money, or making an insignificant profit; but, if that were the case, our merchant navy would not go on expanding, as it does, every year.

In conclusion, let me be permitted to recapitulate the points which the English people should impress upon its mind, viz.—

1. That the increase of carrying-trade has been beneficial to mankind, and has been mainly promoted by Great Britain.

2. That steamers have 5 times the carrying-power, and 7 times less risk than sailing-vessels.

3. That British preponderance on sea increases every year, and that the ship-building trade is mainly in our hands.

4. That British sailors carry most merchandise per man, and that we can work cheaper than any other flag.

5. That maritime disasters are relatively diminishing every year, and that the ratio of British vessels lost is much below the general average.

These are facts almost unknown in England, although everything regarding this subject ought to be duly appreciated, for there are few things that ought to give us greater satisfaction than the knowledge that we possess the greatest merchant-navy that the world has yet seen, and that its power and efficiency, increasing year by year, are a lively emblem of the commerce, wealth, and far-extending influence of Britain.

M. G. MULHall.

M. GAMBETTA AND THE FRENCH

ELECTIONS.

I.

THE

HE old Chamber had been elected in February, 1876, in opposition to the Buffet Ministry. When, in a last attempt at Monarchical reaction, it was dissolved soon after the 16th of May, 1877, the Republican party took as their watchword the re-election en bloc, apart from all personal considerations, of the 363 members who had signed the protest against the De Fourtou and De Broglie Ministry. Out of 533 deputies, they succeeded in sending back to the Chamber, after taking into account the result of all disallowed and recurrent elections, 394 Republicans.

In point of fact, this Chamber was elected on a single questionthat of ridding the country of the men of the 24th and the 16th of May, and placing Marshal MacMahon in a position in which he should be forced either loyally to carry out the Constitution or to resign.

The Marshal, shaken as he was by the failure of the 16th of May, nevertheless chose to remain President of the Republic during the Exhibition of 1878. But the Senatorial elections of January, 1879, gave a fresh blow to his policy. He perceived that there was now but one course open to him. Let us do him justice: he did not hesitate, he

resigned.

M. Grévy was immediately elected President of the Republic. On that day the Chamber of Deputies had fulfilled its mission. If its members had consulted the interests of the country, and recognized their own political function, they could not have hesitated; they would have called for a new election.

They took care to do no such thing. French deputies would gladly hold office for life. Most of them regard the conditions of Government as subordinate to their personal convenience; and political morality is

not yet far enough advanced among us for the public to understand the necessities of party organization and action, and in this way to put the necessary pressure on its representatives. We have yet to master the A B C of Government by debate.

Since public opinion did not imperiously demand a dissolution, the Chamber set to work to prove its existence by discussing Bills. Flimsy ministries, one after another, subsisted as best they might. M. Jules Grévy had made one great mistake: he should, in the very moment of his taking possession of the Presidency of the Republic, have called to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers the incontestable leader of the majority of the 363-M. Gambetta. But neither the President nor M. Gambetta troubled himself about it. The President feared foreign complications in the event of M. Gambetta's coming into power. M. Gambetta was glad to reserve himself. He procured himself to be nominated President of the Chamber, and contented himself with exercising from the chair a secret dictatorship.

In each successive Ministry he had men who were entirely devoted to him. Through them he ruled the rest; and since not one of these haphazard Ministries, tacked together out of shreds and patches, was capable of existing without his support, he exerted, in fact, an illdefined and vexatious authority, exercised without responsibility, and chiefly in the matter of personal appointments. If If you wanted an appointment, you went to the Palais Bourbon. The organ of M. Gambetta, the République Française, rated a recalcitrant Minister, and the Minister submitted or resigned. Every one was struck by the resignation of M. de Freycinet under circumstances such as these. Thoughtful men, acquainted with the necessities of Government, were shocked, even the most moderate of them, at such a state of things. As for the Radicals, they said, "M. Gambetta is the leader of the majority; he must take office."

La Justice, the journal of M. Clémenceau, was founded simply upon the basis of the necessity of the President's calling M. Gambetta to the Presidency of the Council. It was not difficult to prove that Parliamentary consistency required this. Some people were surprised that the opponents of M. Gambetta should so persistently have demanded his acceptance of power; but their point of view was this: "The French Republic has to pass through the Gambetta phase. The sooner that evolution is accomplished the better. We shall soon see what M. Gambetta is made of. If he makes useful reforms so much the better; the country will gain by it. If he proves himself incompetent as a statesman, he will fall; his career will be ended, and the danger of a future dictatorship and of foreign complications will be avoided." M. Gambetta himself held exactly the opposite opinion. Meanwhile, what was the Ministry doing?

