III.
CURRENT HISTORY OF FRANCE.
The France of to-day has to be studied more in sorrow than anger. It is not in the interests of a dull and uncertain Republic that people may think it necessary to write; Europe cannot help seeing, and is not surprised to see, the impotent inaction of France on the field of Foreign Politics. Republics are doomed in Monarchical Europe before they are hatched, and they cannot escape their unavoidable fate; and the Third Republic of French Democrats, still lingering in 1882, is, on the one hand, kept alive by the mutual distrust, the deep internal divisions and secret rancour of Republicans, hating each other more than they love France. On the other hand, it lives owing a good deal to the thinness in the ranks of thoroughgoing patriots along the Monarchical lines, of Frenchmen both practical and strong-minded, of men manly, unworshippers of the rising "stars." Advanced Liberals, Democrats, and ultra-Democrats compose the Republic of France to-day; and this France is represented by a Government of fighting "patriots" whose sole "victories" to be recorded by History will be a wide campaign of lock-picking, official burglaries, and house-breaking, an intermittent warfare waged or permitted against all religion, monasteries, crosses and good people going to church.[1] The whole political and parliamentary vigour of those bombastic Nationalists only expands, it would
- ↑ Lawyers like MM. Constans and Cazot trample under foot the Article Fifth of their very Republican law of September 3rd, 1791, to rob so many good and useful Clergymen and Sisters of Mercy of both their homes and property. What a moral lesson to neighbouring countries! These well may forbid at home the importation of Republican institutions, from France at all events. Republican "Liberité, Egalité, Fraternité" is a lie. The very idea is ridiculous, and more amusing still is the advertisement of these words stuck all over towns and villages in France.
