I believe, the policy would soon become unmanageable.
The result would be, as I have tried to explain, that
the Assembly would be always changing its Ministry,
that having no reason to fear the penalty which that
change so often brings in England, they would be ready
to make it once a month. Caprice is the characteristic
vice of miscellaneous assemblies, and without some
check their selection would be unceasingly mutable.
This peculiar danger of the present Constitution of
France has however been prevented by its peculiar
circumstances. The Assembly have not been inclined
to remove M. Thiers, because in their lamentable present
position they could not replace M. Thiers. He
has a monopoly of the necessary reputation. It
is the Empire—the Empire which he always
opposed—that has done him this kindness.
For twenty years no great political reputation could
arise in France. The Emperor governed and no one
member could show a capacity for government.
M. Rouher, though of vast real ability, was in the
popular idea only the Emperor’s agent; and even
had it been otherwise, M. Rouher, the one great man
of Imperialism, could not have been selected as a
head of the Government, at a moment of the greatest
reaction against the Empire. Of the chiefs before
the twenty years’ silence, of the eminent men
known to be able to handle Parliaments and to govern
Parliaments, M. Thiers was the only one still physically
able to begin again to do so. The miracle is,
that at seventy-four even he should still be able.
As no other great chief of the Parliament regime existed,
M. Thiers is not only the best choice, but the only
choice. If he were taken away, it would be most
difficult to make any other choice, and that difficulty
keeps him where he is. At every crisis the Assembly
feels that after M. Thiers “the deluge,”
and he lives upon that feeling. A change of the
President, though legally simple, is in practice all
but impossible; because all know that such a change
might be a change, not only of the President, but
of much more too: that very probably it might
be a change of the polity—that it might
bring in a Monarchy or an Empire.
Lastly, by a natural consequence of the position,
M. Thiers does not govern as a Parliamentary Premier
governs. He is not, he boasts that he is not,
the head of a party. On the contrary, being the
one person essential to all parties, he selects Ministers
from all parties, he constructs a Cabinet in which
no one Minister agrees with any other in anything,
and with all the members of which he himself frequently
disagrees. The selection is quite in his hand.
Ordinarily a Parliamentary Premier cannot choose; he
is brought in by a party; he is maintained in office
by a party; and that party requires that as they aid
him, he shall aid them; that as they give him the
very best thing in the State, he shall give them the
next best things. But M. Thiers is under no such
restriction. He can choose as he likes, and does
choose. Neither in the selection of his Cabinet
nor in the management of the Chamber, is M. Thiers
guided as a similar person in common circumstances
would have to be guided. He is the exception
of a moment; he is not the example of a lasting condition.