nce of a form of government in which all Americans
take such a lively and sincere interest. Nowhere else in the civilized
world, not even in France itself, would the fall of the third republic
cause such deep regret as in the United States. Hence it is that we
desire to know what likelihood there is of such a disaster being
brought about, in the hope that by calling attention to the dangers,
we may, perhaps, do something to prevent such a lamentable
catastrophe.

The greatest peril that has threatened the republic since its
foundation in 1870, was the recent Boulanger adventure. Though this
rather addle-brained general is now quite dead politically, the causes
which gave him strength and nearly plunged France once more into a
chaos whence would probably have issued a tyranny of some sort, still
exist and are continually on the point of cropping out again. The
principal one of them is the lack of union among republicans. Just as
the republic owed its final triumph to the circumstance that the
royalists and imperialists could not coalesce during the years
immediately following 1870, so Boulanger, backed by these same
royalists and imperialists, nearly won the day two years ago, almost
wholly because the republicans were divided among themselves. Union
among republicans is scarcely less necessary to-day than it was during
the dark days of Marshal MacMahon's presidency and the threatened
Boulangist _coup d'etat_.

Since the republicans have had control of the two houses, the
minority, especially in the chamber of deputies, has been very strong,
the Right to-day numbering about one hundred and seventy deputies, and
the Boulangists about thirty more, making a grand total of two hundred
in a membership of less than six hundred. That is to say, the
Opposition, mustering more than a third of the chamber. And when it is
borne in mind that this minority is not simply a constitutional
Opposition, that its advent to power would mean the eventual overthrow
of the republic, we perceive how radically different such an
Opposition is from that found in the parliament of other countries,
where whether the outs come in or the ins go out, no vital change
occurs in the nature of the government.

The existence of this recklessly revolutionary minority and the
fickleness of republican union are the chief causes of ministerial
instability, one of the worst features of the present regime. The
ministry has changed so often during the last twe