of influence," in place of the old and absolute word "sovereignty," did much to prevent a European war. Other difficulties will arise, or have arisen, for the solution of which appropriate terms will be equally necessary; and our civilization is now and then enriched by new thoughts and new ways of feeling, which may, if unnamed or wrongly named, soon fade from human consciousness. Shall the satisfaction of The English Review.

that want be left, as hitherto, to chance; or will our writers give a little attention to the matter, and, following the example of men of science, but with more consideration for linguistic and human needs, supply their age, like their great predecessors, with elegant, perspicuous and expressive words for its new thoughts and experiences, as they arise? Logan Pearsall Smith.

The Third Republic is perhaps at the beginning of a great Revolution; it may be making up its mind to inoculate the idealism of its politics with the realism of its life.-Laurence Jerrold: The Real France, p. 38.

I.

The recent revival in the Eastern provinces of France of the Dionysiac orgies was an impressive spectacle. As the bands of Bacchic and Mænad revellers went reeling through the vineyards of Champagne, burning, pillaging everything in their path, the torch-lit terror of the Thracian nights seemed no longer a poetic dream.

But the scene was not merely an interesting occasion for æsthetic pleasure, not merely even a happy opportunity for the cinematographer. It possessed many another interest. It was a fresh symptom, after so many others, of a certain state of the French bodypolitic, and it was perhaps what, in the jargon of the experimental psychologist, is called a prodrome of a possible change in the French political and social organism. The terrifying events in Champagne occurred under the eye of a Government apparently powerless to arrest them, and of a Parliament incompetent to offer a solution. The Prime Minister of France sat like Belshazzar at the feast, gazing with dis

may at the awful lettering on the midnight sky, while the Chamber wrung its hands like a Greek chorus. Although he was educated by the Jesuits, the lettering on the wall was Greek to the Prime Minister. What may have been the reflections of the President of the Republic, who had chosen the stalwart Radical senator, Monsieur Monis, to govern France, is not known: the Head of the State in France is, by the real, if not by the legal, Constitution, a mute idol in a pagoda, without responsibility or initiative. The reflections of the public were not so inarticulate. My own reflection was simply this-and, as the readers of this Review know, I had not waited for the Champagne riots to formulate it-the present form of the Parliamentary régime in France is doomed.

It was not three months ago that, commenting upon the formation of the Monis Ministry, consequent upon the fall of Monsieur Briand, I remarked:

It is obvious that the defection of M. Briand's followers, resulting in his quitting office and of the appointment to succeed him of the leaders in the conspiracy against him, will have greatly increased the dissatisfaction of the French electorate with the disorganization of French political life, and will have considerably furthered the reform of the electoral system, which

nation has been evolved in so exposed and coveted a corner of the Continent solely by the adoption of relentlessly centralizing methods, which have determined the maurs, the temperament, the character-and the lack of character— of its members. It is because Frenchmen have had to live and move and have their secular being at this particular spot of the planet that their ideals and their problems, their history, in a word, have differed from those of any other national community.

It would be easy and fascinating to elucidate this truth by testing its application to French historical facts and events to the Champagne riots, for instance, as well as to the Dreyfus case

and to the whole series of French traits. Thus, Casablanca and Agadir, which showed once again that if Germany did not exist it would be worth while to invent her in the interests of French national integrity and of French patriotism, are two trifling events, among many hundreds, which it would be amusing to adduce, if one were challenged to defend the validity of this induction. But we are talking for the moment not of world-politics but of the domestic situation in France. Our business is to obtain the right perspective for the proper appreciation of those scenes of civil war in Champagne which have once more flattered the ineradicable superficial conviction of foreigners that France is going to those legendary dogs who are always barking vociferously at the approach of their prey; that the tricolor is already flying from the stern of Charon's bark; and that the Republic is shortly to be judged and found wanting. The civil war in the eastern departments was but one of a rapidly accumulating series of untoward events, signs of an apparent national disintegration, which have again led the Royalist and Imperialist pretenders-the saviours of society who are always ready to start

up in their absurd jack-in-the box fashion on any and every pretext-to sign manifestoes and to galvanize their apathetic followers into active opposition. Even certain leaders of the Republic have caught the contagion, and talked openly, in pessimistic accents, of the possibility of a real revolution, while more than one French journal has raised the question: "Whither are we going? To the king? To the emperor? Or towards the Fourth Republic?"

The

The unrest which is now pervading French society, the outspoken disgust against the present political and social régime, is a new phase of French life -a new phase, that is, under the Third Republic, for nothing like it has been witnessed in France during the last forty years. Not Boulangism, nor the Panama and Dreyfus scandals, can be cited to confound this verdict. This unrest has, however, a contemporary parallel, and this fact-for those of us who, given to general ideas, yet detesting nothing so heartily as clearly superficial views, love to see things as they are-helps to define its character. pessimism and unrest of France is, as a social and political phenomenon, if not exactly of the same nature as, yet of potential comparison with, the unrest and pessimism of the United States. In both countries at this hour there is this same moral hypochondria, which is engendering the same malarial visions. When a senator from Iowa, ex-Governor of his State, says in an address to the students of the Washington College of Law: "We are living in a period of revolution; our institutions at this day are in the balance," his voice is pitched in the same key as are those of a Millevoye, a Drumont, a Henri Béranger, a Poincaré, a Maurras, and a Jaurès. Yet all these utterances (since they are not isolated, nor confined to any political party, but characteristic of the feeling of the sev

eral audiences to which they appeal) are, in my opinion, the most welcome ground for optimism.

