the President, and it will be seen that a
change of one vote in the minority would have carried the day for the
revolutionists. So narrow was our escape from a peril which the founders
of the Constitution had foreseen, and against which they had devised all
the safeguards possible in the circumstances of the United States. What,
in such a case, would become of a French President?

The American President is not elected by Congress except in certain not
very probable contingencies, and when the House votes for a President,
it votes not by members but by delegations, each state of the Union
casting one vote. The French President is elected by a convention of the
Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, in which every member has a vote,
and the result is determined by an actual majority. The Senate of the
United States is entirely independent of the House. A large proportion
of the members of the French Senate are elected by the Assembly, and the
Chamber outnumbers the Senate by nearly two to one. What the procedure
of the French Senate, sitting as a High Court on the impeachment of a
President by the majority of the Chamber, would probably be, may be
gathered from the recent trial by that body of General Boulanger.

With the resignation of the Marechal-Duc and the election of M. Grevy
the Government of France, ten years ago, became what it now is--a
parliamentary oligarchy, with absolutely no practical check upon its
will except the recurrence every four years of the legislative
elections. And as these elections are carried out under the direct
control, through the prefects and the mayors, of the Minister of the
Interior, himself a member of the parliamentary oligarchy, the weakness
of this check might be easily inferred, had it not been demonstrated by
facts during the elections of September 22 and October 6, 1889.

How secure this parliamentary oligarchy feels itself to be, when once
the elections are over, appears from the absolutely cynical coolness
with which the majority goes about what is called the work of
'invalidating' the election of members of the minority. Something of the
sort went on in my own country during the 'Reconstruction' period which
followed the Civil War, but it never assumed the systematic form now
familiar in France. As practised under the Third Republic it revives the
spirit of the methods by which Robespierre and the sections 'corrected
the mistakes' made by the citizens of Paris in choosing repres