y the
people to consider what the laws shall be, and to adjust the public
taxation to the necessities of the public service. The result
necessarily is that the majority of the French Chamber of Deputies under
the Third Republic has visibly become an irresponsible oligarchy of a
kind most dangerous to liberty and the public weal.

By calling themselves, as they do, the 'party of the appeal to the
people,' the French Imperialists show their doubtless well-founded
conviction that the masses of the French people are essentially
monarchical in their ideas as to the best tenure by which the Executive
authority can be held. To believe this, is to believe that the masses of
the French people are essentially lovers of order, not of disorder; that
they instinctively put the executive above the legislative function in
their conceptions of a political hierarchy, and therefore that they are
essentially fitted for self-government. In this I am sure the
Imperialists are right. But, unfortunately for them, the centralised
administrative machinery of government in France by which the French
people are now and have for a century past been prevented from governing
themselves, though not indeed of Imperial origin, was so developed and
perfected by the genius of the first Napoleon as to become identified in
a sense with the Napoleonic dynasty.

It is a great misfortune of the French people that all great changes in
their political system, no matter how promoted or in what spirit, must
be wrought out within the vicious circle of this centralized
administrative machinery. The initiative in liberating France from this
centralized administrative machinery can only come from within the
vicious circle itself. An independent Executive of France made Chief of
the State by the popular will, and protected, as the Executive of Great
Britain is protected, in the interest of liberty and of the people, by
the hereditary principle, might take this initiative and begin the great
work of so distributing throughout France the administrative
responsibilities and powers now concentrated at Paris as to make the
French people for the first time really their own masters.

Certainly no executive holding power by any tenure less independent and
secure can ever effect this. That a real basis exists upon which this
great work might be carried out in the local life, traditions, ideas and
sympathies by which the widely different populations of what used to be
known