ts and
Telegraphs to the direct control of the Minister of the Interior.

Under his control they still remain, and it is now proposed to attach
these services permanently to the Ministry which manages the elections.
Can anybody fail to see what this means?

At the suggestion of M. Constans, too, the Government resolved to attack
the spectre. It determined to drive General Boulanger out of France. It
is not easy to feel much sympathy with General Boulanger, who while
Minister of War put into execution against the Comte de Paris and his
family a most iniquitous decree, exiling them--for no other cause than
the fact that they come of the family which made France a nation--from
their country and their homes. But the proceedings which the Government
of President Carnot took against General Boulanger were of such a
character that the Procureur de la Republique, who was first directed to
carry them out, withdrew from his post. Before they could be consummated
by the arrest of General Boulanger, he suddenly left France. Into the
subsequent action of the Senate, constituted as a 'High Court of
Justice' to try him, I need not here enter.

Suffice it that after a canvass organized in this fashion and in this
spirit, and prosecuted by the Government with remorseless energy, the
elections held on September 22 and October 6 have left the relative
strength of the Government and of the Opposition in the new Chamber
substantially what it was in the Chamber of 1885. This, in the
circumstances, can only be described, in the language of one of the
ablest Republican journalists in Paris, M. Jules Dietz of the _Journal
des Debats_, as 'an escape from a disaster.'

The repulse of the assailants at the Redan did not save Sebastopol for
the Russians. The margin of the proclaimed majorities by which many of
the Government members of the new Chamber were returned, is so very
small as to suggest of itself the pressure, in a very practical and
concrete form, of the hand of authority on the returns at the polls. In
twenty cases these majorities ranged from 6 to 200 votes.

In one case, in the Seine Inferieure, the details of which were given to
me by persons of the highest character, with perfect liberty to use
their names, the Government member was declared by the prefect, after
two adjournments of the counting, to have been returned by a majority of
173 votes on a total poll, which proved upon examination to very
considerably exceed the total