roy-Beaulieu
were declared invalid, the informal votes cast for M. Menard-Dorian were
declared good and valid, and M. Menard-Dorian was proclaimed to have
been elected. The Committee of the Chamber reported against the seating
of M. Menard-Dorian, and tried to have this report accepted, but as I
write the Chamber has not accepted it, and the odds are that M.
Leroy-Beaulieu, who, though a Moderate Republican, has made himself
obnoxious to the Government by telling the truth about the financial
condition of France, will be kept out of the seat which it is tolerably
plain that he was elected to fill.

It is difficult for an Englishman, even for an American, to understand
the cynical coolness with which things of this sort are done in the
French Republic of the present time, and not very easy to understand the
apathetic way in which, when done, they are accepted by the French
public. There seems to be little doubt that in England of late years
ballot-boxes have been 'stuffed' only by the stupidity of the voters,
and not by the ingenious rascality of the political managers. I wish I
could with an easy conscience say the same thing of my own country. But
even in the United States deliberate tampering with the returns of a
political election has not, I think, been practised since the evil days
of Reconstruction at the South with the calm disregard of appearances
shown by the Government managers during the legislative contest of this
year, 1889, in France; and certainly there has been nothing known in the
Congress of the United States, since the days of Reconstruction, at all
comparable with the systematic invalidation by the majority in the
French Chamber of the elections of troublesome members since it
assembled on November 12. In the cases of General Boulanger and of M.
Naquet, the latter of whom resigned his seat in the Senate to stand as a
Boulangist candidate for the Chamber, this invalidation was carried out
openly as a party measure and precisely in the spirit of the famous or
infamous resolution which Robespierre made the 'Section of the Pikes'
adopt, to the effect that the electors of Paris must be protected
against their own incapacity to choose 'true patriots' by having the
'true patriots' chosen for them. If this be one of the 'principles of
1789,' it must be admitted that the Third Republic is consistently and
courageously acting upon it. It has undoubted advantages, but it has a
tendency, perhaps, to put in quest