d French
Republic has been standing on the defensive. It has steadily lost
ground, with every passing year, in the confidence and respect of the
French people. The financial scandals, amid which President Grevy and
his son-in-law, M. Wilson, disappeared and President Carnot was
'invented,' simply revealed a condition of things inherent in the very
nature of the political organisation of France under the parliamentary
revolutionists who came into power in 1879.

The Third French Republic, such as these men have made it, is condemned,
hopelessly and irretrievably condemned, by its creed to be a government
of persecution and by its machinery to be a government of corruption.
There is no escape for it.

V

It has made the Government of France--not the Administration, but the
form, the constitution of the Government--a party question, and it has
organised the party which insists that France shall be a Republic,
openly and avowedly upon the maxim of Danton that 'to the victors belong
the spoils.' What has come of this maxim in the United States, where the
form and constitution of the Republic are accepted by all political
parties, and the administration of the Government alone is a party
question, I need not say.

There are 'black points' even on the horizon of the American Republic,
as all Americans know. But there is no point blacker than this, as to
which, however, it is possible with us that good men of all political
parties may act together in the future as they have acted together in
the past for Civil Service Reform. But what is possible with us is not
possible with the party of the Republic in France. For, by making the
Republic a republic of religious persecution, the Republicans of the
Republic of Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Carnot, and Clemenceau have made it
necessarily a republic of political proscription, and political
proscription inevitably means political corruption.

If any man needs to learn this, let him study the story of the
establishment of the Protestant Succession in England by Walpole, and
the story of the overthrow of the United States Bank by President
Jackson, in America. He may think the Protestant Succession in England,
and the overthrow of the United States Bank in America, worth the price
paid for each. But he will learn at least what the price was.

It will not be the fault of the Carnot Government--certainly not of the
most energetic member of that Government, M. Constans, Minister of th