The history of the Republic up to this time has been such a course of surprises, that any forecast as to the future must be made with a large reckoning for accidents; but this much may be said, that the Republic owes its present appearance of stability to the want of commanding talents among her ruling men. The outlook could not have been so peaceful had Gambetta been alive. Gambetta had a vast ambition, and a leonine, roaring energy, which provoked furious opposition. The men who have parted his influence among them may be as ambitious as he was; but they are so for personal objects, and as there is nothing great in their characters or their policy, nothing imperious in their manner, nothing stirring or seducing in their eloquence, they are less feared than the man who wished to be a master, and said so. Nobody could denounce M. Jules Ferry as aspiring to become a dictator; yet during the past year he has held more effective power than was ever wielded by Gambetta. He is a faithful party-servant who has been allowed to exercise authority, because his employers have felt that they could dismiss him at a moment’s notice. We bear more from a humble, useful domestic, than from a self-asserting master. Louis XIV., who broke the tyranny of Mazarin, and could not brook the arrogance of Fouquet, submitted to the management of the quiet, astute Colbert.

In his novel “Numa Roumestan,” written while Gambetta was alive, Alphonse Daudet showed “the North being conquered by the South,” that is, the blustering, bragging, blarneying blagueurs of Provence and Gascony enthralling the democracy with their charlatanism, and seizing upon all the public offices. Sardou had worked out the same idea in “Rabagas;” but it must be noticed that the holders of the four most important posts in France at this moment—the four Presidents, of the Republic, of the Senate, of the Chamber of Deputies, and of the Cabinet—are conspicuously exempt from the usual attributes of demagogues. They are cold-headed men, plain of speech, dry in manner; they are not Southerners, and, in fact, they are by no means representative of the French as a nation.

M. GrÉvy comes from the Jura, on the borders of Switzerland, a department which has for the last half century been more advanced in public instruction than all the others, and where the bourgeoisie are something like the Scotch in their puritanism.

M. le Royer, President of the Senate, a hard, sententious little man, with solemn eyes peering through gold-rimmed spectacles, and a voice like the drone of a Lenten preacher—M. le Royer is a Genevan Protestant, whose father became French by naturalisation. M. Brisson was born and educated at Bourges, in the old province of Berry. He is a trim, mathematically-minded lawyer and logician, creaseless in his morals as in his dress, one of those Frenchmen to whom all the levities of French life—light literature, music, gossip, and even cuisine—are distasteful. M. Jules Ferry is a Lorrainer, born in the mountainous Vosges; and, like M. le Royer, a Protestant—at least so far as he confesses to any religion at all.

A nation must be turned upside down before a man like M. Jules Ferry can become Prime Minister. It makes one smile to think that the French have demolished three dynasties, and that countless thousands of enthusiastic revolutionists have let themselves be shot behind barricades, in order that the country may now be ruled by a Cabinet containing three second-rate journalists, and three barristers who have no names at the Bar. “No more revolutions: I have become a Minister,” wrote the late M. Garnier Pages to his constituents in 1848.14 M. Ferry, to do him justice, did not conclude that progress reached its zenith on the day when he took Cabinet office; he has rather shown modest thankfulness at his own elevation, while feeling privately, no doubt, some astonishment. Now that he has been in place some time, the astonishment must have worn off, for he has learnt to know men, and to perceive that circumstances do more for most successful rulers than these accomplish for themselves. An inexperienced man at the helm soon gets accustomed to see the big ship obey the propulsion of his rudder, and if he be steering in calm weather, he may do as well as the skilled pilot. M. Ferry became Prime Minister faute de mieux, and he may remain so (with occasional displacements) crainte de pire. The course of French Republicanism is always downward, and the constant preoccupation of men’s minds under that happy rÉgime, is the fear of worse.

