ng upon will be one of liberty _a l'Americaine_."

All this seems mournful to men of Renan's type, and to young men of
fashion who sigh for the "elegance" of the Empire or the Restoration,
and pose consequently as imperialists or as adherents of Henri V. But
the mass of the nation is supremely contented. The peasants say that the
Republic is the only government which does not go to war; the middle
classes, richer and more numerous in France than in any other country,
are happy in having the care of their material interests in their own
hands, and especially in the consciousness that they are now the ruling
class, and that bourgeois intelligence and respectability, rather than
imperial frivolity or royal pietism, is the prevailing idea. Even Renan
admits that "the present hour is sweet:" what troubles him is the
thought of the future. But the republicans are not troubled at all. They
don't intend to carry out any great reforms; they wish to avoid all
foreign complications until the yearned-for hour arrives when Germany
will be forced to disgorge what they are pleased to term its ill-gotten
booty; they have in their ranks almost all the administrative and
oratorical powers of the country; and they tell you that M. Grevy, the
present president of the Chamber of Deputies, will succeed to the
presidency, when the "stupid" MacMahon goes out, with just as little
difficulty as the latter had in coming in, and that he, in turn, will in
all probability be succeeded by Gambetta. These two men are bourgeois to
the tips of their fingers, as was Thiers--modest, leading a regular
life; well-informed on all local matters, and naively ignorant of the
rest of the world; not strong believers in political economy; prudent
and anti-clerical. Only, Gambetta, being twenty years younger than
Grevy, is by twenty years more fiery and radical.

The reader must not complain that he has been entrapped into reading a
leader on French politics when he desired nothing of the sort; for,
without bearing in mind these preliminary facts, it is quite impossible
to understand the relations of French literary men among themselves.
Party passion has ever run high in France, and now that everybody can
freely speak his mind, it has become more difficult than ever for even
the oldest friendship to stand the strain of daily discussion. Take the
instance of M. About and M. Taine. They were schoolboys together, and it
would be hard to say which of the two most dist