The daily morning journal and courier., 1897-12-24
STTSpTCTON TN BRANCH

SUSPICION IN FRANCE.
 At all the great crises in French life the element of preternatural suspicion has always played an important part. Like some mischevous Puck 1t hovers over the land, whispering doubts here, misgivings there, converting the whole nation into mouchards, whose business it is to set watch on the neighbors day and night. We have such a pro- found admiration for many qualities of the French people, such a sincere belief In the necessity of a powerful French factor in the complex mesh of modern civilization, that we can afford to bring this charge of undue suspicion against France as a whole. No student of French history can fail to see the con- fusion it has wrought. It is not the growth of yesterday, but is almost as evident in the memoirs of the France of the seventeenth century as on the Paris boulevard at the present moment.
 It pervaded the court and the official classes in the time of Richelieu, it was constantly present in the time of Maya rin when negotiating with Cromwell, and it is visil>le all through the pages of the memoirs of De Retz. This spirit of preternatural suspicion naturally at tained it's climax in the French revolu- ton, when, for the first time, the mon archy was involved in it's infinite en- tanglements. From the moment when the national assembly met at Versailles to the day when Napoleon was banished to Elba universal suspicion filled the air and dictated the cruel aspect of French policy. The queen was, of course suspected, and justly, in political mat ters; and perhaps it was not altogether unreasonable that the suspicion in which she was enveloped should have attached to her weak but perfectly hon. est husband, who was assumed to be absoutely under her fatal influence.
 The attack on the Bastile was animat- ed not merely by memories of the past, not in the least because of actual cruel ties at the time, for there was none, but mainly because it was suspected that the Bastile was to be utilized as an armed fortress to overaWe Paris The day of the "black cockades" and the march of the Maenads Cto use Carlyles graphic phraseology) were due to excit- CI SuoplCfollS, | Iit dSStlilDlt Hdu ScdI- cely organized before the demon of sus- picion spread it's dusky wings over that body. and Mira beau and Barnave, at first popular idols, became suspected of intrigue with the court The vigorous personalities who came to the front sus- pecied one another. To them the ia nous warning which Benjamin Frank lin addressed to the founders of the American republic: "Gentlemen, we must hang together or we shall hang separately" would have been useless, They could not hang together, and they did hang, or were guillotinad, separate ly. It was Danton's suspicion of an aristocratic plot which caused the Sep- tember massacres. It was pure suspi- cion that created the most revolting and unjust of all the revolutionary ex- cesses, the tribunal of Fouquier-Tin- vile. Danton in his turn was suspected and fell.
 We may, of course, justify the sus- picion of Dumouriez, but what possible explanation can be given to the suspi- cion of the harmless astronomer, Bailly, with his precisian virtues, who paid with his head for the dangerous folly of meddling with things he did not un- derstand? It was obviously question of war to the knife between Jacobin and Girondin, for each took an abso- lute different view of both foreign and internal politics; but why could not the struggle have been confined to party warfare within the walls of the conven- ton? Why was it necessary to deci- mate the Girondin chiefs? The only answer that can be made is that sus- picion had grown to such pitch that the very existence of Girondism was considered incompatible with the se- curity of the republic. Men had become frenzied, insane, through constant spy ing on one anothers' action and perpet- ual attempts to fathom one anothers inward thoughts; and the Flaw of sus- pects'' was simply a formal expression of national craziness. That way mad ness lies. In the person of Robespierre preternatural suspicion attained it's most complete incarnation. His feline nature was ever on the dart for it's prey; he could not hear a good word of any man but he instantly began to re- volve in his mind the question as to whether there was not some concealed motive in the praise. The shout of tri- umphant relief which reverbrated over France when Robespierre's head fell in to the basket market the break of the straining point of that suspicion which had created and sustained the Terror.
 When we remember that but for an accident Carnot would have fallen a vic tim to Robespierre's suspicious, and that this suspicious disposition had led man of entimental virtue to become a
 wholesale murderer, we can understand that feeling of relief.-London Specta- tor.