after him.

He was one of the celebrities of an age in which celebrity has almost
ceased to be a distinction. But the measure of his political capacity is
given in the fact that he was an active promoter of the insurrection of
September 4, 1870, in Paris against the authority of the Empress
Eugenie. A more signal instance is not to be found in history of that
supreme form of public stupidity which President Lincoln stigmatised, in
a memorable phrase, as the operation of 'swapping horses while crossing
a stream.'

It was worse than an error or a crime, it was simply silly. The
inevitable effect of it was to complete the demoralisation of the French
armies, and to throw France prostrate before her conquerors. A very
well-known German said to me a few years ago at Lucerne, where we were
discussing the remarkable trial of Richter, the dynamiter of the
Niederwald: 'Ah! we owe much to Gambetta, and Jules Favre, and Thiers,
and the French Republic. They saved us from a social revolution by
paralysing France. We could never have exacted of the undeposed Emperor
at Wilhelmshoehe, with the Empress at Paris, the terms which those
blubbering jumping-jacks were glad to accept from us on their knees.'

The imbecility of September 4, 1870, was capped by the lunacy of the
Commune of Paris in 1871. This latter was more than France could bear,
and a wholesome breeze of national feeling stirs in the 'murders grim
and great,' by which the victorious Army of Versailles avenged the
cowardly massacre of the hostages, and the destruction of the Tuileries
and the Hotel de Ville.

With what 'mandate,' and by whom conferred, M. Thiers went to Bordeaux
in 1871, is a thorny question, into which I need not here enter. What he
might have done for his country is, perhaps, uncertain. What he did we
know. He founded a republic of which, in one of his characteristic
phrases, he said that: 'it must be Conservative, or it could not be,'
and this he did with the aid of men without whose concurrence it would
have been impossible, and of whom he knew perfectly well that they were
fully determined the Republic should not be Conservative. He became
Chief of the State, and this for a time, no doubt, he imagined would
suffice to make the State Conservative.

He was supported by an Assembly in which the Monarchists of France
predominated. The triumphant invasion and the imminent peril of the
country had brought monarchical France into the field as one man. M