o join hands, I suppose, with the extemporised 'Republic of
Brazil' in a grand propaganda which shall secure the abolition, not
only of all the thrones in Europe, but of all the altars in America. If
language means anything and facts have any force, this is the inevitable
programme of the French Republic of 1890, and this is the entertainment
to which the Christian nations of the New World and the Old were invited
at Paris in the great 'centennial' year 1889.

Believing this to be the inevitable programme of the Republic, as
represented by the Government of President Grevy so long ago as 1880, I
was yet surprised, as 1 have said, to see the strength of the protest
recorded against it by the voters of France at the Legislative elections
in 1885, because the Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had made, and
deservedly, so much progress in the confidence of the French people,
that I had hardly expected to see the essentially conservative heart of
France startled, even by three or four years' experience of the
Government of M. Grevy, into an adequate sense of the perils into which
these successors of the Marechal-Duc were leading the country.

'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' is an essentially French
proverb. Seven years of peace, liberty, and financial prosperity under
the Conservative Republic should have gone far, I thought, to convince
the average French peasant that he might, after all, be safe under a
republic. Doubtless this impression of mine was not wholly unfounded.
Yet, in spite of this important check upon the headway of the reaction
against Republicanism provoked by the fanaticism and the financial
extravagance of the Government of President Grevy--and in spite, too, of
the open official pressure put upon the voters of France by the then
Minister of the Interior, M. Allain-Targe, who issued a circular
commanding all the prefects in France to stand 'neutral' between
Republican candidates of all shades, but to exert themselves for the
defeat of all 'reactionary' candidates; in spite of all this, the
elections of October and November 1885 sent up about two hundred
monarchical members, whose seats could by no trick or device be stolen
from them, to the Chamber of Deputies, and pitted a popular vote of
3,608,578 declared enemies of the existing Republic against a popular
vote of 4,377,063 citizens anxious to maintain or willing to submit to
it.

From that time to the present day the Government of the Thir