the power of hearing the reasons of others, of comparing them quietly with one’s own reasons, and then being guided by the result.  But a French Assembly is not easy to reason with.  Every assembly is divided into parties and into sections of parties, and in France each party, almost every section of a party, begins not to clamour but to scream, and to scream as only Frenchmen can, as soon as it hears anything which it particularly dislikes.  With an Assembly in this temper, real discussion is impossible, and Parliamentary government is impossible too, because the Parliament can neither choose men nor measures.  The French assemblies under the Restored Monarchy seem to have been quieter, probably because being elected from a limited constituency they did not contain so many sections of opinion; they had fewer irritants and fewer species of irritability.  But the assemblies of the ’48 Republic were disorderly in the extreme.  I saw the last myself, and can certify that steady discussion upon a critical point was not possible in it.  There was not an audience willing to hear.  The Assembly now sitting at Versailles is undoubtedly also, at times, most tumultuous, and a Parliamentary government in which it governs must be under a peculiar difficulty, because as a sovereign it is unstable, capricious, and unruly.

The difficulty is the greater because there is no check, or little, from the French nation upon the Assembly.  The French, as a nation, do not care for or appreciate Parliamentary government.  I have endeavoured to explain how difficult it is for inexperienced mankind to take to such a government; how much more natural, that is, how much more easy to uneducated men is loyalty to a monarch.  A nation which does not expect good from a Parliament, cannot check or punish a Parliament.  France expects, I fear, too little from her Parliaments ever to get what she ought.  Now that the suffrage is universal, the average intellect and the average culture of the constituent bodies are excessively low; and even such mind and culture as there is has long been enslaved to authority; the French peasant cares more for standing well with his present prefet than for anything else whatever; he is far too ignorant to check and watch his Parliament, and far too timid to think of doing either if the executive authority nearest to him does not like it.  The experiment of a strictly Parliamentary Republic—­of a Republic where the Parliament appoints the executive—­is being tried in France at an extreme disadvantage, because in France a Parliament is unusually likely to be bad, and unusually likely also to be free enough to show its badness.  Secondly, the present polity of France is not a copy of the whole effective part of the British Constitution, but only a part of it.  By our Constitution nominally the Queen, but really the Prime Minister, has the power of dissolving the Assembly.  But M. Thiers has no such power; and therefore, under ordinary circumstances,