tants are supposed to favor a liberal government, is exposed to persecution and massacre. At Nîmes, in particular, a new Saint Bartholomew has broken out with full violence.

Nearly all the Protestant homes in that city have been sacked, and a great number of Protestants have perished, but still more have been saved. Mme. and Mlle. Chabaud had just time to escape. The Duke and Duchess d'Angoulême have organized bands of royalists cut-throats, have appointed military and civilian commissioners who refuse to recognize the acts of the royal government or the authority of the prefects and commanders which it has 1 appointed, saying that the hand of the of the king is being forced by his cabinet.

In the departments of the East, in Burgundy, Franche-Comté, Champagne, and Alsace and Lorraine, the people are mostly Bonapartist or at least ready to support any one but a Bourbon. In the Department of the North opinion is mixed. There are a great number of constitutional monarchists among the rank and file of the people. They do not love the Bourbons but - they support them because they offer the best prospect of peace. At the same time this party is attached to the principles of the Revolution, to representative government, to confirming the property changes which the Revolution has brought about, and to equality before the law. This party controls all our port towns. Paris is a hodge-podge of all these factions.

rangements which have been concluded regarding France. We do not know them here yet, but they will, of course, include the surrender of several fortresses and heavy war indemnities.

Last week, according to reports, the Allies were inclined to make exorbitant demands, including the destructions at our cost of the defences of Dunkirk and Cherbourg. Last week they despoiled under an armed guard our picture galleries. They left only part even of those pictures which belong to the old royal family.

It was certainly an exasperating spectacle for us Frenchmen to see our beautiful gallery filled with British, Prussian, and Austrian officials, superintending taking down and packing up our most beautiful works of art, and to watch English gentlemen and ladies promenading about with all the arrogant and insolent airs of merchants ordering their goods packed. The king's cabinet unable to prevent this spoliation, unwilling to sign the disgraceful treaty submitted to it, and despairing of success in its struggle against the reactionary party headed by the princes, resigned in a body. This produced a most unhappy effect upon public opinion, though the newspapers, which are strictly controlled by the powers that be, have not dared to mention this. The king tried to smooth things over by selecting for his new cabinet men standing very high in public esteem. These gentlemen refused to accept, at first, for the same reasons that had caused the old cabinet to resign. However, they have now been prevailed upon to reconsider their refusal on two conditions: first, the court has renewed its solemn promise to maintain the constitution and not to support the reactionaries; second, Tsar Alexander, in whose service the Duke of Richelieu remained throughout the Revolution, urged him to accept, promising to use

his powerful influence to secure more acceptable peace conditions.

Apparently the Tsar kept his word and the terms have been revised; for the report is now that the foreign troops are about to leave. We do not know how many will be left - mainly to keep the Bourbons on the throne or where they will be stationed. Considerations of safety, however, will require them to be posted either at Paris or at frontier fortresses. We shall feel it a blessing to have them off our shoulders. The provinces and the cities will welcome it as a great relief, and such forces as may remain at Paris will probably be put in barracks instead of billeted upon private citizens.

October 19, 1815.

Every one is discussing the treaty of peace between the Allies and France. We cede definitely a half-dozen small fortresses on the extreme frontier. The Allies will keep 150,000 men in other fortresses until France has paid an indemnity of 700,000,000 francs due in four or six years. This is the substance of the treaty or, rather, of the law imposed upon us. The other articles are unimportant.

We are greatly pleased, because the interior of France will be cleared of foreign troops, except some ten or twelve thousand English soldiers which some say are to be left in Paris. Personally, I do not think that probable. They would be merely enough to keep us irritated without holding us down.

Men who believe they have inside information say that the court proposes

to sweep away all restraints on royal authority, and fear utter reaction and a royalist terror. We can only hope that the king will be wise enough to avoid such excesses, which would only cause suffering to all parties. Nevertheless, our liberties are being visibly curtailed every day.