Jules Ferry owed the beginning of his political fortune to his luck in writing for a newspaper which had a witty editor. Just twenty years ago (1865), being then thirty-three years old, he joined the staff of the Temps, and after contributing leaders for three years, undertook in 1868 a series of papers attacking the administration of Baron Haussmann as Prefect of the Seine. Baron Haussmann had rebuilt Paris and made it a city unique in the world for beauty and sanitation. M. Ferry could not have performed such a task, but he was able to criticise the Prefect’s work, to array long columns of figures showing how much it had cost, and to ask whether it would not have been far better if all these millions had been given to the poor. Baron Haussmann sent communiques to the Temps impugning the accuracy of M. Ferry’s figures; but the journalist of course stuck to his multiplication, and, as spirited opposition always made a man popular under the Empire, the Vosgian’s articles obtained more success than is usual with statistical essays. It was proposed that they should be rebound in pamphlet form and circulated among Parisian householders in view of the general election of 1869. M. Neffzer, editor of the Temps, then suggested that the pamphlet should be called, “Les Comptes Fantastiques d’Haussmann.”15

The title took, and Jules Ferry got the reputation of being a comical fellow. Resolving to make the most of this character while it lasted, he came forward as a candidate for Paris at the elections of 1869—calling himself a Radical for this purpose. He was no more Radical than comical, but if he had not taken up extreme views he could have offered no reason for opposing the moderate Liberal (M. GuÉroult, editor of the Opinion Nationale), who was the sitting member of the sixth Parisian ward. M. Ferry defeated his brother-journalist; and in the following year, when the Empire collapsed at Sedan, he became ex-officio a member of the Government of National Defence. It will be remembered that this Government was composed of the nine members for Paris, because M. GrÉvy and some other leading Republicans refused to accept power unless it were lawfully conferred upon them by a national assembly.

M. Ferry was of course installed in Baron Haussmann’s post; but during the siege of Paris he was very nearly lynched by some of those excellent working-men who had formerly hailed him as a friend and brother. On the 31st October, 1870, an insurrection broke out in the beleaguered city, and a vigorous attempt was made to overthrow the Government. M. Ferry fell into the hands of the insurgents, and for six mortal hours these rude men subjected him to every species of indignity. They pulled his luxuriant black whiskers, they taunted him with eating white bread and beefsteak, while his proletarian brethren had to content themselves with rations of brown bread and horseflesh, and when dinner-time came they offered him his choice between a grilled rat and some cold boiled dog. Happily the Breton Mobiles were at hand and delivered him; but from that day M. Ferry’s Radicalism perceptibly cooled, and when the Communal rebellion occurred, he took good care not to let himself be kidnapped again by the once-idolised working-man. Decamping to Versailles he remained there throughout the second siege, and did not return to take possession of his post as Prefect of the Seine until the rebellion had been crushed. It was on this occasion that alighting from his brougham near the still-smouldering HÔtel de Ville, and seeing a convoy of Communist prisoners pass, he shook his nicely-gloved fist and exclaimed: “Ah! tas de canaille!”

The exclamation was pardonable, for these Communists had shot M. Ferry’s friend and former Secretary, Gustave Chaudey, and the new-fledged Prefect must have imagined bullets whistling by his own sleek ears as he looked at them. However, M. Ferry’s vindictiveness went no further than words, for he exerted himself charitably to save some old journalistic comrades who had taken the wrong side during the civil war. He is believed to have secreted several of these in his private lodgings and to have covered them with his official protection while the police were hunting for them. What is more, he honorably connived at the escape of one of his vilest detractors, FÉlix Pyat. This charming person, always the first to preach sedition and regicide, and the first to fly in the hour of danger, had been unable to get clear away from Paris when the Commune fell. He took refuge in a convent, where the nuns harbored him for six weeks, though these poor women were quite aware that he was the Pyat who had been clamoring for the demolition of churches and the shooting of hostages. Jules Ferry happened to hear of Pyat’s whereabouts, but instead of delivering up the wretched men to a court-martial, he caused a passport to be privately given him.

