ropagandism that its
leaders cannot, if they would, either readjust the national finances or
let the religious question alone.

A man of much ability and of very high character, who has filled
important financial posts under the Empire in this part of France, tells
me that there has been no real balancing, now, of the public books for
several years, because the members of the Cour des Comptes whose duty it
is to get this done have found it impossible (and so reported) to get
all the necessary accounts from the Ministry of Finance. As no
Conservative members are permitted to sit on the Committee of the
Budget, even such a monstrous thing as this passes unchecked by the
Chamber. No wonder that he should tell me, M. Bethmont, one of the
members of the Cour des Comptes and a Republican, is of the opinion that
nothing can make matters straight again in France but an Emperor with a
Liberal constitution, or, in other words, a revival of the Ollivier
experiment of 1870.

I tried in vain to get from M. Fleury some definite notion of the
political programme of General Boulanger. As I have been constantly
assured that the General formed his programme from his observation of
the institutions of my own country during the short time which he spent
in America, as one of the chosen representatives of France during the
centennial celebration of the crowning victory of Yorktown, in 1881, I
have long been not unnaturally curious to ascertain precisely how he
proposes to 'Americanise' the actual government of France. But on this
point I can get no more light from M. Fleury in Picardy--though M.
Fleury spent some time with the General as a not unsympathetic
ally--than I have been able to get from any of the General's most
devoted partisans in Paris. In Picardy as in Paris, Boulangism seems to
represent a destructive--or, if the phrase be more polite, a
detergent--rather than a constructive force. It is not the less worthy
of consideration, perhaps, on this account. But on this account it
appears to me more likely to play a subordinate than a leading part in
the political movement of these times. It is rather a broom, if I may so
speak, than a sceptre which the 'brav' general' is expected to wield. In
conversation with M. Fleury, another of General Boulanger's intimate and
confidential lieutenants, M. Turquet, formerly an Under-Secretary of
State in the Ministry of Fine Arts, who ran for a seat as deputy in the
Aisne in 1885, summed up the