Public places are filled with spies. The newspapers are so strictly censored that they are forbidden to print dispatches from London, and we know nothing of what is going on in Spain where, rumor has it, insurrections have occurred. It is impossible in France to print anything that is really important. Whatever escapes the censor is pounced upon by the police. People make up for this by gossiping most ferociously at their clubs and other private gatheringplaces. I don't go out, however, but stay at home, as you know. Those who circulate among the public say that the discontent is widespread and bitter. The police are not able to prevent its expression. At Villemomble, and probably at other places, the authorities have proclaimed by public crier that it is forbidden to discuss the government either approvingly or critically. That alone was enough to set folks doing so, even though they were previously indifferent.

I shall probably have to be very cautious when writing you, especially letters that are going through the public post. You will understand and fill in the things which I am not at liberty to say. Be patient for the time being. Conditions will change; but only fools will venture to predict when and how.

Of all the great men in English history, Gladstone was surely the worst judge of political human nature. Before he introduced his first Home Rule Bill he is said to have felt quite sure about Chamberlain and very doubtful about Harcourt. Some overtures for support he did make to English Conservatives, but Irish Conservatives he ignored and, what was still more remarkable, he forgot Ulster, then a Liberal stronghold.

To an ordinary man, it would have been an obvious counsel of prudence to sound Ulster and, if possible, persuade her beforehand. Had he done so and met with any measure of success, the first Home Rule Bill would have been a better Bill than his own, and had even more Home Rule in it; for the only way of reconciling Ulster to the idea of Home Rule for Ireland was then, as now, by the offer of Home Rule to herself. In fact, it would have been a Bill on the same general lines as the Act now in force. Had such a Bill been introduced a generation ago, the North and South would by this time have composed their differences; Irish politics would have been running on the same wholesome differences between Liberal, Labor, and Conservative that divide opinion in other countries, instead of following the wholly unnatural divisions of geography and religious faith; there would have been no rebellions; and Sir Edward Carson, if he had not developed into a Grattan, would have been, at any rate, Lord Chancellor of a united Ireland.

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Alas, the Conservatives were the first to understand Ulster, and Mr. Balfour was the first to recognize the gifts of Sir Edward Carson.

The mean and unworthy estimate of Sir Edward Carson's character, though it can be made to fit in with a great many facts, is the wrong one, and it is not, in reality, that of Ireland generally. He is not an Ulsterman, though he sits for an Ulster division; though narrow he can be generous; he is free from the religious bigotry which is the curse of Northern Ireland; he has the brogue, not of Belfast, but of Galway, the most beautiful of all the monuments of melancholy in Ireland; and he loves his country-not part of it merely, but the whole. It is one of the tragedies of Irish history that his gifts should have been at the service of half a province instead of the cause of a united Ireland, and there are times when one suspects that he feels it as a tragedy of his own life too. For no one can hear him replying to Mr. Asquith on a question of Irish policy without suspecting that, apart from the specific disagreement of the moment, there is deep down in his nature a feeling of personal resentment against official Liberalism for warping his nature and twisting the sort of work that he might have done for Ireland.

Between him and the remnant of Irish Nationalists in the House there is no such gulf. They belabor each other, but with it all there is some understanding and a great deal of respect; and of Sir Edward Carson, when he was organizing rebellion in Ulster, there was

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far more popular admiration even in the rest of Ireland than there was in all England, outside Liverpool and the Carlton Club. But in every gesture towards the official Liberal benches there is the same accusation of faithless

ness

'We were yours and you cast us off' a charge that cannot be brought against Nationalism or Sinn Fein.

One ought not to ignore this grievance of Sir Edward Carson as a good Irishman against the blundering tactics of Gladstone which presented him with it, for, rightly handled, the question of Home Rule in 1886 was far easier than now, and might have been solved. But if he has a grievance, so have others-England and Ireland both against him. He did not teach Ireland to rebel, but he led the only successful rebellion she has made, and the lesson was not lost. Ireland as a whole, too, has a grievance against him as a lost leader of union.

The most dramatic apparition to be seen in the House is that of Sir Edward Carson at the door when an Irish debate is proceeding. Especially now, with the Irish Nationalist Party a mere twittering ghost of its former greatness, there is always an element of theatricality in Irish debates; someone said once that there ought to be a row of footlights all round the Irish coast. It may be the theatricality of Irish debate or there may be some positive suggestion in the tall, lank figure, the straight black hair, the hollow cheeks, and the lengthened chin, but one cannot help thinking of Mephisto in the play at such times.

