the country" (March 1). These rather exaggerated
charges (against which Napoleon III. protested from his place of exile,
Chislehurst) were natural in the then deplorable condition of France.
What is surprising and needs a brief explanation here, is the fact that
a monarchical Assembly should have allowed the Republic to be founded.

This paradoxical result sprang from several causes, some of them of a
general nature, others due to party considerations, while the personal
influence of one man perhaps turned the balance at this crisis in the
history of France. We will consider them in the order here named.

Stating the matter broadly, we may say that the present Assembly was not
competent to decide on the future constitution of France; and that vague
but powerful instinct, which guides representative bodies in such cases,
told against any avowedly partisan effort in that direction. The
deputies were fully aware that they were elected to decide the urgent
question of peace or war, either to rescue France from her long agony,
or to pledge the last drops of her life-blood in an affair of honour.
By an instinct of self-preservation, the electors, especially in the
country districts, turned to the men of property and local influence as
those who were most likely to save them from the frothy followers of
Gambetta. Accordingly, local magnates were preferred to the barristers
and pressmen, whose oratorical and literary gifts usually carry the day
in France; and more than 200 noblemen were elected. They were chosen not
on account of their nobility and royalism, but because they were certain
to vote against the _fou furieux_.

Then, too, the Royalists knew very well that time would be required to
accustom France to the idea of a King, and to adjust the keen rivalries
between the older and the younger branches of the Bourbon House.
Furthermore, they were anxious that the odium of signing a disastrous
peace should fall on the young Republic, not on the monarch of the
future. Just as the great Napoleon in 1814 was undoubtedly glad that the
giving up of Belgium and the Rhine boundary should devolve on his
successor, Louis XVIII., and counted on that as one of the causes
undermining the restored monarchy, so now the Royalists intended to
leave the disagreeable duty of ceding the eastern districts of France to
the Republicans who had so persistently prolonged the struggle. The
clamour of no small section of the Republican party for war