Good nature abounds in M. Ferry’s character, and this quality, in combination with perseverance and a quiet talent for picking up other people’s ideas, has been the secret of his success. During the last years of the Empire while he wrote for the Temps, he was a daily frequenter of the CafÉ de Madrid, and there he was appreciated as an attentive listener to no matter whose stories. He had then, as he has now, a face such as is only to be seen on the shoulders of old-fashioned French barristers and Belgravian footmen. The judges of the Second Empire did not allow avocats to wear beards, so M. Ferry shaved his upper lip and chin, but his whiskers were of stupendous size. Add to these a Roman nose, a fine forehead, shrewd playful eyes, a well shaped smiling mouth, and a certain plumpness of girth which removed him altogether out of the category of those lean men whom Shakespeare thought dangerous. He always shook men’s hands with a hearty grip; he could laugh loud and long even when not amused; if conversation flagged he could light it up suddenly with a few crackling jokes, but he generally preferred to sit silent, smoking penny cigars (for he was not rich), sipping absinthe, and taking mental notes of what was being said around him. Now and then, especially if a talker appealed to him, he would nod approval with a grave closing of the eyes, which is the supreme politeness in the art of listening.

He never squandered his knowledge in small talk, so that his public speeches always took his most intimate friends aback. Gambetta once said to him: “You are the most secretive of chatter-boxes,”16 the truth being that Ferry used commonplace ideas in private intercourse, just as some men keep half-pence for beggars. To stake gold in conversational games over a cafÉ table was more than his intellectual means could afford. A blagueur himself in a small way, he knew the destructive power of that light chaff which can be thrown upon a good idea while it has the bloom of novelty on it. Then he was not combative. Gambetta, a millionaire in talents, could scatter his best thoughts broadcast without ever impoverishing himself. At the CafÉ Procope, at BrÉbant’s, and in the dining-room of his friend, ClÉment Laurier, he would pound his fists on the table and thunder out long passages of the speeches which he intended to deliver, and this without caring whether political opponents heard him. “You are showing your hand,” Laurier17 and the still more prudent Arthur Ranc used to say. But Gambetta could win without hiding his trumps, or he could win without trumps.

Ferry always went into political action with his powder dry, chose his ground carefully and picked out an antagonist whom he was sure to worst. Gambetta would rush at the strongest enemy, Ferry fired at the weakest; but this system had the advantage of leaving him after every combat victorious and unwounded. It was a great triumph to him, when, coming back among his friends, he heard their self-astonished bravos as they slapped him on the back. There is much slapping on the back in French political assemblies. Many a time has Gambetta’s broad hand descended upon Ferry’s stalwart shoulders with the shout, ”C’est bien fait, mon petit!”

The two were capital friends from the first, and remained so till nearly the end. It was not till within two years of Gambetta’s death, that the chief began to find his protÉgÉ a little too independent. Mutinous Ferry never was, but a time arrived when, from one cause and another, he found himself second in influence to Gambetta among the Republican party. He was but Addington to Gambetta’s Pitt: nevertheless he got tired of hearing people say that he was only allowed to hold office as a stopgap; and with a proper dignity he resented Gambetta’s pretensions to act as occult Prime Minister without assuming the responsibilities of the premiership. Gambetta, as we know, wanted to become President of the Republic, or else Prime Minister with a secure majority to be obtained by scrutin de liste. Until he could compass one or other of these ends, he preferred to play the Agamemnon sitting in the Presidential chair of the Chamber of Deputies. M. de Freycinet and M. Ferry each humored this whim so long as it was possible, and indeed nothing could have been more amicably subservient than M. Ferry’s conduct while Prime Minister in 1881. He not only dispensed his patronage by Gambetta’s directions, but framed all Government measures according to the Dictator’s tastes, and even agreed to the performance of little Parliamentary comedies, in which Gambetta pretended to attack the Cabinet in order to dispel the notion that M. Ferry was not a free agent. This state of things, however, could not continue after the general election of 1881, when a strong Republican majority was returned—not to support the Ferry Cabinet, but to set up something better. Gambetta forgot that in putting on the gloves with his friend Ferry, simply pour amuser la galerie, he was apt to give knock-down blows which made Ferry look small. The cautious Lorrainer felt that he had had enough of these sparring-matches, and he had the sharpness to see that if he accepted a portfolio in the “Grand MinistÈre,” which Gambetta formed in November 1881, he would confirm the general opinion that throughout his premiership he had only been the great man’s puppet. For all this, it was a very brave thing he did in refusing to sit in Gambetta’s Cabinet. Gambetta was deeply offended and doubtless as much surprised as Richelieu would have been if Brother Joseph had declined to “act any longer with him for the present.” Happily the Dictator could not punish Brother Jules as the Cardinal would have chastised Brother Joseph.