And the impression is not removed by the rich brogue and is deepened by the corrosion and negation of what he says. Nothing in politics seems worth while when he speaks; Irish ideals are balloons blown up with gas; a new thought or hope is treated like a hostile witness; the great world pines to

the dimensions of a poky court of justice, and nothing seems to matter but what is concrete enough to be put into an affidavit. It is all magnificently done, for Sir Edward Carson has not risen on nothing to the position of perhaps the most famous of living advocates. He has in a supreme degree the faculty of dissolving a state of mind into little crystals of fact and holding each up to the light that is appropriate to his purpose. No one in our time at the Bar has had his power of unexpected thrust and stab in cross-examination, and he has so cultivated the habit of always speaking at the greatest common measure of intelligence in a jury that he has lost the power of rising above it. Outside Irish affairs-for example, example, on labor topics on labor topics he speaks occasionally with flashes of originality and sentimental insight, but ordinarily on politics he is a barrister whose rare distinction of manner cannot disguise the mediocrity and dullness of what he has to say.

If Sir Edward Carson had never turned rebel, popular opinion would have neglected him as a politician; but his organization of the contingent rebellion in the North of Ireland made him a scoundrel in the eyes of many and a hero with others, and with nearly all profoundly modified the estimates of his character. A few, indeed, there were who still refused to take his politics seriously; to them he was still a stage Irishman only, bedadding and bejabering, even when he was talking hypothetical treason and civil war.

In fact, his action at this time proved the exact contrary. It may not have been a great thing for him at his time of life to throw up an exceedingly lucrative practice and devote himself entirely to the work of organizing resistance to the enforcing of the Home Rule Act. But it was a great thing for him to run the risk of arrest and the social dis

grace, not to speak of the physical danger, of being a rebel. It was proof that he really cared, that his denunciation of Home Rule was the outcome of real conviction, and even that he had the stuff of martyrdom in him. There is no exaggerating the mischief that was done to the country by the formation of the Ulster army; but when all is said it is a test of sincerity that a man should in the last resort be prepared to fight in a cause of conscience when he is convinced that no other honorable issue is possible. And by that test the Government of the day which did not arrest Sir Edward Carson stands condemned in its Irish policy. Whatever Irish Whatever Irish policy was to be adopted later, it must inevitably after that be a policy that did not involve the coercion of Ulster, and to have established that principle, if a negative achievement, redeems his political career from barrenness and contempt.

Sir Edward Carson might have done still more and achieved political greatness had he, after this victory, known how to use it for the service of all Ireland. For now because, rather than in spite of, the war- was the time to achieve the unity of Ireland, and Sir Edward Carson, by close coöperation with the Unionists of the rest of Ireland, if not with the Nationalists too, might have achieved that end. The opportunity was neglected and Sir Edward Carson remained the leader of a province when he might have been so much

more. The truth was and his brief tenure of office during the war confirms it that he is quite without constructive ability of any kind. Absolutely dependent on others for his general ideas, he might have served a greater cause than that of Ulster had he fallen early under the right influences. But the official Liberal party first neglected him and then abused him, as it did Chamberlain and later Mr. Lloyd George; and he never realized all that of which he might have been capable. There were also faults of temperament as well as of mind.

For all that has been said of his personal kindliness and good-nature, there are hundreds of instances that might be quoted in support, and the caricaturists who see the man in the Red Indian profile and the combative jaws see less than strangers who, meeting him for the first time, are fascinated by the deep melancholy of the eyes. He is a man of a deep emotional nature, and the appearance of truculence is a carapace for a skin that is more tender than most people's. But there are some humans perhaps more numerwhose ous in Ireland than elsewhere devotion to those who depend on them takes the form of intense distrust and ferocity toward every one else. They rend and tear, not out of cruelty, but out of a too restricted and as it were provincial range of affection. Sir Edward Carson was of these, and the fact has ruined him as a national politician.