, was constituted on that day--the
anniversary, by the way, oddly enough, of the decapitation of Charles I.
of England at Whitehall.

That is the date, not 'centennial,' but 'decennial,' which ought to have
been celebrated in 1889 by the Third French Republic. In his first
Message, February 7, 1879, M. Grevy formally said: 'I will never resist
the national will expressed by its constitutional organs.' From that
moment the parliamentary majority became the Government of France.

Something very like this French parliamentary revolution of 1879 to
which France is indebted for the Third Republic as it exists to-day, was
attempted in the United States about ten years before.

In both instances the intent of the parliamentary revolutionists was to
take the life of a Constitution without modifying its forms. The failure
of the American is not less instructive than the success of the French
parliamentary revolution, and as all my readers, perhaps, are not as
familiar with American political history as with some other topics, I
hope I may be pardoned for briefly pointing this out.

Upon the assassination of President Lincoln in April 1865 the
Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, became President. He was a Southern man,
and as one of the Senators from the Southern State of Tennessee he had
refused to go with his State in her secession from the Union. To this he
owed his association on the Presidential ticket with Mr. Lincoln at the
election in 1864. He was no more and no less opposed to slavery in the
abstract than President Lincoln, of whom it is well known that he
regarded his own now famous proclamation of 1863 freeing the slaves in
the seceded States, as an illegal concession to the Anti-Slavery feeling
of the North and of Europe, and that he spoke of it with undisguised
contempt, as a 'Pope's bull against the comet.' Like Mr. Lincoln, Andrew
Johnson was devoted to the Union, but he was a Constitutional Democrat
in his political opinions, and the Civil War having ended in the defeat
of the Confederacy, he gradually settled down to his constitutional
duty, as President of the United States, towards the States which had
formed the Confederacy. This earned for him the bitter hostility of the
then dominant majority in both Houses of Congress, led by a man of
unbridled passions and of extraordinary energy, Thaddeus Stevens, a
representative from Pennsylvania, a sort of American Couthon, infirm of
body but all compact of will. It was