of Lords, and to the Liberals that the way to remedy that grievance is not to make the Upper Chamber politically impotent but to reorganize it from within? I look round and I see no statesman untrammelled, powerful, persuasive enough to turn to national The Fortnightly Review.

account the propitious influences and emotions of the hour, to stop this dire drift towards a whirlpool of chaos and faction, to make a final stand for safety and sanity. I see none-unless, indeed, it be his Majesty, King George the Fifth.

Sydney Brooks.

If the President of the Republic were to die, Paris would say, "Dear me, how sad!" and go about its business. The only Parisian King for many generations has died with Edward VII. He was not merely the only Parisian King, but was a great deal more Parisian than any President of the Republic has ever been. The President of the Republic has always remained, and still remains, a provincial in Paris. For one thing, he is generally a southerner, and for another, wherever he comes from, he never succeeds in looking upon Paris as a Parisian does, in doing Parisian things as a Parisian does them. King Edward would run over from London, from the "mists of the Thames," as French "journalese" always puts it, and do exactly the right thing. The President of the Republic would be annoyed, and wonder: "Now why hadn't I thought of doing that?" He never did, and King Edward always did. If the Palace of the Elysée were ever jealous of him it had some cause. "Edouard is dead; 'the' King is dead," Parisians said; they almost said "Our King is dead." When he was dying I listened to Parisian street gossip, "He is low, he cannot pass the night." "But he has vitality-such vitality!" "Yes, but he has spent it." "Spent it? I should think so, and small blame to him. He did well, and he spent it well." "There is no saying but what his life was well filled," put in an old

lady in the café who knew the world. The waiter was emboldened, and said, "How right madame is! How few of us shall have profited by our lives as Edouard has!" "Of course, he had his especial chances, but he used them well," said the sententious, respectable tradesman. "Used them well?" shouted the choleric politician; "I should like to see the man who says he didn't use them well. Where is he? Let him tell me, if you please, what other King has been a Parisian King. What other was our friend, and a friend who understood us? What other understood his trade as King a tenth part as well? What other did a hundredth part as much for the world, and did it with a thousandth part of his businesslike human savoir faire? What other has had so little nonsense about him? Ah! you may thank your stars you had him. Where should we have been now without him? Where, indeed?" "Yes, he really has been a man, Edouard," the chorus agreed; "he has been a King and he has been a man."

When King Edward came officially to Paris on May 1st, 1903, we Englishmen in Paris all thought there were only too many chances of his being hissed. Not a single man in the street, and few politicians except M. Delcassé, wanted the Entente Cordiale. There is no doubt whatever that we

that is to say, Edward VII., representing us-forced it upon France at

the time, and that she had not dreamt of asking for it. There is no doubt whatever that King Edward came to Paris, hat in hand, to a people which had not asked him to come, a people which is innately polite but innately ironic, which welcomes a confiding stranger courteously, but never on that account foregoes its right to make game of him, a people which is also suspicious as well as amiable. King Edward came like a man forcing his friendship upon a stand-offish family. The French did not want it; they would just as well have accepted (politically, and only politically, no doubt) the hand of Germany a few years before; they deliberately allowed England, through her King, to make all the advances, and they did not take one step forward towards meeting her. All this, which has never been said outright, can be said bluntly now. King Edward was not welcome when he came to Paris bringing the offer of the Entente Cordiale. We in Paris thought he very well might be hissed. The Paris police thought so too, and dotted the crowd along the route on the day of his arrival with its jolly workmen and retired military men and marvellous men about town, whom it fondly fancies no one ever spots, and whom King Edward must have been the first to pick out with amusement. Edward VII. came, and that evening one heard the crowd in the streets out to see the illuminations singing, "C'est Edouard, Edouard, Edouard-e, c'est Edouard-e qu'il nous faut." It was a feeling none of us will forget who had dreamt of an Entente Cordiale as Utopian.

The coming of King Edward suddenly struck the Parisian imagination. The English Press had been "working up" the future Entente Cordiale for all it was worth without the slightest response in France from either Press or people. Never had a proffered hand

been so reluctantly taken; never had the most sentimental people in Europe -that is, ourselves-been more gushing; never had the least sentimental— that is, the French-been more cool. King Edward came, and was almost coldly received on his arrival. The English correspondents in Paris made heroic efforts to reconcile their innate love of truth with their sympathy for the yet unborn Entente Cordiale, and to produce the impression in England, without exactly saying the words, that the King had been received with enthusiasm; but all knew he had not been. That he had not been hissed was such a relief to them that in the fever of turning out copy this negative proof became positive evidence of enthusiasm. There was no enthusiasm, but after a few hours there was a sudden firing of the Parisian imagination. Suddenly the Paris

ian mind saw the future in a picture before it; saw power, influence and benefits in the Entente Cordiale; saw in the same flash the past, what King Edward had planned; saw how he had planned it and what it might lead to; saw his work as he had foreseen it. He proved, indeed, that he had better knowledge of Parisians than we who lived among them, for he must certainly have had an intui- · tion that his sudden move would strike their imagination as it did. One can suppose him saying, "It is the card to play," and-to timid advisers making objections-"I will play it, and it will win." Perhaps the only quality really wanted in Kings is a genius for reading men. Neither continual plodding nor brilliant flashes will serve them if they read men wrong.

