nt which exists in France only in virtue
of a majority which a change of 140,000 votes in a total poll of
7,827,475 would have turned into a minority, can hardly be said to rest
upon as firm a basis, for example, as that of the Third Empire, with its
plebiscitary majority of seven millions in 1870 responding to its
majority of seven millions in 1852?

Take away from the narrow Republican majority of 1889 the public
functionaries, high and low, now counted in France by tens of thousands,
with all who depend upon and are connected with them; give to the ballot
in France the sanctity, freedom, and security which it has in England;
compel the public authorities in France to abstain, as they are
compelled in England to abstain, from direct interference with the
exercise by the voters of the right of suffrage, and the evidence is
overwhelming which goes to show that the Third Republic would be voted
into limbo to-morrow!

VIII

To say this is to say that the Third Republic does not exist in France
by the will of the French people; and this I believe to be absolutely
true. The Third Republic exists by virtue of the control which its
partisans have acquired of the administrative machinery of the
Government, or, in other words, by virtue of political corruption and
intimidation. So great has been the multiplication of functionaries
great and small under the Third Republic, that it is not easy to get at
an accurate estimate of their numbers. The best information I have been
able to obtain leads me to believe that, exclusive of the military and
naval forces, not less than two hundred thousand adult French citizens
now draw their subsistence from the public treasury. This represents a
population of at least a million of souls, so that we have nearly one in
thirty of the inhabitants of France subjected to a direct or indirect
pecuniary pressure from the central authorities at Paris. So openly is
this pressure exerted under the Third Republic, that the Government of
M. Carnot did not hesitate, during the Universal Exposition, and not
long before the Legislative Elections began, to bring up no fewer than
some thirteen thousand of the mayors of France to Paris at the public
expense. There they were entertained--still at the public expense--with
a sumptuous hospitality, which proves that, however orthodox the
Republican Atheism may be of M. Constans, the Minister of the Interior,
he has not yet struck the blessed St. Julian out of