faiths, in which the people have been right and the classes have been wrong. The time approaches when the people will pronounce the verdict upon the fate of Ireland-nay, rather of England, for, in the words of Lamartine, "No man," and a fortiori no nation, “ever riveted the chains of slavery round the neck of his brother that God did not secretly but irresistibly weld the other end of the chain around the neck of the tyrant," and hath not God said, "Woe to them they covet fields and take them by violence, and houses and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage; therefore, thus, saith the Lord, against this family do I devise an evil" (Micah ii. 2). The crisis is urgent, the issue of the next verdict of the English people will be momentous; the inauguration of a new era of coercion may preclude the possibility of a peaceful conclusion to the long controversy, the oppressed nation may become hardened and learn" to love despair." Like the prisoner of Chillon, Ireland may learn to say "My very chains and I grew friends, In the dignified and most pathetic appeal with which Mr. Gladstone brought to a conclusion the great debate in 1886, a speech which elicited from friend and foe alike the tribute of a prolonged burst of irrepressible applause, his last words were, "We have the people's hearts." If premature as a declaration of present fact it was luminous with discernment as a prophecy now approaching fulfilment. The characteristic English instinct that abhors oppression is clearing its vision from the false issues which at the last general election beclouded moral sight, and when it awakes it is irrepressible. "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side; The next general election will answer the question, and we believe that Ireland's demand for Home Rule will be conceded by the immense majority of the English people in the name of freedom, justice, and the fear of God. BASIL WILBERFORCE. [In reference to a passage in Lady Grant Duff's article on Mr. Laurence Oliphant in our last issue, p. 182, second paragraph, Sir Thomas Wade asks us to explain that there was no real unfairness in Lord Elgin's procedure. Had Mr. F. Bruce been on the spot, he, and not the gentleman previously instructed, would have represented Lord Elgin. Mr. Oliphant merely took Mr. F. Bruce's place. But it was characteristic of him that be remonstrated with Lord Elgin, fearing lest he was supplanting some one who might have reason to think that he had a claim to the prominent position.-ED.] THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN FRANCE: I. 1789-1889. A DISTINGUISHED member of the Council of Higher Education, M. Edouard Goumy, has just published, under the title of "La France du Centenaire," a résumé of the vicissitudes through which the country has passed during the last hundred years, and of its present position, moral and political. M. Goumy's opinion may be taken as fairly representative of the opinions, or rather the feelings, of the majority of educated Frenchmen who have not cast in their lot with any political party, and who accept the Republic, not as an ideal form of government, but as the only form of government, short of a military dictatorship, which is possible under the circumstances. They are the same opinions, the same feelings, which found expression in a somewhat less sharp and positive form, in M. Renan's address at the reception of M. Jules Claretie into the French Academy. The feeling is one of utter disillusion and discouragement as regards the present, and of sorrowful apprehension as regards the future. A hundred years ago it was the very eve of the meeting of the States-General; joy glowed in every heart, lighted every face; all minds were carried away by the inspiration of a mighty hope. The future seemed without a cloud. There was a universal confidence that the nation, whose rights had been sacrificed so long to a royal despotism, was about to take possession of herself without forfeiting the traditions of her past, and that in the union of all Frenchmen was to be found the beginning of universal happiness. A few years sufficed, instead, to cover the soil with ruins, to wreck the ancient monarchy to which the country owed her being, to set her citizens at one another's throats, to impoverish all alike by foreign and intestine war, and finally to establish a despotism sterner than that of Louis XIV. or Louis XI. And now, a hundred years after that dazzling dawn of 1789, we find ourselves asking whether the work of the French Revolution has not been a huge fiasco, whether France is not doomed to either anarchy or despotism, or even to both by turns, and whether we are not, after these eighteen republican years, about to fall under the most ignominious of all yokes, the yoke of a political charlatan. To M. Goumy there is nothing but despair in the retrospect, for he judges with excessive severity the course pursued by the Republicans ever since they became undisputed masters of the country in 1879, while he searches in vain among the Conservatives for any clear perception of the situation, and doubts the possibility of a "Ligue des Gens de Bien" of all parties, which he nevertheless regards as the only chance of saving the country. If we are to look on M. Goumy's book-representing, as it does, in its bitter and incisive way, the opinion of a great part of the Liberal middle-class-as nothing more than a political pamphlet, intended to open men's minds to the errors and dangers of the moment and to point out a way of escape, we can have nothing but praise for its force and eloquence and courage. But it would be a great mistake to regard it as a genuine historical work, or as a full and definitive judgment on modern France. M. Goumy greatly exaggerates both the sufferings of the past century and the vices of our present system. The critics of the Third Republic are suffering from the same ills as the men they criticise-from intemperate hopes and fears, from an incapacity to see things simply and as they really are. The discouragement which has taken possession of us all is but too real; but it is far greater than there is any need for; and it only wants a strong moral impulse to shake off the depression itself, and half the causes it springs from would disappear along with it. It comes, in fact, from the inevitable disappointment of impossible hopes. It is the permanent defect of the Gallic mind to be too hasty, both in the onset and in the recoil. Ardent and fearless in attack, it is crushed by the least reverse. It is so certain of the thing it hopes for, that it takes no account of time and space; and the least hindrance, the least delay, seems a token that all is