Republic will come to the bottom I
believe, if not of the purse, certainly of the patience, of the French
people.

It is already admitted on all hands that so slight a thing as the
reappearance of General Boulanger at Paris on September 21, 1889, would
have completely reversed the general result of the elections of the next
day. The birthday of the First Republic would have been celebrated by
the funeral of the Third. The failure of General Boulanger then to
reappear may have made an end of General Boulanger, but it certainly did
not establish the Republic.

On the contrary, here as we see is the Minister of the Interior, who
knows the situation better than any of his colleagues, invalidating
election after election in the Chamber of Deputies, and beginning the
work of financial reform by demanding an enormous Secret Service Fund to
protect the Republic against conspirators!

Sooner or later this tragi-comedy must end. It concerns Europe and the
world that it should end sooner rather than later, and that it should
end with a pacific restoration of France to her proper place in the
family of European States. Surely the most imperious necessity of the
immediate future in Europe is a general disarmament. No French Republic
can possibly propose or accept such a disarmament. No French Empire even
could easily propose or accept such a disarmament. For the Republic and
the Empire are jointly though not equally responsible for the
humiliations and the disasters of the great Franco-German War. The
historic French monarchy, restored through a revision of the existing
Constitution by the deliberate will of the French people, might propose
such a disarmament with a moral certainty that it would be accepted.
Would not England necessarily stand by France in such a proposal? And is
it not clear that the refusal of Central Europe to accept such a
disarmament so proposed and supported would make that alliance with the
Russian Empire, which is impossible to a French republic, both easy and
natural with a French monarchy?

I should have visited France to small purpose if I could suppose that
such considerations as this will much affect the masses of the French
people. Their present Minister of Public Instruction, M. Fallieres, gave
his measure of their average enlightenment on such points when he
actually called upon the electors of the Lot-et-Garonne in September to
vote against M. Cornelis Henry de Witt because a monarchical restor