those whom the conditions of existence have excluded from the privileges of education, who can pay only a sou for their daily supply of political information, cannot be too deeply pitied for having to rely upon such sources of news as La Patrie and L'Intransigeant. They go into the wine-shop then, primed with the awful lesson in civilisation they daily receive, their minds poisoned against all those in public office by the ferocious hate, the slander, the ignoble lies they have read and discussed in their newspaper. How are these to distinguish between truth and falsehood? No critical faculties in them have been cultivated by training or education. They accept as educated the men who write these pernicious articles, and if the writers solemnly assure their readers that every public man in France is a thief and traitor, the latter suppose these men must know, and, being by nature suspicious of those who rule and tax them, they are only too ready to believe all they read. And so they credit M. Loubet with a capacity for every dark crime.
The unpretentious dignity and courage, above all, the bourgeois simplicity of M. Loubet's presidentship of the Republic should bid us hope for France in our worst hour of despondency. There is a fine sense of duty in the race, for which this simple civilian stands without brag, assumption, or a trace of French panache. Honour