He sent twice to Ferry to offer him a portfolio, wrote to him once, and ended by proposing to get him elected life-senator and President of the Upper House. But when all these favors were declined with thanks, he shrugged his shoulders and exclaimed: “Mais c’est absurde!” meaning that his friend Ferry had come to think a little too much of himself.

Two months after this the “Grand MinistÈre” had fallen. Jules Ferry had given the Scrutin de Liste Bill his vote, but he had refrained from exerting any influence on behalf of the Cabinet. “C’est un coup de Ferry!” ejaculated Gambetta, when the numbers of the division were announced,18 and upon somebody’s remarking that Ferry had voted aright, “Bah, you should have seen him in the smoking-room,” growled the angry chief. “But he was speaking up loudly for you in the smoking-room.” “The song is in the tune,” answered Gambetta, “and Jules was singing flat.”19

The fact is that the fate of the Scrutin Bill had turned wholly on the question as to whether Gambetta could be trusted. The measure establishing election by caucus would have placed absolute power in his hands for years, and the Left Centre were naturally afraid of this prospect, which was tantamount to the destruction of regular Parliamentary government. But before committing themselves to a coalition with Radicals and Monarchists, many of these moderate Liberals came and sounded Ferry. He would only answer that he was sure Gambetta meant well, and so forth; but of course this was not enough, and the Moderates marched over to M. ClÉmenceau. The day after this vote M. Ferry was back in office with the portfolio of Public Instruction, and thirteen months later he was Prime Minister once more, but this time under conditions very different from those which had chequered his first Administration. Gambetta was dead, three Cabinets had been overthrown within eight months, and M. Ferry was actually able to make a favor of accepting a post in which M. de Freycinet, M. Duclerc and M. FalliÈres had wretchedly failed. Things had come to such a pass that if M. Ferry had objected to form a Government, M. GrÉvy would have resigned.

Thus M. Ferry was truly on a certain day the Deus ex machinÂ. His advance to a position so powerful can only be explained by comparing him to the winner of an obstacle race. Nine years ago, any politician contemplating the possibility of Gambetta’s death, would have named at least six Republicans now living as more likely than M. Ferry to succeed him as leader of the party. He would have named Jules Simon, LÉon Say, William Waddington, Charles de Freycinet, Challemel-Lacour, or EugÈne ClÉmenceau; and supposing all these runners had started with M. Ferry over a flat course, it may be questioned, to keep up the racing metaphor, whether Ferry would have been so much as placed. But in an obstacle race, one man comes to grief at the “hanging-tub,” one at the crawling, another at the water-jump, and the winner is often the man who, having scrambled through every thing in a haphazard fashion, comes in alone—all the others having dropped off.

No man ever spoilt a fine chance so sadly as Jules Simon—the first to “drop off”—and this all for want of a little spirit at the right moment. The author of many learned and entertaining works on political economy, a bright scholar, charming causeur, persuasive debater, a man of handsome face and lordly bearing, infinitely respectable in his private life, full of diplomatic tact and with a genuine aptitude for administration—M. Simon had all the qualifications of a party-leader. Under the Empire he was an Orleanist, but he let himself be converted to Republicanism by M. Thiers after the war, and he was the only Minister whom Thiers trusted to the extent of never meddling with the business of his department. He was Minister of Public Instruction and Worship for more than two years, and acquitted himself of his functions in a manner to please both Catholics and Freethinkers, cardinals and vivisecting professors. He was perhaps a little too unctuous in his phrases; he had a suspicious facility for weeping, and he scattered compliments and promises about him, as a beadle sprinkles holy water in a May-day procession. But these are the little arts of diplomacy: M. Simon could be quite firm in dismissing a Bonapartist professor, even while shedding tears over the poor man’s appeal to be suffered to earn his bread in peace; and when he was sent as High Commissioner of the Government to visit the pontoons and prisons in which Coummunists were confined, all his tender pity for political offenders in general (he recognised many of his quondam electors in bonds) did not prevent him from investigating each individual case with unemotional acumen. He had power to liberate whom he pleased, but he used it sparingly. At Brest he was much pained by the rudeness of a prisoner to whom he had said kindly: “Why are you here, my friend?” “For having too much studied your books,“ was the sniggering answer.20 He had another disagreeable shock at the prison of Versailles, where Louise Michel called him ”Vieux farceur.”