In France, at this moment, there is, for the first time in my recollection, a wide-spread craving for positive reform; a growing insistence that something must be done to purify French political and administrative life; a resolve to effect certain radical changes, however drastic, and at whatever sacrifice of persons, in the relations of the several parts of the great political and administrative machine; a repudiation of French ideology and a revival of idealism in the English sense of the word; a spirit of relentless and vigilant criticism, and a moral purpose which may legitimately be described as the harbinger of a French Renaissance. But in seeking to comprehend this new state of things, the foreign observer might easily go wrong. Let it be understood once for all that the "pretenders," who would fain utilize the dissatisfaction of France with many of her existing institutions in order to substitute for the Republic a Monarchy or an Empire, are following in their familiar way evanescent willso'-the-wisp. The reforms which are to take place are to be of the nature of a readjustment of the Republican Constitution to modern conditions, not of the upsetting of the Republic. The dried fruit of the old régime is no longer succulent to the French palate. In spite of its occasional mephitic iridescence it is the deadest of the dead fruits of the Dead Sea.

Yet things are not going well. In fact, they are going very badly; and it is the intention of this article to suggest some of the reasons why. Happily it is impossible to exaggerate the admirable and useful rôle of the anti-Republican opposition in helping to create discontent in France and to transmute that discontent into a force capable of destroying grave abuses.

III.

Government in France is the tyrannical monopoly of a minority. During a great many years one of the classical methods of the Republican system of government was to maintain a state of war in France. The Republicans found ready to their hands an incomparably compact and centralized Administration, and their main object was to hold the citadel of that Administration, and to man all its bastions and outworks by sworn members of their party. They treated the rank and file of the nation as enemies who could not be trusted. In order to consolidate their troops the Republican leaders invented the useful bug-a-boo of an antiRepublican and anti-Constitutional opposition. Not that the nucleus of such opposition did not really exist, but the utility of preserving it, the advisability of exasperating it by methods of persecution, in order to cultivate the illusion in the country that Republican order was being chronically menaced, was the accepted device for the conservation of Republican power. The disinterested sporadic efforts of this or that leader to dismantle the Republican donjon-Gambetta, Spuller, Méline, Briand-to substitute Republican for Feudal rule, to make the Republic a real Republic in which all France should have the same rights, as the compact little garrison defending the citadel, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, have been systematically misunderstood, not to say regarded as treason, by the professional politicians; and, meanwhile, behind the scenes, the privileged troops manning the state battlements, have battened off the assiette au beurre, corrupted French character by the multiple distribution of "places" for idle functionaries, bought thus indirectly the votes of their clients, and made the Republic no longer worthy of the name.

There is no such thing in France as

a

constitutional opposition, because French "parliamentarism" is in no particular such a method of democratic government as is connoted by the words "parliamentary government." In view of the fact that France is not a Monarchy, it may be legitimate, as it is certainly convenient, to call it a Republic; but its government is obviously not that of a democratic Republic. Its government is not, as in England, a parliamentary government by the device of well-defined parties that appeal directly to the Democracy, nor yet, as in the United States, is its government government of the people, by the people, and for the people, of the Consular Republican form. Yet it was undoubtedly the object of the Constitution of 1875 to establish Parliamentary Government. How happens it that that object has never been attained?

The Constitution of 1875 was a concoction of the Orleanist party. That party hoped by easy stages to restore the Monarchy, and it counted on election by the Congress of a Comte de Paris or a Duc d' Aumale as President of the "Republic," in succession to Marshal McMahon. As an independent critic of singular perspicacity, Monsieur Georges Thiébaud has pointed out in his instructive book, Les Secrets du Règne, there were precedents for this method, notably the expedient used in 1830 for the choice of Louis Philippe, after Lafayette, on the balcony of the Hotel-de-Ville, had baptized him La Meilleure des Républiques. Once the majority in the two Chambers were rendered unmistakably monarchical, it was held that it would not be difficult to utilize the clause of the Constitution which permits revision, in order to restore the Old Régime in favor of the younger branch of the French Bourbons. The Orleanist project failed. But the Royalist Constitution remained; and most of the woes from which France is suffering to-day are

due to two facts: first, the fact that she is still living under a Constitution which, while it is admirably adapted to thwarting the possible rise of a dictator of the Napoleonic type, is utterly inadequate for the realization of the democratic dream of Representative Government, according to an ideal of liberty and of social and economic progress by free discussion under the party system; secondly, the fact that while her political Constitution is Royalist her Administrative machinery is centralized and Napoleonic. It is a psychological impossibility to reconcile for purposes of human government systems so disparate as this Royalist Constitution of 1875 and the Republico-Napoleonic Administration. The friction caused by the effort to make that Constitution and that Administration work in harmony has now assumed the importance of a scandal. It accounts for the present unrest throughout French society. It has, in fact, brought about a Constitutional crisis.

French official historians hesitate frankly to acknowledge the factwhich is as little familiar to the average Frenchman as to the foreignerthat the Constitution of the Third Republic was never intended to serve any other end than the re-establishment of the Monarchy. Yet such is indeed the case, and it would be difficult to devise શ system of government less well adapted to the organization of a modern democracy. The civic and social irresponsibility which their Administrative régime has been engendering among Frenchmen ever since the First Empire (vid., among a score of testimonies, the recent books of Monsieur Faguet: Le Culte de l'Incompétence and

et l'Horreur des Responsabilités) has been enhanced by the political Constitution under which they have been living.

Since the last thirty years, public opinion in civilized communities has de