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How little confidence the Government of the Third Republic really felt in the efficacy of the 'principles of 1789,' and of the 'Centennial Exposition,' to save it at the polls in 1889 from the natural consequences of its intolerance and its corruption, was instructively shown by the absolute panic into which it was thrown by the election at Paris of General Boulanger on January 27. Here, at the very threshold of the great electoral year, rose the spectre of the 'man on horseback'!

Certainly General Boulanger was not Napoleon Bonaparte. The Government, which had itself put General Boulanger on horseback, knew the strength and the weakness of the man himself. But it was the legend, not the man, they dreaded. If the French people, or even if Paris, really believed in the legend of Boulanger—and this tremendous vote of January 27 looked very much like it—it mattered little what the real value of the man might be, the legend would make him master of France. That would mean for the Third Republic the fate of the First Republic and of the Second, and for the men who had identified it with their own fanaticism and folly, and greed, and incapacity, a long farewell to all their greatness!

As for the eventual results, what mattered these to them?

The Universal Exposition might collapse, or it might be opened by General Boulanger on his black horse, instead of President Carnot in his landau. What did that signify? But it signified much that the men who had invented President Carnot were not likely to make part of the cortège of General Boulanger.

It is no exaggeration to say that from January 27, 1889, the Government of the Third French Republic was openly and visibly given up by night and by day to one great purpose alone—and that purpose was, not to glorify the 'principles of 1789,' not to celebrate the Republic—the grand statue of the Triumph of the Republic, destined to be set up with great pomp in the sight of the assembled human race, was actually left to be cast in plaster of Paris, no functionary caring to waste a sou on putting it into perennial bronze or enduring marble—no! the great dominant, unconcealed purpose of all the leaders of the Republic was, in some way—no matter how, by hook or by crook—to conjure that spectre of the First Consulate, riding about, awful and imminent, on the black horse of General Boulanger!

Perhaps the high-water mark of this quite unparalleled and most instructive panic was the appearance, towards the end of the last parliamentary session, of M. Jules Ferry, the author of the odious 'Article 7,' the man who after hesitating—to his credit be it said—originally to propose that ministers of religion should be absolutely forbidden to teach the children of France in her public schools, at last succumbed to the vehemence of Paul Bert, the Condorcet of this modern persecution, and became the acknowledged leader of the war against Liberty and Religion—in the tribune of the Deputies, there to urge, and indeed to implore, the Conservative members to make peace with the persecutors, and save them from the peril of Boulanger!

The scene of that day in the Chamber of Deputies was not one to be forgotten. The aspect and the accents of the Republican leader were at times absolutely pathetic with the pathos of unaffected terror. It was difficult to believe, whilst listening to him, that he could really have 'five millions of professed atheists' at his back, encouraging him to extirpate Christianity, root and branch, out of the land of France!

Not less striking, in quite another sense, was the grim and stony silence with which the appeal of the Republican leader was received by the Right, representing, as the Third Republic has chosen to make the Right represent, the Religion, and with the Religion the Liberty, of France.

It reminded me, I am sorry to say, of the way in which a naturally amiable and considerate householder might be expected to listen to the arguments of an adroit and accomplished burglar showing cause why he should be locked into the plate-closet to protect him from the police.

M. Jules Ferry's offer was to suspend the application to certain religious bodies of the interdict fulminated against them by himself and the Republican Government. At last he paused, evidently oppressed by the steady, unresponsive gaze of his hearers.

Then the silence was broken!

'Do you speak for the Government?' called out a fiery deputy of the Right.

M. Jules Ferry hesitated a moment and then replied, 'No! I speak for myself; but there are many who think as I do!'

'You!' came back the hot response. 'You! bah!—you are nothing!'

The real response came later, on September 22, when, in his own town of St.-Dié, the chief of the Opportunists, despite all the efforts of the prefect of the department and of the local authorities to carry him through, was beaten by a Monarchist. Obviously M. Ferry had heard how things looked from his committee at St.-Dié when he made his fruitless appeal to the Eight in the Chamber!

Finding that nothing was to be expected from any cajolery of the Right, or any transactions with the outraged and awakened Christianity of France, the Government at last gave up the control of the impending elections unreservedly into the hands of M. Constans of Toulouse, of whom I have already spoken. To him, as Minister of the Interior, all the machinery of politics was abandoned. Every prefect in France became an electoral agent to do his bidding.