But Jules Simon rendered some very great service to the Republican cause. The office-holders of to-day often talk as if they had founded the Republic—which shows that they have defective memories. The Comte de Chambord was the real “Father of the Republic,” as even Senator Wallon must acknowledge in his meditative moments.21 If the Bourbon prince had been anything better than a Quaker, Monarchy would have been restored after the Commune—in fact, during the five years that followed the civil war, the Republic merely lived under respite of a death-sentence, so to say, until its enemies agreed as to how it should be exterminated. But they could not agree, and Jules Simon was in a large measure the cause of this. He went about among the Orleanists, coaxing over this one and that one to the idea that Republicanism was the only practical thing for the moment. His favorite argument was this, that Socialists and other such people could be put down much more summarily by a Republican Government than by a King. Under a Bourbon Sovereign, Liberals and Socialists would make common cause, and there would inevitably be another revolution before long; but if the Orleanists would only take the Republic under their patronage they might rule the country according to their doctrines, just as the English Whigs had long ruled England, keeping their Radical tail in subjection. With these words, Jules Simon wiled away many; and the trophies of success thickened upon him. He was elected to the French Academy; in 1875 he was nominated a life-senator, and in 1876, some months after the first general election under the new Constitution, he became Prime Minister.

He kept his post for about eight months, and then one memorable morning he allowed Marshal Mac Mahon to dismiss him from it like a lacquey. The Spaniards, by way of expressing their disbelief in the consistency of courage at all times and in all circumstances, are accustomed to say that a man was brave “on a certain day.” One may assert then, without any imputation on M. Simon’s general valor, that on the 16th May, 1877, he showed an utter want of pluck. The reason for this appears to have been that he was out of health at the time—worn out by two or three sleepless nights, and disgusted with the worries of office. He had gone to bed on the 15th May without any suspicion that the Marshal President intended to dismiss him and his Liberal Cabinet, and he was therefore astounded when, as he was dressing, a messenger brought him a letter in which the Marshal cavalierly told him that, as he had been unable to manage the Republican majority, he must make way for stronger men.

Now it was quite true that the Republicans under Gambetta had behaved very factiously towards Jules Simon. Parties were so divided in the Lower House that no Minister could govern, and it was manifest that the only way out of the death-lock would be through a dissolution. But M. Simon was cashiered at the instigation of a Royalist Palace Cabal, who wanted the next elections to be held under the auspices of a Reactionary Cabinet, and he should have had the boldness to denounce this intrigue. Instead of doing that he sat down in his dressing-gown, it is said, and wrote a tame, self-exculpatory letter to the Marshal. He did not see that Mac Mahon had played into his hands by enabling him to take his stand as champion of the entire Republican party. A few brave words of defiance to the Cabal, a dignified reproof to the Marshal himself, and an appeal to the whole nation to rouse itself for a grand battle at the polls, this is what Jules Simon’s letter should have contained, and an epistle couched in these terms would have made him immensely popular.

But the ejected Premier’s abject, doleful apology appearing in the papers on the same day as the Marshal’s letter, spread consternation and disgust through the Republican party. It was a whine at the moment when a trumpet blast was expected. Simon had missed the opportunity of being great. The Republicans were ashamed of him, and spurned him with a positive yell of execration. In the course of the morning he hurried to M. Thiers’s house, and began in a lachrymose style to descant upon his wrongs, saying that he had never been the Marshal’s effective adviser, that the Duc de Broglie had all along been guiding Mac Mahon, &c. “Why on earth didn’t you say that in your letter?” screamed Thiers; and the lugubrious M. BarthÉlemy St. Hilaire, lifting up his long arms in woe, repeated like his chief, “Why was not that said in the letter?”

