may be found for the disorders of the French democracy, the temporary effect of the democratic idea upon the national fabric was, undoubtedly, a rending of the roots of their national stability and good feeling.  The successive revolutionary explosions, which have constituted so much of French history since 1789, have made France the victim of what sometimes seem to be mutually exclusive conceptions of French national well-being.  The democratic radicals are “intransigeant.”  The party of tradition and authority is “ultramontane.”  The majority of moderate and sensible people are usually in control; but their control is unstable.  The shadow of the Terror and the Commune hangs over every serious crisis in French politics.  The radicals jump to the belief that the interests and rights of the people have been betrayed and that the traitors should be exterminated.  Good Frenchmen suffer during those crises from an obsession of suspicion and fear.  Their mutual loyalty, their sense of fair play, and their natural kindliness are all submerged under a tyranny of desperate apprehension.  The social bond is unloosed, and the prudent bourgeois thinks only of the preservation of person and property.

This aspect of the French democracy can, however, easily be over-emphasized and usually is over-emphasized by foreigners.  It is undoubtedly a living element in the composition of the contemporary France; but it was less powerful at the time of the Commune than at the time of the Terror, and is less powerful to-day than it was in 1871.  French political history in the nineteenth century is not to be regarded as a succession of meaningless revolutions, born of a spirit of reckless and factious insubordination, but as the route whereby a people, inexperienced in self-government, have been gradually traveling towards the kind of self-government best fitted to their needs.  It is entirely possible that the existing Republic, modified perhaps for the purpose of obtaining a more independent and a more vigorous executive authority, may in the course of time give France the needed political and social stability.  That form of government which was adopted at the time, because it divided Frenchmen the least, may become the form of government which unites Frenchmen by the strongest ties.  Bismarck’s misunderstanding of the French national character and political needs was well betrayed when he favored a Republic rather than a Legitimist monarchy in France, because a French Republic would, in his opinion, necessarily keep France a weak and divided neighbor.  The Republic has kept France divided, but it has been less divided than it would have been under any monarchical government.  It has successfully weathered a number of very grave domestic crises; and its perpetuity will probably depend primarily upon its ability to secure and advance by practical means the international standing of France.  The Republic has been obliged to meet a foreign peril more prolonged and more dangerous than that which