entatives
not amenable to the discipline of the 'sea-green incorruptible'; and as
a matter of principle, leads straight on to that usurpation of all the
powers of the State by a conspiracy of demagogues which followed the
subsidized Parisian insurrection of August 10, 1792.

Such a _regime_ as this sufficiently explains the phenomenon of
'Boulangism,' by which Englishmen and Americans are so much perplexed.
Put any people into the machinery of a centralized administrative
despotism in which the Executive is merely the instrument of a majority
of the legislature, and what recourse is there left to the people but
'Boulangism'? 'Boulangism' is the instinctive, more or less deliberate
and articulate, outcry of a people living under constitutional forms,
but conscious that, by some hocus-pocus, the vitality has been taken out
of those forms. It is the expression of the general sense of insecurity.
In a country situated as France now is, it is natural that this
inarticulate outcry should merge itself at first into a clamour for the
revision of a Constitution which has been made a delusion and a snare;
and then into a clamour for a dynasty which shall afford the nation
assurance of an enduring Executive raised above the storm of party
passions, and sobering the triumph of party majorities with a wholesome
sense of responsibility to the nation.

There would have been no lack of 'Boulangism' in France forty years ago
had M. Thiers and his legislative cabal got the better of the Prince
President in the 'struggle for life' which then went on between the
Place St.-Georges and the Elysee!

III

There are two periods, one in the history of modern England, the other
in the history of the United States, which directly illuminate the
history of France since the overthrow of the ancient French Monarchy in
1792.

One of these is the period of the Long Parliament in England. The other
is the brief but most important interval which elapsed between the
recognition of the independence of the thirteen seceded British colonies
in America, at Versailles in 1783, and the first inauguration of
Washington as President of the United States at New York on April 30,
1789. No Englishman or American, who is reasonably familiar with the
history of either of these periods, will hastily attribute the phenomena
of modern French politics to something essentially volatile and unstable
in the character of the French people.

My own acquaintance, such