Why indeed? If Jules Simon had shown spirit he would have been accounted the foremost man of the Republican party after Thiers’s death, and he might eventually have been President of the Republic in place of M. GrÉvy. As it was, the Republicans, after their victory at the general election of 1877,22 refused to rank him as one of their number, and he has ever since been in the humiliating position of a pariah. His speeches in the Senate are always applauded, but not by the Republicans. It has become the fashion among his former allies to speak of him as a renegade, and facetious party-newspapers have not scrupled to play practical jokes upon him. One of these pleasantries was rather funny. A paper announced that M. Simon had inherited a large sum of money, and that, in the excess of his philanthropy, he had taken to distributing twenty ‘napoleons’ every morning among the first five score beggars (being true Republicans) who knocked at his door. For days the Place de la Madeleine, where the unhappy statesman lived was infested by hordes of vagabonds, howling “Vive la RÉpublique,” and the police found it difficult to disperse these believers in M. Simon’s munificence.

M. LÉon Say has been mentioned among the politicians who once seemed destined to do great things. He may do some of these things yet, for he has not lost the confidence of his party, but he is such a rider of hobbies, that he can never be expected to fall into the swing trot of any party cavalcade, even though he be suffered to caper at its head. He has been Prefect of the Seine, Minister of Finance, Ambassador to London, and President of the Senate. He is a jovial man, with a plump waist, face and moustache, not quite sixty, the proprietor of the Journal des DÉbats, a millionaire, and the highest French authority on finance. He writes as well as he speaks, and he speaks like a clever book. The Bourse has so much confidence in him that this return to the Ministry of Finance would at any time make the funds rise, and for this reason every Premier has been anxious to have him in the Cabinet. If M. Say would only confine himself to finance as M. CochÉry does to postal matters,23 he might abide comfortably in office for years; but he is a political Sybarite who chafes at rose leaves. He has no sooner accepted a post than he begins to see reasons for throwing it up. Hours are wasted at every change of Cabinet in trying to persuade M. Say to join this or that combination; but either his Free Trade principles stand in the way, or he cannot sit with so and so, or he insists upon having such and such a man to be his colleague. The curious thing is that, while in opposition, M. Say takes immense trouble to get the offer of one of those places, which he rejects when they have been given him. He is not the dog biting at shadows, but the dog who snatches substantial bones, and then turns up his nose at them.

Very different is M. de Freycinet, who has neither snatched at the bones of office, nor surrendered them willingly when they fell in his way. How came this able and active politician to fail so egregiously as Prime Minister? About his talents there is no dispute, and he entered public life under Gambetta’s special and most admiring patronage. A distinguished civil engineer, he was almost unknown to the political world, when, at the senatorial elections of 1876, Gambetta brought him forward as candidate for Paris. De Freycinet was elected, and all of a sudden he got talked of as the coming man—that is, the man who was to be Gambetta’s factotum. He had dedicated a book on military tactics, with some academical compliments to his patrons; and it was remembered that he had been Gambetta’s military secretary and adviser during the war. He was supposed to be full of new ideas about army reorganisation, railway management, tax-assessment, and colonial extension. The first time he spoke in the Senate there was a hush of curiosity, and though he delivered himself in a small, piping voice, the lucidity of his reasoning, and his business-like exposition of statistics, produced a favorable impression. He was not much cheered, for applause would have drowned his voice. “Nous n’applaudissions pas pour mieux Écouter,” said LÉon Say politely to him.

Unfortunately, De Freycinet too soon forgot that Gambetta had singled him out as an assistant and not as a rival. He did fairly well as Minister of Public Works in M. Waddington’s Cabinet, but the rapid using up of men in parliamentary warfare forced him out of his turn into the front rank. His total and often amusing ignorance of foreign countries made him unfit for the post of Foreign Secretary, whilst his want of suppleness rendered him incapable of managing a party by means of easy social intercourse with its most prominent members. He is a politician of self-asserting conscientiousness, with a smileless face, a distant manner, and a captious tone of saying, or rather speaking, “no” to every proposal which he does not approve on a first hearing. At the Quai d’Orsay he always seemed to Ambassadors to be in a hurry; but, though he would draw out his watch two or three times in ten minutes and repeat, “Venons au fait,” he generally wasted half the time in every interview by telling his hearers that which he did not mean to do, “because my conscience forbids it.” At the time when the rewards for the Exhibition of 1878 were distributed, he told an English attachÉ that as the French Government had allotted 150 crosses of the Legion of Honor to exhibitors, he thought that the Queen of England would do a popular thing by awarding “twenty Garters.” When the constitution of the Order of the Garter was explained to him, he said: “Ah well, then twenty Victoria crosses.” He once remarked to Lord Lyons that he was afraid it was only an antiquated insular prejudice which prevented the English from adopting the French decimal system of coinage; and he maintained in the hearing of Prince Orloff, the Russian Ambassador, that “every Russian peasant speaks French.”

