Year: 1876




tribution to the good result secured by the
elections of Sunday last. Even Brittany
not moro remote from the highways of the
world physically than it has been thought
inaccessible intellectually and morally to
modern thought-sends republicans. BY
what hidden channels or secret sympathies
whole people in any department discovers
how the people in all the other departments
are going that they may go the same way them
selves no philosopher has yet told us, and
it cannot therefore be put down for the bene-
fit of ofice-hunters but these communica-
tions by secret channels have evidently been
active in France of late, for the agreement
was not clearer or greater that once gave
seven million votes to a plebiScite But now
that the doubt as to the result is over that
doubt seems in France to give place to
another as to the possible consequences of
the result as it is. In this doubt the gloomy
shade seems to prevail (; and while monarch
lists and Bonapartists revile the republican
ship of state as a craft 'Fbuilt in the eclipse
and rugged with curses dark" even those
who hurrah at the launch seem to regard the
possibilities of her voyage with more hope
than confidence.


Perhaps the apprehension that the pos
session of power by republican party will
lead to acts of folly, if not to acts that could
only be justly described by severer word,
is natural enough, because all the ex-
perience of so-called republican domination
in France exhibits as a common result that
it leads in dangerous directions. Every sue
cess that seemed to further republican ideals
has led to calamity; every scheme conceived to
procure the domination of popular elements,
or contrived to guarantee what was called
the popular cause, has handed the nation
over to some conspiracy or put it under the
foot ofsome conqueror has made either war
or insurrection, which have equally swept
the country as with deluge of fire. And
with an experience of that sort, with a recog-
milton in those vague delusions called gen.
eral ideas that the Republic has always been
the source of calamity, people cannot see
why it should be otherwise now, and
believe, in view of the result of Sun
days election, that they have substan-
tial grounds for the faith that ruin
looms in the near future. But the fact
that the croakers are so clamorous the fact
that all the elements of opposition hold up
a tableau of the national history as the pic
ture of what is to come the fact that great
sections of the population are ready to re-
gard the Napoleonic legend as q serpent's
slough and to give Chambord's white
banner to the ragpickers of his
tory, yet proceed very faint heartedly in
an inevitable advance toward the party of
the nation-these facts alone might reassure
the country, under that rule of contraries so
pertinently applicable that in France it is
only that which is foreseen that never hap
pens. 1t threatens to be in France, under
that or some other rule, precisely the same
with parties as it has been with some promi-
nent individuals as to disappointments and
surprises. Here is NJ. Buffet distinguished
republican in all the days when the name
was discredit and reproach-who goes over
to the enemy only an hour, as it were, be-
fore the day of republican glory dawns on
the country; and there is the ferocious
Naquet who believes that Marseilles will re-
turn him with an overwhelming vote, and
that there are q hundred thousand heads
waiting for the guillotine that he will put in
operation. AS these have been disappointed,
the whole country may equally be disap-
pointed by the discovery of republican
party not to be seduced by conspiracies-no
to be driven from its course by any fury of
passion-calm, strong successful knowing
exactly what it means, and meaning always
the welfare of the nation and the happiness
of the people; the utmost of each that is
consistent with the other.


But there are more substantial reasons
than any founded upon an epigram for the
opinion that the Republic as now organized
and in the hands of the party that has just
carried the country will not repeat the
crimes and blunders consecrated in the
chronicles as the crimes and blunders of the
Republic in France and the best of these
reasons is that the comparison of republics
that is behind this assumption is not merely
unjust but absurd. They who compare the
so-called Republic framed on ''the princi-
pies of 49," or the Republic of AS, with the
Republic that actually exists in France, COM
pare very dissimilar facts that in the liberal
cassifcations of history are jumbled to-
gether under the same name and they who
hold that because three governments are
classified under the same name therefore
the third must necessarily follow in the
course taken by the other two, give them
selves up to delusion. All that happened in
1859 and the succeeding years was sort of
paroxysm of national frenzy not the regular
action and reaction of political forces, but
the occurrence in the life of nation of such
an event as in an individual would be called
an access of maniac fury. Crushed under
the accumulated iniquities of ten centuries,
and nYcited hv the defamation of rhan-