The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-09-24

Editorial Opinions ofthe Leading Journals
upon Current Topios-oompiled Every .
Day for the Evening Telegraph
WILL "THE MIRACLE OF 1892" REPEAT
ITSELF

invaded and partly threatened by armies of
an extensive coalition. Prussia and Austria
were marching against her. the Empire and
the King of Sardinia were ready to join them
Spain, Rome and Naples we're expected to
follow suit Russia promised aid to the
invaders; the English Parliament rang with
laundering appeals against the invaded. In
one word, the whole of Europe seemed to
enter upon a crusade against an isolated
state, and that state convulsed and shaken
to its very foundations by an unparalleled
revolution, state whose ruler was q captive
in his own blood-deluged capital, whose
army was demoralized and half-disbanded
and whose Legislature was dictated to by
frenzied mobs. Revolutionary France seemed
to be lost, her leaders doomed to terrible
vengeance But revolutionary France, in
stead of sinking upon hor knees before Eu-
rope in arms, only redoubled the inner fury
which seemed to consume her, and by dint of
that fury drove the foe beyond the frontier,
and carried war, convulsion, and freedom into
the lands of the invaders. The world was as
founded by this extraordinary phenomenon,
aud even posterity calls it still ''the miracle
of 1902" And at the time of our writing,
seeing France again invaded, convulsed, and
menaoed in her integrity and with but slight
chances of an ordinary escape from the ter
rible consequences of folly and disaster, the
observer, led by more or less sympathetic
curiosity, anxiously asks himself and history,
Is there much probability of the miracle of
1892 repeating itself? Can France; the en-
shared giant, once more arise like Samson,
and by one grand exertion shake off the foes?
The answer of history, if studied with candor
in connection with the present, is-we must
state it-sadly discouraging to the friend of
France, and that on various grounds.
First, the invasion of 1892, compared with
the one which last month laid low the armies
of Napoleon ILL., was far from being in any
degree powerful, in spite of the vast dimen-
sions it apparently assumed. The armies
sent against France were neither numerous
nor brought up in the school of victory; their
movements were slow and vacillating; their
commanders pedantic or imbecile followers
of an old traditional strategy, which became
entirely worthless when the genius of revolu-
tion created its own in the French camps; the
monarchies which sent them were as hostile
to each other as they were to the common
enemy.
And is it necessary, in order to show the
vast difference between the invasion of 1882
and that of 1870, to draw parallels between
that tool of charlatans and mistresses, Fre-
derrick William II, and William L; between
the Prince of Ooburg and Moltke; between
Lucchesini and Bismark or between Valmy
and Jemappes and Gravelotte and Sedan?
And then, in fighting the ill-commanded,
scattered, and disunited forces of the then
ridden courts of Vienna, Berlin, Turin, and
Madrid, revolutionary France drew her cou-
rage inspiration, and boldness not only from
her first almost unexpected military successes,
but from deeper and mightier sources
These were the necessity of conquering or
perishing, of destroying or being destroyed;
the fanaticism of new ideas, more powerful
than any that had ever agitated Europe,
ideas which acted with the magic of world
egeneratingrevelation the intoxication with
which the recent victories, in the name of
equality and fraternity over caste, the throne,
and the altar had filled the masses of the self
disfranchised people; the concentrated power
of volcanic forces which an all-crushing
terrorism knew how to elicit from the scat
tered members of a nation suddenly aroused
to terrible lf-consciousness; and, finally,
the certainty of meeting with allies burning
with equal passions wherever a breach could
be made in the ramparts of effete tyranny
At the moment when Ferdinand of Bruns-
wick began his retreat, retiring like a lamb
after having roared like a lion, the conven-
tion met, and decreed new era for France
and the world. France believed in it, and
her hosts carried their faith triumphantly far
beyond her borders, as the followers of Islam
had carried theirs from Mecca to the Pyre-
nees.
Now all these sources of inspiration and
success are wanting to the menaced France
of to-day. She has not only to fight well-or-
ganized and well-led armies flushed with pa
triotic enthusiasm and the pride of wonted
victory; she has not only met with crushing
and humbling reverses at the very opening
of the contest; but, what is worse, she is
devoid of even a spark of that fanaticism
which saved her in 1892, and made Paris q
world shaking volcano in the following years.
She entered the lists with a bad con-
science, and debauched and enervated by
twenty yeara of the most degrading of tyran-
MES, and that tyranny based on mere
materialism, and accepted from political apa-
thy and cynical unbelief in ideas; and she has
now, in this supreme crisis no other moral
resource to fall back upon but ordinary pa
triotism, sentiment capable of great sacri-
fees, but not of miracles. The grand ideas
which by turns inspired or agitated France
after 1889 have all sadly spent their force.
The republic, instead of founding fraternity
and freedom, led in the first instance,
through the massacres of Paris, the 1lOyadeS
of Nantes, the naitrdilIades of Lyons, and the
like, to the 18th Brumaire; in the second,
through the 10th of December, 1S48, and the
I'd of December, 1851, to the ignominious
rehabilitation of the sovereign people in
1852 Bonapartism-that is, "la Gloire"-
ended, in the first instance, after the sacri
fee by France of millions of her sons to thai
idol, with the surrender of Paris and the
captivity of st. Helena; and, in the second
with the more humiliating surrender at Sedar
and the farcical captivity at Wilhelmshohe
Revived Bourbon legitimism killed itself, in
July, 1880, by its own stupidity. Orleanism
which replaced it, showed its inherent
want of vitality by being swept away
by slight revolutionary blast, in February
1S48. Socialism made itself hateful by lead
49, H. 80