Respecting M. de Freycinet’s trick of pulling out his watch, a droll story is told. M. Tirard, now Minister of Finance, who made his fortune in the jewelry trade, once gave his colleague a gold watch as a New Year’s present, the reason of this gift being that De Freycinet had lately lost a watch. Next time the Foreign Secretary pulled out his timepiece in the Senate, a facetious member observed in a stage whisper: “He wants to make sure that Tirard’s present isn’t pinchbeck.” “I am sure it is not,” answered the unjocular Freycinet, turning round quite gravely in his place; “you are quite mistaken in ascribing any such suspicions to me, sir.”

De Freycinet and Gambetta soon quarrelled, because the former as Prime Minister wanted to follow out a policy of his own or else compel Gambetta to take the reins. “I’ll be coachman or passenger,” he said with his love of logical arrangements: “but I won’t sit on the box and let you drive from the inside.” He had to resign, and the next time he came to office, after the fall of the “Grand MinistÈre,” it was as Gambetta’s declared opponent. But Gambetta at once set himself to show that, although he had been unable himself to command a majority, no Cabinet could live without his support, and M. de Freycinet was made the first victim of this demonstration. He was overthrown on the Egyptian question, and as M. Ferry did not care to be bowled over in the same style, the veteran M. Duclerc was asked to form an emergency Cabinet. But this gentleman and his successor M. FalliÈres, nick-named “le Gambetta blond,” were mere nonentities.

M. Duclerc’s Cabinet was called the Long Vacation Ministry, because it was too obviously predestined to collapse at the first contact with Parliament. M. FalliÈres’s Administration lasted but ten days, owing to the excessive modesty of its chief in recognising that he had been placed on a pinnacle too high for his nerves. On the strength of his sobriquet —though his only resemblance to Gambetta consisted in his being fat and hearty—he had been giving himself some airs as a pretender to office, but his sudden accession to the Premiership in the trying period that followed Gambetta’s death, made him so giddy that he was smitten with gastric derangement and had to pen a resignation in his bedroom. It was then that Jules Ferry, laughing quietly in his sleeve at the discomfiture of his various competitors, came back to the helm as already described.

We have said nothing about M. Waddington and M. Challemel-Lacour, who were once thought superior to him in their prospects because M. Jules Ferry has really always had advantages over these two rivals. M. Challemel-Lacour, who is now shelved, has been a much over-rated man, and M. Waddington is an Englishman. If it had not been for M. Waddington’s nationality, which has estranged him a little from French thought and made the French people somewhat suspicious of him, his talents would possibly have enabled him to keep the leadership of the Moderate Republicans; but then it has to be borne in mind that if he were not English—a Rugbeian, a Cantab, a scholar and athlete—his talents would not be what they are. M. Waddington may remain a valued servant of the Republic and hold all sorts of high posts except the highest; but the greatest destinies perhaps await EugÈne ClÉmenceau—the sixth on our list of men who were once preferred to M. Ferry, as “favorites” for the first place.

M. ClÉmenceau is another of those Northerners whose ascendency disproves M. Daudet’s theory. He is a Breton, a doctor by profession, a keen, cold man with a cutting tongue, and something of military peremptoriness in his manner. He began his political career by opening a free dispensary in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, and giving advice gratis to the poor on politics as well as medicine. He was elected mayor for one of the wards of Paris during the siege, and performed his administrative business splendidly, at a time when almost all the other mayors were blundering. He and Gambetta hated each other so thoroughly that it is a wonder they never came to duelling. The Breton Doctor, who loathes “gush,” despised the Southerner’s rhodomontade; and Gambetta used to bound and roar like a stung lion at the contemptuous thrusts which ClÉmenceau made at him both from the tribune and from the columns of his newspaper, the Justice. This paper is not pleasant reading, for its editor appears always to write as if he meant to provoke his enemies into personal quarrels. He is a brilliant swordsman, most dangerous because left-handed, and a capital shot with pistols. Even the doughty Paul de Cassagnac once declined a meeting with him.