lost, and it is no use going on. The history of French colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is an epitome of French politics in the nineteenth. No other nation threw out such brilliant and prosperous colonies so rapidly as France did, or showed such splendid qualities at the first go-off; none other allowed her possessions to be snatched from her so lightly, or so listlessly allowed them to die out of themselves. In the same way, the history of our own day is that of a series of political creations, inaugurated with enthusiasm, and then destroyed in fury or abandoned in disgust. Both these waves of feeling are equally exaggerated, and each tends to reproduce the other. Moderates, like M. Goumy, who mercilessly arraign the Republic for having failed to secure financial prosperity, powerful allies, an invincible army, religious concord, and general harmony, fall into the self-same error, and show the self-same want of common sense, as the Radical who laments that the country has not been completely republicanized, the Church disestablished, and the whole system of taxation readjusted, or the Royalist who sees no remedy for anything except in a Restoration. With a little more common sense and a little less imagination, with a somewhat finer perception of what is practicable, a little more fairness to opponents, a little more tolerance for other people's ideas, and a little less haste in the application of one's own, it would not be so impossible to build up a durable political system, under which Conservatives and Radicals should take the lead by turns, and which should oscillate softly from Right to Left and from Left to Right without any fear of going over altogether. It is this intemperance of judgment, this mutual intolerance between parties and persons, which pushes everything to extremes, and makes it impossible for a Government to lose the public confidence without the risk of a revolution. If, as is only too possible, the Third Republic should end in a new revolution and a violent reaction, the fault will rest with that excessive criticism which has discredited the existing system; with the extravagant hopes fostered by the Radicals, and the equally extravagant outcry raised against the immobility of the Moderates, and the too conservative character of the Constitution; with the obstinacy of the Royalists in clinging to a defunct ideal instead of entering the Republic and taking the helm in their turn; and finally, with the absurd illusions that the Boulangists have sown in the minds of the ignorant and the credulous. But, That this is all-that France is suffering mainly from moral instability and diseases of the imagination, the result of a too sudden rupture with her own traditions-is obvious from the fact that after every revolution, and in spite of seventeen changes of Constitution in a single century, she always rights herself, and knows no pause in her intellectual and industrial activity, nor any decline in her material force. She could cure everything by an act of her own will. imaginary or wilful as her ills may be, they cannot go on for ever with impunity. During the last twenty years she has suffered from disorders so serious that it will take years of patience to recover from them. Fresh dangers menace her at this moment. Let us consider what they are, and how the catastrophe is to be avoided-or precipitated. Ever since that same year of 1789, France has been a sort of laboratory for political experimentation; and Europe has looked on, always curiously, sometimes anxiously, often with a sort of scornful pity, at these experimenta in anima nobili. Absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, all sorts of republics, and all sorts of despotisms-we have tried them all. Each has had its hour of splendour and enthusiasm; not one of them has lasted more than eighteen years. Are we to read in these successive revolutions the condemnation of the nation itself, novarum rerum semper cupida— incapable of patience or of perseverance? Are we to believe that France has broken with the traditions of her past only to sink into an incurable decline? and that all the efforts made during the past century to create a freer and better balanced social state are to end in nothing but chaos or a tyranny? I think not. For, on the one hand, in spite of political uncertainties, we have reaped some very real and beneficial results from the Revolution of 1789-results which are definite, durable, and more and more evident as time goes on; and, on the other hand, we can trace our political instability to certain distinct causes, in which the national character plays but a small part. Those who deplore the fall of the ancien régime, and see in it nothing but a misfortune for which there is no compensation, forget what the ancien régime was at the time of its fall. They see in modern France only an unstable political system-an evil real, indeed, but superficial: and they fail to regard her social condition as a whole and in its permanent characteristics. They forget that the ancien régime itself was ruined by excessive centralization, that it presented a strange mixture of anarchy and despotism, that its whole machinery was rusty, warped, and strained. Despite the virtues and good intentions of many agents of the central power, corruption reigned throughout all ranks, from the king who wasted his treasure on the Polignacs to the rural tax-collector who favoured one taxpayer at the expense of another—from Parliament and Privy Councils to the pettiest tribunals. The institutions which sprang up under the Revolution could not eradicate all the vices of the ancien régime. They retained in particular-after an unlucky and exaggerated attempt at decentralizing a centralized administrative system; but they at least established order in place of chaos, distinction instead of confusion of functions, and scrupulous integrity instead of shameless corruption. We owe it to the Revolution that all offices have been thrown open to merit, that wealth and property have been democratized as well as power, and that the France of to-day, after all her reverses— after three invasions, two civil wars, six revolutions, and any number of insurrections-is a rich, prosperous, happy, and powerful country. M. Renan said the other day that we shall know in another twenty years whether the Revolution has been a consummate good or a consummate evil. It is not likely, we think, to deserve so positive a sentence either in one direction or in the other; but we need not wait twenty years to say that, in many respects at any rate, it has turned out well. None the less, it is true that we owe to it the instability of our |