upon party differences have tended steadily to disappear. During
the Empire some of the cleverest writers, such as Sainte-Beuve and
Merimee and About, were imperialists: now they are all dead or have
changed their politics. During this period, too, the intelligent and
literary opposition was mostly Orleanistic, but the last seven years
have clearly shown not only that the bourgeois monarchy had no roots in
the heart of the people, but also that the conservative Republic
possesses all its advantages, combined with few of its objectionable
qualities. To men like Renan and Laugel, who have been Orleanists all
their lives, and who cherish a personal affection for the party, the
situation appears melancholy, and the wail of Renan in his last book is
sad enough. He is French to the core; supports openly the doctrine, "My
country--right or wrong;" finds the centralization of the French system,
carried to its logical extreme, the ideal government; and hates, above
all things, "Americanism." What strikes an Anglo-Saxon as the merest
commonplace of healthy politics or intellectual life is in his eyes the
most pernicious heresy. We believe that freedom to teach and to write is
the only way to discover the truth, and are confident that in the
struggle of life which opposing systems must pass through the truth is
sure in the end to win. Not so Renan. "The idea that there is a true
knowledge, which must be taught, protected, patronized by the state, to
the exclusion of false knowledge, is losing ground--one of the results
of the general enfeeblement of notions of government." This is bad
enough, but the political situation is even worse than the moral and
intellectual; for M. Renan finds that France has "preferred the
democratic programme, according to which the state, composed of the
agglomeration of individuals, having no other object than the happiness
of these individuals _as they themselves understand it_, gives up all
notion of initiative above their feelings and ideas. The consequence of
such a state of things is the pursuit of prosperity and liberty, the
destruction of whatever remains of the spirit of class, weakening of the
power of the state. Individuals and the subordinate groups of the state,
such as the county and the township, will prosper under such a regime;
but it is to be feared that the nation, the country--France--will lose
every day something of its authority and its strong cohesion. The period
which we are enteri