The Sun.
London, England, 1871-01-16 00:00:00

FRANCE HOPELESS.

In a letter from Bordeaux, the special correspondent of
the Standard writes :—The depression of the public spirit
which I mentioned as prevailing a few days since gains
rather than loses in intensity, in spite of the cheerful utte-
rances of the official press. There is but one opinion
among intelligent Frenchmen with whom I speak. France
is sinking ; swamped by the utter incapacity of her lea d-
ers, and by their blind infatuation in refusing to do what
everyone but themselves perceives is the one prime object.
of necessity, namely, to concentrate all their avail-
able forces for an advance to Paris. A friend yesterday
reckoned up with me the number of men in the armies
and camps of France, and we found that, excluding the
garrison of Paris, France has over 800,000 men in arms,
without reckoning the Sedentary National Guard. Can
any one doubt that, deducting 100,000 for the army
and garrisons in the North, if the 700,000
remaining troops were concentrated into two great
armies, and marched simultaneously upon Paris, they
would fail in reaching it and raising the siege ?
What if they are still deficient in artillery ? What if they
are still weak in cavalry ? Seven hundred thousand men
could force back the retaining armies of Germany, and
open a path to Paris. Concentration is all that is re-
quired to save France ; but M. Gambetta will not con-
centrate. He persists in frittering away the strength of
France in a hundred places,while Paris is slowly starving.
Deep as is my conviction of the utter incapacity of
M. Gambetta, it is fully equalled by that of the
Frenchmen of my acquaintance. "If we cannot get
rid of bim," a friend said to me to-day, " France is lost.''
In that case, France is lost. There is no getting rid of
Gambetta. Like Sindbad's Old Man of the Sea, he has
leapt upon the shoulders of France, and there
he sits, an incubus not to be shaken off. It
is too late now to change. The coach is now
going rapidly down hill ; it may by a miracle escape
being smashed, it may gain the opposite rise in safety,
but there is now no possibility of a change of coachmen.
He must hold the reins now till the end. I cannot describe
the pain it gives me to watch their downward progress,
to read their words of hope, accompanied by an utter
absence of effort, to know that their hundreds of thou-
' sands of men are scattered uselessly through France when
every bayonet is needed at the front, to know
that the date of the surrender of Paris is slowly
approaching, and that the men in authority are
making no movement whatever to gather their forces to-
gether and to march to save her. Government are no doubt
content. They have, as I long sinee said, two aims in
view, the one to save the Republic, the other to save
France ; and they may chuckle to themselves that, if they
gain no victories for the second, at least they are con-
solidating the first. The step of abolishing the Council
Generals, and replacing them by persons named by the
maires, who are for the most part the creatures of the
prefect, who are, with scarcely an exception, the creatures
of the Government, was, no doubt, a great stroke for the
Republic, but it had been* ieceived with a storm of public
indignation. The utterly arbitrary and illegal ac
tion was a great Republican victory ; but it has had
the effect of awakening France to the danger she
runs of being crushed by the Republic no less than by the
Prussians. The conduct of the Government is, indeed,
as arbitrary, as despotic, and as illegally exercised over
the part of France yet remaining subject to their
power, as is that of the Prussians ia the oc-
cupied provinces, and there are symptoms that
France is wearying of one yoke as she is of
the other. Not that she would object to the exercise of
the most despotic power on the part of her rulers, or
would grumble at the most arbitrary measures, if they
were but redeemed by military energy and success ;
but it is, indeed, hard to kneel at the feet of a despotic
advocate, whose gross incapacity is bringing France to
ruin.

THR IRISH LAND ACT.---Two very important cases
have come before the Land Sessions of Nenagh. In one
case the tenant, who held a farm of seven acres, claimed
£l5O for disturbance and £lBO for compensation for im-
provements. In the course of the case the question
arose as to whether the farm was, in the
meaning of the Act, " a town park," and the chair-
man, holding that it was, reduced the claim to
£lO for unexhausted manuring. In another case,
in which Mr. Heron,. Q.C., appeared for the
tenant, the question of Ulster tenant-right arose. Sir
William Osborne sought to eject a tenant named Fahy
from a three-acre farm. The tenant put in a claim leaving
blanks for the sums claimed, as his case was the custom
of tenant• right—that he was able and willing to pay his
rent, and should not therefore be disturbed. After a good
deal of argument, the chairman made a decree with stay
of execution until after next session, in order to enable
the tenant to put in a claim specifying the items of the
amounts on which he claimed.