litically hostile people, and to say: "Here I am; you know me, I am an old Parisian. I come now not as le Prince de Galles, but as King; but I come still as an old Parisian. I come as an old Parisian for the deliberate purpose of using my old Parisianism as an influence upon you. I come to ask your friendship. I think the friendship of our two nations will be useful and powerful. I might offer it politically, and I do; but I offer it also personally. You know me of old; for my sake think whether this Entente Cordiale be not worth having. It is a business offer; but, frankly, I use my own goodwill with you to further my business, which is the business of my people, and which, if you consider it, will, I think, prove your own good business too." That is exactly what the offer was, and Parisians understood it accurately thus. The frankness of the offer fetched them, they. struck the bargain as frankly, and the Entente Cordiale was sealed. Some suspicions held out, and Paul Déroulède's letter calling upon all patriots who had prepared to throw cabbagestalks on King Edward's arrival to desist, and to welcome with dignified hospitality the guest of France, had not quieted all patriotic hearts, which were troubled for a year or two still with lurking inklings of perfidious designs. But the decisive blow had been struck, for the popular imagination had been kindled. King Edward understood the French people, which was grateful for having been understood. It saw suddenly what he had meant by coming with the Entente Cordiale in his traveling bag, saw the possibilities of it, and saw, that he had trusted the French people to know its own business, and trusted it to take him, an old boulevardier, frankly as a friend-the same old boulevardier and friend though crowned a King.

can be lasting that does not at the same time strike its imagination and touch its deeply realistic human sense. The Franco-Russian alliance was satisfying to the French imagination, and those who had felt a little ashamed of the French people for losing its sense of dignity and throwing up its babies. imploringly to be kissed by Russian sailors in a carriage procession through the Paris streets, afterwards understood more broadly what had seemed the childishness of popular enthusiasm; it was the first time the French people had not felt alone in the world since 1870. This first-extended hand was grasped and embraced convulsively; the Franco-Russian alliance struck the popular imagination as a great consolation. But it left no roots. in the deep realistic instinct which is the foundation of French character. There was very little human reality about the alliance, as there was extremely little human kinship between the two peoples, and the imaginative force of the impulse once past, surprisingly little vital force in fact was. found to be left behind it.

King Edward, cheerfully coming unbidden, an English King who was a boulevardier, to offer English friendship to France, which had not asked for it, and coming because, thinking it would be a good thing for both peoples, he thought he was Parisian enough to bring the thing off even against the Parisian will, struck Parisian imagination strongly enough. This, indeed, was drama; the Boer war, during which we were not more liked in France than elsewhere, only just over; the late Prince de Galles coming back to Paris crowned, yet the same Prince de Galles, with an Entente in his pocketan Entente of which the French people suddenly saw the wonderful possibilities. It was a dramatic picture to strike the imagination, but the inter

more to the French. It was no political understanding negotiated through the Chancelleries; the French people knew nothing of such negotiations, and cared less; the Foreign Offices might have negotiated for years, but could not have brought off the Entente Cordiale. What appealed to the French was the King's move; they saw afterwards the political possibilities of it, but what they first saw was its human picturesqueness; and to them, first of all, the Entente Cordiale was a symbol, of which the King who had been le Prince de Galles was the reality. It is quite certain that no other man at that moment could have made the Entente. He imposed it, not through what courtiers call personal magnetism, or charm, or kingly authority, nor through prestige-for he had little then; the prestige came later, almost immediately afterwards. He had his way because of the strong human stuff the man was made of. The French people has made too many revolutions for the sake of changing the labels of its Governments to be any longer taken in by trappings wrapped round sham men; it picks out a real man very soon when it sees one, either in its own midst or elsewhere. Edward VII. suddenly appealed to the French mind as an extraordinarily interesting human personality when he boldly and blandly came unbidden to Paris; the image of his personality took shape quickly, past traits were remembered and put into the picture, the present circumstances gave it accent and relief, and soon, with a few decisive strokes, French minds had swiftly, as French minds will, drawn for themselves the full portrait of a King who was a real man, "le roi Edouard." When that portrait had been drawn, the Entente Cordiale, by the same mental operation. became an accomplished fact for the French. They took the Entente from him, but they gave him

something also. He made the Entente but to some extent French opinion can be said to have made him. The portrait which they drew for themselves of him is one that has remained, and his own people have never drawn a better one; perhaps the public conventions that surround an English throne have even prevented their drawing one as good. The French understood him quite as quickly as his own subjects, and what there was of sheer human worth in him appealed quite as soon to the French as it did to the English mind.

A King who was a man to whom nothing human was foreign and nothing life has to give indifferent; who got what he could out of life and out of human things, and whom only life and humanity interested; not a man of theories and books, but one, in the words of Bossuet, whose "main book was the world"; who, having lived, ruled by the same tokens, and looked only at life and human things for his people as he had looked at them for himself; who watched every moment the purely human world, knowing it as well as a man can, and at every moment used it; a King determined to give the people he was called to rule over all the benefit, as far as it lay in his power, of the worldly knowledge the amassing of which had filled his own life to the full; an intense realist as a man, a mighty realist as a King: that was "le roi Edouard."

The French are a people of realists, and the King whose picture they had drawn for themselves as that of the prince of realists and the realist among princes would have been the very King for them. He never afterwards belied their portrait of him. In France whenever he came, he not only always did the right thing, but he always did the real thing-the thing that really mattered and the thing that had the most real value at that moment of the