For the first time too, I believe, even in French administrative history, all the employees of the post-offices and the telegraph offices were transferred from the control of the Director of Posts and Telegraphs to the direct control of the Minister of the Interior.

Under his control they still remain, and it is now proposed to attach these services permanently to the Ministry which manages the elections. Can anybody fail to see what this means?

At the suggestion of M. Constans, too, the Government resolved to attack the spectre. It determined to drive General Boulanger out of France. It is not easy to feel much sympathy with General Boulanger, who while Minister of War put into execution against the Comte de Paris and his family a most iniquitous decree, exiling them—for no other cause than the fact that they come of the family which made France a nation—from their country and their homes. But the proceedings which the Government of President Carnot took against General Boulanger were of such a character that the Procureur de la République, who was first directed to carry them out, withdrew from his post. Before they could be consummated by the arrest of General Boulanger, he suddenly left France. Into the subsequent action of the Senate, constituted as a 'High Court of Justice' to try him, I need not here enter.

Suffice it that after a canvass organized in this fashion and in this spirit, and prosecuted by the Government with remorseless energy, the elections held on September 22 and October 6 have left the relative strength of the Government and of the Opposition in the new Chamber substantially what it was in the Chamber of 1885. This, in the circumstances, can only be described, in the language of one of the ablest Republican journalists in Paris, M. Jules Dietz of the Journal des Débats, as 'an escape from a disaster.'

The repulse of the assailants at the Redan did not save Sebastopol for the Russians. The margin of the proclaimed majorities by which many of the Government members of the new Chamber were returned, is so very small as to suggest of itself the pressure, in a very practical and concrete form, of the hand of authority on the returns at the polls. In twenty cases these majorities ranged from 6 to 200 votes.

In one case, in the Seine Inférieure, the details of which were given to me by persons of the highest character, with perfect liberty to use their names, the Government member was declared by the prefect, after two adjournments of the counting, to have been returned by a majority of 173 votes on a total poll, which proved upon examination to very considerably exceed the total number of voters registered in the district!

But, taking the general return of the votes cast at these elections as authentic, it is perfectly plain that the Monarchical party in France is stronger to-day than it was in 1885, and that the Republican party is weaker in France to-day than it was in 1885.

In 1885 the strength of the two parties stood as follows:—

Republicans of all shades	4,377,063
Conservatives and Monarchists	3,608,578
	————
Republican majority	768,485

In 1889 the strength of the two parties stands as follows:—

Conservative Monarchists	3,144,978
Boulangists	629,955
	————
	3,774,933
Opportunist Republicans	2,980,540
Radicals	981,809
Socialists	90,593
	————
	4,052,542
Republican majority	277,609

Here at once we see a falling off in the Republican majority, between 1885 and 1889, of no less than 490,876 votes. This is certainly significant enough when we remember that in 1885 the Monarchists did not everywhere and openly attack the Republic as a form of government, while in 1889 the issue was admitted on both sides to involve the existence of the Republic as a form of government.

But this is not all.

When we compare the total of the votes cast in 1885 and 1889, we find a diminution of no fewer than 788,821 votes. If this proves anything, it proves that the voters of France care very much less about the stability of the Republic in 1889 than they did in 1885. And this farther appears from the further fact that the falling off in the total of votes cast affected the Republican vote of 1889 much more seriously than it affected the Monarchical vote. Indeed it did not affect the Monarchical vote at all. On the contrary, while there was a positive falling off from the Republican vote of 324,521 between 1885 and 1889, there was a positive increase of the Monarchical vote, between 1885 and 1889, of 166,355.

How is it possible to weigh the meaning of these figures fairly without seeing that a form of government which exists in France only in virtue of a majority which a change of 140,000 votes in a total poll of 7,827,475 would have turned into a minority, can hardly be said to rest upon as firm a basis, for example, as that of the Third Empire, with its plebiscitary majority of seven millions in 1870 responding to its majority of seven millions in 1852?

Take away from the narrow Republican majority of 1889 the public functionaries, high and low, now counted in France by tens of thousands, with all who depend upon and are connected with them; give to the ballot in France the sanctity, freedom, and security which it has in England; compel the public authorities in France to abstain, as they are compelled in England to abstain, from direct interference with the exercise by the voters of the right of suffrage, and the evidence is overwhelming which goes to show that the Third Republic would be voted into limbo to-morrow!