o or out
of his carriage without treading on some incorruptible 'patriot'
prostrate between its wheels with a petition for a prefecture, a title
or a pension. The crimes and follies of the First Republic had made
France and the world sick of its name. Its true story was a tale of
shame and humiliation, not fit to be dragged out into the blaze of the
glory of Imperial France.

The First Republic was the deadly enemy both of liberty and of law. The
conduct of its first envoy to the United States would have justified
Washington in locking him up. When a stop was put to his mischievous
impertinences, he preferred exile in America to the chance of the
guillotine at Paris, and his name died out, I believe, curiously enough,
with one of the chief instruments of the notorious Tweed Ring in New
York.

The first shots fired in anger under the American flag after the peace
of 1783 were fired against cruisers of the French Republic captured in
the West Indies by American men-of-war, to put an end to the ignorant
and insolent attempt of what called itself a government at Paris to
issue letters of marque on American soil against English commerce.

So grateful was France to the Emperor for restoring the reign of law,
that she never troubled herself about liberty, and but for the
indomitable defence of constitutional liberty and national independence
which England maintained, often single-handed, from the rupture of the
peace of Amiens to the victory of Waterloo, the very names of the chief
actors in the odious and ridiculous dramas of the Revolution would have
long since faded, as Napoleon intended they should fade, out of the
memory of the masses of mankind.

VII

How little confidence the Government of the Third Republic really felt
in the efficacy of the 'principles of 1789,' and of the 'Centennial
Exposition,' to save it at the polls in 1889 from the natural
consequences of its intolerance and its corruption, was instructively
shown by the absolute panic into which it was thrown by the election at
Paris of General Boulanger on January 27. Here, at the very threshold of
the great electoral year, rose the spectre of the 'man on horseback'!

Certainly General Boulanger was not Napoleon Bonaparte. The Government,
which had itself put General Boulanger on horseback, knew the strength
and the weakness of the man himself. But it was the legend, not the
man, they dreaded. If the French people, or even if Paris, really
believed i