Year: 1877

! tional calamity. 1t needs little logic to see
that when great nation in q state of transit
ton as to its politics reaches critical point
where the struggle is fierce on either side,
and where the accuracy of popular percep-
tion rs to the path Of safety is clouded by
the dust which Jealous advocates raise that
the greatest loss the nation can suffer is that
of a man competent to advise in virtue of the
clearness and soundness of his Judgment;
capable of putting his advice in such simple
and convincing words that it has the form Of
and believed in by the majority of his
countrymen that his opinion has an authority
almost sufficient TO determine the national
Judgment to one side or the other. In the
loss Of statesman OF the most extensive
experience, and q patriot who at late
period Of his career had abandoned lifelong
political convictions because he had come to
see that they could not further the welfare
of his country, the French people are
bereaved as they could not have been by any
other death, and as no other people in the
civilized world could be by the loss OF any
single citizen.


In the position of parties in France, and
in the exciting electoral conflict that is
imminent, the death of the ex-President is
the loss OF great power for the republican
cause. There was in NJ. Thiers' adhesion
to the Republic fact that appealed to the
world of thinking men in France with pecu-
liar weight. He was an adversary who had
become m advocate through observation of
the irresistible necessities of the case
Down to the time when the Second Empire
fell he was known to all his countrymen rs
the great supporter of the cause Of constitu-
tional monarchy. An earnest admrer of the
government and political system of England,
he lapsed in his political philosophy SO far
as to believe that with specified notifications
these products Of q moderate climate and
phDegmatic people might be transplanted
and flourish under the ardent skies Of his
own country. He had little faith in the re-
suits of the great revolution SO far as it had
pret.nded to make the French nation a
unit; but he regarded it rather as marking
stage in the growth of the bourgeoisie
and carrying the growth of that
class in France to such point that
it became the equivalent in politics Of
the middle class in England; the central
pillar OF the nation; the necessary support
and strength of any system, policy or party
that hoped permanently to rule the coun-
try. He believed consequently that II
prince of the Orleans fapaily-a family born
to the diadem yet not inimical to the new
ideas, to stand in the same relation to the
parliament as the monarch held in England
was the best hope for the immediate future
of France, and he sustained that conviction
with great success for period longer than
the career Of most public men.


But in the rise of the Second Empire, in
irreconcilable with that view. Revolutions,
mostly sustained by workingmen in the
great cities, who called themselves the
French people and had their claim ad-
mitted, marked the events in which the
Second Empire rose, and gloried in it's fall
while its most certain support was the rural
population, which by its votes made more
substantial claim to be considered the
French people thcn the workingmen had
done by their barricades. But here was
government successful for twenty years
that came and went without refer
ence to the bourgeoisie that was
vivifed by one blind passion of the people
and blasted by another; and it became the
part Of practical politicians, men who
hoped to guide the people in virtue Of their
inclinations, to count with these great ma
tional passions and know their utmost pos
ton of the national spirit--the national
pride of the race to which the first Bona
parte had SO excessively ministered--the
whole family had n place in the hearts of
the people; but in the larger sense
of that same national pride-in the spirit
of popular solfassert.ion that would not be
suppressed by any individual individual
tyrannies and dynassic expressions must
equally perish. Between the milstones of
these forces there was no room for SO color
less possibility as all Orleans monarchy,
and the hopes of that system perished when
NJ Thiers, choosing with the judgment of a
typical Frenchman the national passion he
would serve, declared that the Republic was
the form ofgovernmentt hat could most effect
lively give unity and harmony to the nation,
and for that reason he became republican.


AS a republican thus produced he became
to an extensive conservative public
guarantee for his party. It's tickets went





chant indorsed by one with illimitable
credit 1t was said by the opponents of
Theirs that he glorif ed the First Empire,
created the second and prepared the third
This relation to those sources of opinion
from which the Empire derived strength
was real, and his accession TO the Republic
was of value there. Aside from those city


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