nations, she has seen herself in danger of annihilation between the cross-fire of German entrenchments and the barricades of her own rebel sons.
Let us with stout hearts study the Past. "He who would judge well concerning the future," Bossuet wrote for his Royal Pupil's instruction, " must diligently consult the past." Let us look and see whether the French have not wandered or been led astray; that, if so, they should once more prevent so painful a degradation. The future is still theirs, and Frenchmen can, if they will, save themselves as others do.
"Christ Jesus! whom Clotilde declares is the Son of the living God; Thou who, they say, givest help to those in peril and victory to those that trust in Thy Name, I invoke with fervour Thy glorious aid. If through Thee I vanquish my enemies, I will believe in Thee and I will be baptized; for, I have prayed to my gods, I have proved them, they have refused to help me." Clovis, to seal the Covenant of victory and immortality, erected a Cross. This has been for fourteen centuries the guiding star of the grandeur of France. This, reader, is the Covenant, a part of the heritage of the Jews and the Romans, bequeathed to the ancestors of the Comte de Chambord and the Royal Family of France. This is the starting-point of that French Monarchy which sprang from a rightly understood divine and national appointment^, Christ, victory, liberty; not from that liberty which, bred in the mire of errors and Revolutions, turns into licence and ruins, but from that liberty bred in the morality of the Gospel.
Faith, Law, Liberty: these are the constitutional elements of French Conservatism; together with the hereditary succession required by the Frank nation from the conditions of the Treaty accepted by their ancestors. It is the observance of this both by King and people that made France what she was.
This historical Covenant between faith and greatness may provoke a smile of scorn from those worshippers of success achieved, of the faits accomplis and the beati possidentes, who, intoxicated with the triumph of current semi-Napoleonic and semi-Republican gamblers, are proud of the series of victories won by men ruling without God, the soul, or Religion. They ask with gentle irony whether the Cross prevented the French defeat at Crécy,