M. ClÉmenceau has been patiently biding his time—which does not mean that he has been spending his time to good purpose, for he has attacked every Government during the last eight years with an utter disregard of the dangers which might accrue to the Republic through the continual overthrow of Ministries. This must lead one to doubt whether there is not more of personal ambition than of public spirit in his tactics, for the only alternative would be to suppose him stupid, and that he certainly is not. He has now transferred to Jules Ferry the scorn which he formerly poured upon Gambetta, and the two men must be regarded as exponents of two completely antagonistic schools of Republicanism. Jules Ferry used not to be an Opportunist, but in succeeding to the leadership of Gambetta’s party, he has had to take up its programme—colonial extension, little wars for glory, Protection, temporisation in Home affairs, and in particular as regards the relations between Church and State. M. ClÉmenceau, on the contrary, is a Free-trader, non-interventionist, decentraliser and disestablisher. He is more in harmony with the Manchester school than any other French politician. That huge system of administrative centralisation, which Napoleon created, is to him abhorrent, and he is a partisan of local self-government on the largest scale. He is fond of relating how a certain village mayor, receiving in 1852 a copy of the new Imperial Constitution with orders to post it up, wrote to M. de Morny, saying that he had done as requested, and would be happy to post up as many more Constitutions as might be sent him thereafter.

M. ClÉmenceau’s Church policy may be summed up in the word Destruction; he goes much further than a mere abrogation of the Concordat. He looks to the day when Notre-Dame shall be a museum, and the Madeleine a scientific institute. He holds that the Republic should repudiate the Catholic Church and treat all ecclesiastical buildings as State property. He would not object to a Gallican Church being afterwards constituted, nor forbid members of that communion from buying back some of the churches if they could afford to do so; but he would apply to Roman Catholics the law against secret societies, and absolutely prohibit French priests, under pain of banishment, to acknowledge the authority of Rome. When people arguing with him about this scheme, remark that “persecution never succeeds,” he answers: “Nonsense, it is half-hearted persecution that does not succeed. Protestantism was thoroughly well stamped out of Spain, and Romanism out of England. I should not expect to get rid of our French Romanists within a few years—two or three generations would be required to complete the extirpation. But if the work is to be done fully, it must be commenced with vigor.”

M. ClÉmenceau will never do much when he comes to office, because he wants the power of moving masses. He has already been yelled at in Montmartre as a backslider because he has refused to espouse the economic fallacies of the Socialists. The multitude is not to be swayed by pure reason, and no man can be a successful revolutionist unless he have a dash of the fanatic about him. Events are nevertheless preparing to bring M. ClÉmenceau to the Premiership, and this consummation will be important because it will involve the incursion of an entirely new set of men into all the public offices. M. ClÉmenceau’s influence comes, not from his doctrines, but simply from his combativeness which has made him the captain of a fine hungry host of young men who see no chance of turning the Opportunists out of their snug places under Government except by banding together as a new party.

If M. Ferry could bring the China and Tonquin wars to a brilliant ending, could manage to create a Budget surplus, reduce taxation, relieve the military burdens of the country, and put an end to the agricultural and commercial stagnation—he might become a People’s man for some years. Indeed he might consolidate his popularity by carrying out half of the programme just sketched. The least success on his part in war or diplomacy would be inflated by his Opportunist supporters into a great triumph, because it is indispensable for the existence of a party that its leader should be a man of reputation. Political ideas must be incarnated in a man before democratic electorates can understand them. Gambetta’s death took the Opportunists by surprise, and they were not prepared with a man to put in his place. “Jouons au Ferry,” said M. Arthur Ranc, and M. Ferry had the great luck of coming to power just at the moment when the Opportunists had begun to perceive that there must be no more overthrowing of Cabinets for some time.—Temple Bar.