een; the average consumption for the period 1888-1898 being thus
something over three hundred millions. Consequently, if the terms of the
company had been accepted, the consumers would have had to pay in these
ten years a hundred and thirty-three million francs less,--and the
municipal council had made a present of this sum to the shareholders of
the Compagnie du gaz. In the present case, the acceptance of the offer
of the electrical companies would involve a reduction in the cost to the
consumers, and also to the city, of two or three million francs a year,
that is to say, of thirty or forty-five millions for the fifteen years
of waiting which are proposed,--supposing, which is not at all probable,
that the consumption would not greatly increase with the lowering of the
cost. So that, from every point of view, it is considered that the
necessity is for immediate reform.

* * * * *

All these larger administrative municipal details, and the Third
Republic itself, date from 1870, the most important year in the history
of France, and it may be thought that no record, however brief, of the
machinery of government, of the characteristics, the aspirations, and
tendencies of this modern society, would be approximately correct
without some allusion to its recent origin, to those tremendous
political events which so transformed it, and which still remain for it
an endless and hopelessly bitter source of speculation, of discussion,
and of fierce recrimination. In this overthrow of a nation, it is the
great figure of the Chancellor of the German Empire that fills the
scene, moving apparently at his will kings, emperors, and ambassadors,
and influencing, even at this late day, every measure of the government
of the capital and the nation by an enduring Consternation,--by a fear
that does but increase from year to year. The incompetence of the
Emperor, the folly of the Empress, probably but served to aid or to
accelerate the ruin which Bismarck thought necessary to secure his great
building,--the Confederation of the North German states had been
consolidated by the defeat of Austria at Sadowa, but France, he was
convinced, would never consent to the re-establishment of the German
Empire. Even the vanquished admit that he did not want war for the sake
of war; but, by his own admission, in 1892, he was willing to secure
this necessary result by any trick, even that of the forger.

[Illustration: PRIVA