sues, yet keeping silent session after session rather than embarrass the Liberal party, we shall get some notion of M. Louis Blanc's self-imposed restraint. The divergence between him and M. Gambetta does not relate to mere questions of strategy. It is, at all events in M. Louis Blanc's estimation, a radical difference of principle. He sees, as he thinks, the conquests of the revolution put in peril by M. Gambetta's love of finesse. The compromise which is offered seems to him utterly valueless. The institutions which he is called on to support are republican only in name. They are monarchical in their essence, with the sole difference that the crown is elective instead of hereditary. M. Louis Blanc has seen this detested cross between incompatible ideas maturing for months and even years, and all this time he has held his tongue. The action of the Left during and after his speech is another tribute to M. Gambetta's ascendency. The strain has been too great for M, Louis Blanc, and he has at length broken away, but carried scarcely any one with him in his protest. Appeals which must have gone straight to the heart of many members of his party failed to draw forth a single cheer. The Left were silent while he occupied the tribune, and silent when he left it. There were none of those triple rounds of applause or of those tempestuous hand-shakings which have so often been given to orators of lesser mark. Prudence has for the time quieted every natural impulse, and overrules every other consideration.
There is no need to insist upon the significance of this fact. Unseasonable violence — violence which alienated friends and encouraged enemies — has been the special characteristic of French Radicalism, and now not the Left Centre itself is more studiously moderate in tone and phrase. As yet, however, we know only that the change has taken place; the cause of it is not equally clear. Is it the result of conviction? Does this assent on the part of the advanced Republicans to a constitution of which M. Louis Blanc's description is scarcely an exaggeration, mean that they have at length awakened to the beauties of moderation? Have they discovered that there is more than they thought to be said for a carefully constructed balance of power in the constitution? It is not probable that such a revolution should have taken place, and as there is a much easier way of accounting for the facts it will be wiser to prefer it until further evidence appears. The Left may be silent under the provocation of adversaries and the apparent treachery of friends because they are persuaded that discretion is the only card that they can play with so much as a chance of success. In this respect circumstances have greatly favoured M. Gambetta. He may have built his own preference for moderate courses on the impossibility of founding a permanent constitution without the co-operation of the peasantry. Former republics have broken down in France for want of this indispensable condition. The peasantry are the mainstay of French industry and French prosperity, and if the Republicans are to go on frightening them into accepting the empire, M. Gambetta may well feel that he will succeed no better than those who have gone before him. But there is no need for him to try to draw his party along with him to this conclusion. There are more obvious dangers in view, fully sufficient to supply M. Gambetta with arguments by which to persuade the Left to remain silent under all provocation, and to "lie low." They have to deal with an executive which would be certain to act with prompitude and decision if those who compose it saw reason to fear any open resistance to their will, and with an Assembly which would give an unhesitating support to the executive if it saw its supremacy threatened. The efforts still made from time to time to reconstruct the old majority — the majority which overthrew M. Thiers and set up Marshal MacMahon in his room — prove that the elements of that majority have not wandered so far from one another that they might not be reunited by external pressure. The Right Centre and the more conservative section of the Left Centre have accepted the republic for the very reason which moves M.Louis Blanc to reject it — its unlikeness to all other French republics. The Left must know that any effort on their part to deprive the republic of this special feature would array all the conservative elements in the Assembly on the side of a government which should, at all events, not be Republican. The Assembly is in possession, and, though it has been brought to contemplate a surrender of its own sovereign power as a step not long to be deferred, the process might soon be undone if the whole Left were in the habit of speaking its mind as freely as M. Louis Blanc. The
