self-government; while here the principles
of civil liberty, transplanted from the mother country and flourishing
in congenial conditions under colonial administration, found apt and
natural expression in the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution. The event of republican institutions twice tried in
France failed to show that even the leaders understood the principles
of liberty as they were understood by the fathers of the American
system of government, and enthusiastically adopted by the people, as
the crystallization, so to speak, in definite terms, of what they had
long enjoyed. Short-sighted acts of tyranny, exercised by George III
and his ministers, were regarded, and justly so, as mere accidents of
the time and as innovations to be resisted and overcome. The outcome
was the vindication of the principles of government founded by the
countrymen of King Alfred the Great, their expansion, and the
invaluable expression of those principles in the Declaration and the
Constitution.

Some of the bravest and best under the French monarchy helped to
establish the reign of popular liberty in the United States, and there
can be no question but that the French Revolution was accomplished in
part as a result of what had been seen and done on this side of the
Atlantic on behalf of the civil rights of the people; but the founders
of the first republic in France had no complete foundation on which to
build a fabric firm and lasting. It was not easy for a venerable
European nation, int