in dealing with what seemed a serious
crisis, was followed by the swift collapse of the whole movement, and
when Boulanger was summoned before the High Court of Justice upon the
charge of inciting a revolution, he fled from the country, and the
incident was closed.

In one important respect the Third Republic differs from the two
preceding it. A constitution had hitherto been supposed to be the
indispensable starting-point in the formation of a government. No
country had been so prolific in constitutions as France, which, since
1790, is said to have had no less than seventeen; while England, since
her Magna Charta made her free in 1215, had had none at all.

An eloquent and definite statement of the rights of a people once
seemed as indispensable to a form of government as a creed to a
religious faith. Perhaps the world, as it grows wiser, is less
inclined to definite statements upon many subjects! Our own
Constitution, probably the most elastic and wisest instrument of the
kind ever created, has in a century required sixteen amendments to
adapt it to changing conditions.

What is known in France as the Constitution of 1875, is, in fact, a
series of legislative enactments passed within certain periods of time;
these, as in England, serving as a substitute for a Constitution framed
like our own.

The French may have done wisely in trying the English method of
substituting a body of laws, the growth of necessity, for a written
constitution. But this system, reached in England through the slowly
moving centuries, was adopted in France, not with deliberate purpose at
first, but in order to avoid the clashing of opposing views among the
group of men in charge of the republic in its inception; men who, while
ruling under the name of a republic, really at heart disliked it, and
were, in fact, only enduring it as a temporary expedient on the road to
something better. And so the republic drifted. There are times when
it is well to drift; and in this case it has proved most satisfactory.

Not alone the rulers, but the nation itself, was in doubt as to the
sort of government it wanted, or how to attain it after it knew. It
was experimenting with that most difficult of arts, the art of
governing. An art which England had been centuries in learning, how
could France be expected to master in a decade? And when we consider
the conditions and the elements with which this inexperience was
dealing, the dangerous element a