The age-herald., 1898-01-02
SUSPICION IN FRANCE.

From the London Spectator.
 At all the great crises of French life the element of preternatural suspicion has played an important part. Like some mischievous Puck it hovers over the land, whispering doubts here, misgivings there, converting the whole nation into mou- chards, whose business it is to set watch on their neighbors day and night. We have such profound admiration for many qualities of the French people, such sin cere belief in the necessity of a powerful French factor in the complex mesh of mod ern civilization, that we can afford to bring this Charge of undue suspicion against France as whole. No student of French history can fail to see the confusion it has wrought. It is not the growth of yester- day, but is almost as evident in the me- moirs of the France of the seventeenth century as on the Paris boulevards at the present moment.
 It pervaded the court and the official classes in the time of Richelieu, it was con- stantly present in the mind of Mazarin when negotiating with Cromwell and 1t is visible all through the pages of the me- moirs of De Retz. This spirit of preterna- tural suspicion naturally attained it's cli- max in the French revolution, when, for the first time, the monarchy was involved in its infinite entanglements. 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 matters: and perhaps it was not altogether unrea- sonable that the suspicion in which she was enveloped should have attached to her weak but perfectly honest husband, who was assumed to be absolutely under her fatal influence.
 aff a01x nr, ha Rn U not merely by memories of the past, not in the least because of actual cruelties at the time, for there was none, but mainly because 1t was suspected that the Bastile was to be utilized as an armed fortress to over-awe Paris The day of the "blaclS cockades" and the march of the Maenads (to use Carlyle's graphic phraseology) were due to excited suspicion The assembly had scarcely organized itself before the demon of suspicion spread it's dusky wings over that body, and Mirabeau and Barnave, at first popular idols, became suspected of intrigue with the court. The vigorous per- sonalities who came to the front all sus- pected one another. TO them the famous warning which Benjamin Franklin ad- dressed to the founders of the American re- public: "Gentlemen, we must hang to- gether or we shall hang separately" would have been useless. They could not hang together, and they did hang, or were gull lotined, separately. It was Danton's sus- p1clon or an arlStOcratlc pot Wnlcn caused the September massacres. It was pure s,ienicinn that oted the most revolting and unjust of ali the revolutionary ex- cesses, the tribunal of Fouquier- Tinvlle. Danton in his turn was suspected and fell.
 We may, of course, justify the suspicion of Dumouriez, but what possible explana- ton can be given of the suspicion of the harmless astronomer, Bailey, with his pre- cisan virtues, who paid with his head for the dangerous folly of meddllng with things he did not understand? It was ob- viorslv question nf wa- to the knife he- tween Pacobin and Girondin, for each took an absolutely different view of both for