France and the Republic | Page 9

the way, but the evil he did lives after him.
He was one of the celebrities of an age in which celebrity has almost ceased to be a distinction. But the measure of his political capacity is given in the fact that he was an active promoter of the insurrection of September 4, 1870, in Paris against the authority of the Empress Eugénie. A more signal instance is not to be found in history of that supreme form of public stupidity which President Lincoln stigmatised, in a memorable phrase, as the operation of 'swapping horses while crossing a stream.'
It was worse than an error or a crime, it was simply silly. The inevitable effect of it was to complete the demoralisation of the French armies, and to throw France prostrate before her conquerors. A very well-known German said to me a few years ago at Lucerne, where we were discussing the remarkable trial of Richter, the dynamiter of the Niederwald: 'Ah! we owe much to Gambetta, and Jules Favre, and Thiers, and the French Republic. They saved us from a social revolution by paralysing France. We could never have exacted of the undeposed Emperor at Wilhelmsh?he, with the Empress at Paris, the terms which those blubbering jumping-jacks were glad to accept from us on their knees.'
The imbecility of September 4, 1870, was capped by the lunacy of the Commune of Paris in 1871. This latter was more than France could bear, and a wholesome breeze of national feeling stirs in the 'murders grim and great,' by which the victorious Army of Versailles avenged the cowardly massacre of the hostages, and the destruction of the Tuileries and the H?tel de Ville.
With what 'mandate,' and by whom conferred, M. Thiers went to Bordeaux in 1871, is a thorny question, into which I need not here enter. What he might have done for his country is, perhaps, uncertain. What he did we know. He founded a republic of which, in one of his characteristic phrases, he said that: 'it must be Conservative, or it could not be,' and this he did with the aid of men without whose concurrence it would have been impossible, and of whom he knew perfectly well that they were fully determined the Republic should not be Conservative. He became Chief of the State, and this for a time, no doubt, he imagined would suffice to make the State Conservative.
He was supported by an Assembly in which the Monarchists of France predominated. The triumphant invasion and the imminent peril of the country had brought monarchical France into the field as one man. M. Gambetta's absurd Government of the National Defence, even in that supreme moment of danger when the Uhlans were hunting it from pillar to post, actually compelled the Princes of the House of France to fight for their country under assumed names, but it could not prevent the sons of all the historic families of France from risking their lives against the public enemy. All over France a general impulse of public confidence put the French Conservatives forward as the men in whose hands the reconstitution of the shattered nation would be safest. The popular instinct was justified by the result.
From 1871 to 1877, France was governed, under the form of a republic, by a majority of men who neither had, nor professed to have, any more confidence in the stability of a republican form of government, than Alexander Hamilton had in the working value of the American Constitution which he so largely helped to frame, and which he accepted as being the best it was possible in the circumstances to get. But they did their duty to France, as he did his duty to America. To them--first under M. Thiers, and then under the Maréchal-Duc de Magenta--France is indebted for the reconstruction of her beaten and disorganised army, for the successful liquidation of the tremendous war-indemnity imposed upon her by victorious Germany, for the re-establishment of her public credit, and for such an administration of her national finances as enabled her, in 1876, to raise a revenue of nearly a thousand millions of francs, or forty millions of pounds sterling, in excess of the revenue raised under the Empire seven years before, without friction and without undue pressure. In 1869, the Empire had raised a revenue of 1,621,390,248 francs. In 1876, the Conservative Republic raised a revenue of 2,570,505,513 francs. With this it covered all the cost of the public service, carried the charges resulting from the war and its consequences, set apart 204,000,000 francs for public works, and yet left in the Treasury a balance of 98,000,000 francs.
It is told of one of the finance ministers of the Restoration, Baron Louis, that when a deputy questioned him once about the finances, he replied, 'Do you give