France and the Republic | Page 8

of a series of visits paid to different parts of
France during the year 1889.
These visits would never have been made, had not my previous
acquaintance with France and with French affairs, going back
now--such as it is--to the early days of the Second Empire, given me
reasonable ground to hope that I might get some touch of the actual life
and opinions of the people in the places to which I went. My motive for
making these visits was the fact that what it has become the fashion to
call 'parliamentary government,' or, in other words, the unchecked
administration of the affairs of a great people by the directly elected
representatives of the people, is now formally on its trial in France. We
do not live under this form of government in the United States, but as a

thoughtless tendency towards this form of government has shown itself
of late years even in the United States and much more strongly in Great
Britain, I thought it worth while to see it at work and form some notion
of its results in France.
Republican Switzerland has carefully sought to protect herself against
this form of government. The Swiss Constitution of 1874 reposes
ultimately on the ancient autonomy of the Cantons. Each Canton has
one representative in the Federal Executive Council. The members of
this Council are elected for three years by the Federal Assembly, and
from among their own number they choose the President of the
Confederation, who serves for one year only--a provision probably
borrowed from the first American Constitution. The Cantonal
autonomy was further strengthened in 1880 by the establishment of the
Federal Tribunal on lines taken from those of the American Supreme
Court. There is a division of the Executive authority between the
Federal Assembly and the Federal Council, which is yet to be tested by
the strain of a great European war, but which has so far developed no
serious domestic dangers.
The outline map which accompanies this volume will show that my
visits, which began with Marseilles and the Bouches-du-Rhône, upon
my return from Rome to Paris in January 1889, on the eve of the
memorable election of General Boulanger as a deputy for the Seine in
that month, were extended to Nancy in the east of France, to the
frontiers of Belgium and the coasts of the English Channel in the north,
to Rennes, Nantes, and Bordeaux in the west, and to Toulouse, Nîmes,
and Arles in the south. I went nowhere without the certainty of meeting
persons who could and would put me in the way of seeing what I
wanted to see, and learning what I wanted to learn. I took with me
everywhere the best books I could find bearing on the true
documentary history of the region I was about to see, and I concerned
myself in making my memoranda not only with the more or less fugitive
aspects of public action and emotion at the present time, but with the
past, which has so largely coloured and determined these fugitive
aspects. Naturally, therefore, when I sat down to put this volume into
shape, I very soon found it to be utterly out of the question for me to try

to do justice to all that had interested and instructed me in every part of
France which I had visited.
I have contented myself accordingly with formulating, in this
Introduction, my general convictions as to the present condition and
outlook of affairs in France and as to the relation which actually exists
between the Third Republic, now installed in power at Paris, and the
great historic France of the French people; and with submitting to my
readers, in support of these convictions, a certain number of digests of
my memoranda, setting forth what I saw, heard, and learned in some of
the departments which I visited with most pleasure and profit.
In doing this I have written out what I found in my note-books less fully
than the importance of the questions involved might warrant. But what
I have written, I have written out fairly and as exactly as I could. I do
not hold myself responsible for the often severe and sometimes scornful
judgments pronounced by my friends in the provinces upon public men
at Paris. But I had no right to modify or withhold them. In the case of
conversations held with friends, or with casual acquaintances, I have
used names only where I had reason to believe that, adding weight to
what was recorded, they might be used without injury or inconvenience
of any kind to my interlocutors.
The sum of my conclusions is suggested in the title of this book. I speak
of France as one thing, and of the Republic as another thing. I do not