ill wear--I don't know what!

There was as much--and as little--reason thus to depict the England of
the seventeenth, as there is thus to depict the France of the nineteenth
century.

If there had ever been, a hundred years ago, such a thing as a French
Republic, founded, as the American Republic of 1787 was founded, by the
deliberate will of the people, and offering them a reasonable prospect
of maintaining liberty and law, that Republic would exist to-day. That
we are watching the desperate effort of a centralised parliamentary
despotism at Paris in the year 1890 to maintain a 'Third Republic' is
conclusive proof that this was not the case.

France--the French people, that is--- had no more to do with the
overthrow of the monarchy of Louis XVI., with the fall of the monarchy
of Charles X., with the collapse of the monarchy of July, or with the
abolition of the Second Empire, than with the abdication of Napoleon I.
at Fontainebleau.

Not one of these catastrophes was provoked by France or the French
people; not one of them was ever submitted by its authors to the French
people for approval.

Only two French governments during the past century can be accurately
said to have been definitely branded and condemned as failures by the
deliberate voice of the French people. One of these was the First
Republic, which after going through a series of convulsions equally
grotesque and ghastly, was swept into oblivion by an overwhelming vote
of the French people in response to the appeal of the first Napoleon.
The other was the Second Republic, which was put upon trial by the Third
Napoleon on December 10, 1851, and condemned to immediate extinction by
a vote of 7,439,219 to 640,737. I am at a loss to see how it is possible
to deduce from these simple facts of French history the conclusion that
the French people are, and for a century have been, madly bent upon
getting a Republic established in France, unless, indeed, I am to
suppose that the French Republicans proceed upon the principle said to
be justified by the experience of countries in which the standard of
mercantile morality is not absolutely puritanical--that three successive
bankruptcies will enable a really clever man to retire from business
with a handsome fortune!

If it were possible, as happily it is impossible, that the American
people could be afflicted with a single year of such a Republic as that
which now exists in France, we would rid ourselves of it, i