galley on her shield, and her motto:
"_Floats, but sinks not._" But few capitals have been more frequently,
apparently, on the point of being submerged. Even as these lines are
being written, it is agitated by the protracted and cumulating effects
of a military and social agitation which, in the language of the
President of the Cabinet of Ministers, "is deplorable, which paralyzes
all commerce and creates a situation intolerable to all."

[Illustration]

Indeed, it may be said that the present moment is the most critical, the
most dramatic, in the long history of the city and the nation, and that
an entirely new interest will henceforth attach itself to this crowned
capital which sees herself in the inevitable future forever uncrowned.
Never before has the pitiless march of events, the pitiless accumulation
of irrefutable evidence, the testimony of so many observers, at home and
abroad, so seemed to demonstrate that all the methods of government had
been exhausted, and that the nation had attained her summit of power and
was doomed to steady decline. Down to Louis XIV, her hope was thought to
lie in the consolidation of the royal authority and the suppression of
the feudal power of the nobles; down to 1789, in the _tiers etat_ and
the States-General; after the Commune of 1871, in the maintenance of a
Republic supported by universal suffrage. The ideals of 1830 and of 1848
have been practically attained; there are, finally, no new and more
liberal political expedients to hope for,--and never has France seen
herself so distanced by her neighbors. Her contemporary literature
groans with the accumulation of these facts--from the ineptitude of her
rulers, national and colonial, down to the dependence upon the
foreigner for wood for her street pavements and the canned provisions
for her army. Behind that "gap in the Vosges" upon which, as one of her
statesmen remarks, she cannot forever fix her gaze, she sees her great
and hated rival doubling in power. In 1860, Germany had the same
population as France; to-day, she has that of France and Spain combined.
"Never has such a displacement of power been so quickly produced between
two rival peoples. And no one among us seems to regard it, though not
one of the problems which torment us is as grave as this one. Our
agriculture, our industry, our commerce decline; we seem to be in
decadence! How could it be otherwise? There are, in the neighboring
hive, beyond the Rhine, sixteen m