M. Jules Ferry had slipped into the law for higher education a certain 7th Article, refusing to the non-authorized religious orders the

right of instruction. It was a useless and ill-conceived article, inasmuch as these orders not only had already no right to teach, but had no right to exist. It had been surreptitiously introduced into a Bill in which it had no natural place. It disclosed the willingness of the Government to flatter the persecuting instinct which the majority of Frenchmen derive from their Catholic education, and which is just now turned against Catholicism itself. Lastly, it introduced a distinction, ridiculous in the eyes of freethinkers, between the regular and the secular clergy.

In order to carry this 7th Article, M. de Freycinet had threatened to apply the existing laws. The threat itself proved the needlessness of Article 7. The Senate threw it out. M. de Freycinet then issued the decrees of the 29th of March, involving the dissolution of the non-authorized orders. But he entered at the same time into negotiations with Rome with a view to dispensing with the application of them.

This was not what his colleagues intended. M. Jules Ferry became President of the Council, and took upon him the pitiful and shameful task of carrying out the decrees. Everybody remembers the police expeditions, the calling in of locksmiths, the grotesque besieging of convents, the military campaign, such as that of General Billot against the Prémontrés. The resistance was equally ridiculous-the Dominicans piling up behind their doors the forgotten faggots of the Inquisition-the excommunication of police functionaries. The whole thing was absurd. The Ministry spun out these military executions in order to occupy the public mind. This little war against clericalism relieved it from the necessity of settling more serious questions. It was no use asking it to do something useful so long as it could answer, "Wait till we have finished the siege of the Capuchins."

For a whole year the Ministry lived on the execution of the decrees. Next year, it was necessary to find a fresh amusement for public opinion. They invented the question of the Kroumirs.

The predatory incursions of the Kroumirs were not, indeed, a new thing. It was a mere question of police, and of delimitation of frontier; but they seized this pretext for flattering French Chauvinism, and sent out the Tunis expedition.

The mass of the nation swallowed the bait. But the Radicals of the great towns were not to be duped. The plaudits of three thousand persons greeted the words of the radical candidate for the 1st arrondissement of Paris,* in opposition to M. Tirard, the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, when he said at his first meeting: "There is something profoundly immoral in this old governmental policy, borrowing its methods from defunct monarchies, and treating the people like a wild beast, to be muzzled or coaxed with scraps. In 1880 they threw you the Jesuits; in 1881 they throw you the Kroumirs."

Meanwhile, how were the Chamber of Deputies and the Ministry

The present writer.

dealing with the questions which had served as an electoral platform to the Republican party throughout the whole duration of the Empire ?

There was one of these questions, the urgency of which was obvious to all-that of education, secular, gratuitous, and compulsory. For each of these terms M. Jules Ferry contrived a separate Bill. He did this in order to postpone the question of secularization. This was what he understood by making war upon clericalism! It was only under the pressure of the Chamber, urged on by public opinion, that he eventually threw the three Bills into one. The Chamber of 1877 is now dissolved, and the Bill has never yet passed the Senate.

It was not till 1881 that the Chamber ended by passing a Bill for the liberty of the press, consolidating former legislation on the subject, and suppressing a certain number of Draconian provisions. A Bill on public meetings was also passed at the last moment. Ill-made laws, both of them, based on the notion that the direction of private opinion is one of the functions of Government. Yet they are liberal compared with the former state of things, and they may be made useful. As to the liberty of association, the Chamber would not so much as touch it, on pretence that the clericals might make use of it for their own purposes. There was a law passed on professional syndicates—a piece of class legislation, caste legislation, but useful nevertheless. This, however, has not yet been ratified by the Senate.

To justify its inaction, the Ministry said to the deputies who urged it, "What would you have? We have to reckon with the Senate." To justify themselves, in their turn, for their own timidity, the deputies repeated to their constituents: "We are willing enough. It is the Senate." So that the conviction sank deep in the public mind that the Senate was a standing obstruction, the removal-or at least the modification-of which had become a necessity. This conviction was strengthened by a very important fact.

It is well known that the Chamber of 1877 had been elected by scrutin d'arrondissement. According to this method the electors of an arrondissement vote for a single deputy. During the existence of the last Legislature the inconveniences of this method of voting had become plain to the eyes of all politicians. The deputies thus elected were generally either landowners, doctors, or advocates in the small towns, men who enjoyed a certain notoriety in their own small community, but who were ill fitted to deal with general questions of policy and legislation; or else they were financiers, who would work an election as if it were a question of floating a loan.

A Chamber elected under these conditions must be weak. The majority of French politicians preferred scrutin de liste. By this method the deputies of a whole department are elected at once upon a single list. Each party, or each subdivision of a party, decides on its own list of candidates. It is its interest to place on this list the most important names. The electoral conflict is thus fought out over pro