interposed in our instructive colloquy. Was it not so, M. Blanqui?

BLAN. It was. Traitor is his true description. And I did not call things and persons by their right names for seventy years on earth to drop the habit

now.

GAM. I have already told you, M. Blanqui, that I consider you a privileged person. Even your shadowy ideals were not more baseless than are your reproaches, but your fidelity to the one has fairly earned you license for the other. Yet, alas for France! who has suffered more from the revolutionist than the reactionary-more from the most devoted of her friends than from the most rancorous of her enemies.

DE M. What a convenient abstraction is the name of one's country! Where among reactionaries--meaning, I suppose, the friends of strong government-do you find your "enemies of France"? No one, I dare swear, could have been a more ardent lover of France than I was. I adored her as the favourite alike of Bacchus and Cytherea, the birthplace of the choicest wine, the home of the most fascinating, if not the prettiest, women that the earth produces. As to Frenchmen, indeed, that is another matter. But Jacques Bonhomme is not a bad fellow if he is properly managed. I like him, in fact, a little better, if I despise him a little more than I do the rest of the foolish race to which he belongs. The animal has pace and spirit and showy action, along with his devil of a temper. He only needs a rider who understands him, who does not fear him, and who will not humour him to the point of weakness. And while I lived he had it.

GAM. Your estimate of your own powers seems a highly

flattering one, M. de Morny.

DE M. Pooh! it is the facts that flatter me. Has any one been able to sit him since? If so, how comes it that the political course is dotted with the discomfited jockeys who have made the attempt? As for you, M. Gambetta, you who were lifted into the saddle amid the cheers of the crowd, what sort of business did you make of it? Why, you began by admitting that you could not ride the brute without a new patent curb of your own invention, and when you found that that was not to be had, you dismounted after the first canter to escape being thrown.

BLAN. True, M. de Morny! Quite true! It was a moral unhorsement of the most dishonouring kind.

DE M. You will now, perhaps, find it less difficult, dear M. Gambetta, to comprehend the unpleasant terms of my greeting. I told you that you had joined us too soon, perhaps, for your ambition, but not too soon for your fame : and surely I was right. As it was, you were enabled to leave behind you the tradition of a great capacity which had never been fully tested, and you will live in history on the credit of hypothetical achievements which were really beyond your powers.

GAM. Your taunts, Monsieur, come easily to you, and no wonder. Death is your confederate in silencing their confutation.

DE M. Malign him not, cher confrère ! Believe me, he was your truest friend. Can you look at the France of to-day and doubt it? I cannot. I would not, however, be unjust to you; I allow your infinite superiority to the

puppets whom you manipulated in life, and whose wires have been spasmodically jerking of themselves ever since you departed. But you surely cannot believe that their failure is wholly due to themselves. Candidly, now, do you really think that if you yourself had lasted another twenty years you could have enabled your precious. Republic to last as long? Did you even think it strong or flourishing, nay, reasonably secure at the hour of your departure?

GAM. My position between you, Messieurs, is certainly an unfortunate one. Opposed as you are, I might have thought that whenever I offend the one I should at least conciliate the other. But while one denounces my opportunism as treachery, the other, it seems, will allow it no merit as policy. No, M. de Morny, I did not think the Republic either strong or flourishing, or even secure when my hour came to be called away. Had I thought it so, I might have pursued a course which would not have exposed me as an Opportunist to the taunts of M. Blanqui.

BLAN. I should equally have denounced you.

GAM. That I doubt not, good apostle of intolerance; but it would have been under a different name. My ideal of a Republic would never, I fear, have been fortunate enough to coincide with yours. But as it was I never had the time or chance to realize my own ideal. I was forced to submit-or rather my very opportunism consisted in submitting—to a consciously imperfect realization of it, in order to educate the masses of my countrymen to accept it one day in a more perfect form.

DE M. Ah, the old story! Phrase-makers and formulists,

the whole crew of you! Excuse my frankness, M. Gambetta, but this talk of yours appears to me to be the merest jargon of the tribune and the lecture-room. Whom in France were you "educating," and in what? Your endeavour was to found a Conservative Republic, and you claim, I suppose, to have been educating the peasantry to accept its Republican form, and the workmen of the towns to acquiesce in its Conservative complexion?

GAM. I do; and what is more I claim to have completely succeeded in the first half of my task already.

DE M. Blague! The one class needed no education from you, and the other would never have learnt your lesson. The peasantry will accept any régime that shows itself capable of lasting for a couple of years, and which promises to continue. Strength and stability, or rather the appearance of the strong and stable is all they crave, whether it presents itself to them under the name of Republic, Monarchy, or Empire. As for the workmen, you were no more educating them into Conservatism by your policy than the hunted Russian traveller who flings his children to the pursuing pack is educating wolves for domesticity. The whole of your later career was a continuous flight before the Reds, who bolted at a mouthful every sop to anarchy which you threw out to them, and still pressed on.

GAM. It is the common delusion of the Reactionary to suppose that every ruler is at heart a reactionary himself -that he shares his own ignoble fears of the people and thinks of nothing but how to purchase their continued favour by the same vulgar expedients. But I, Monsieur,

knew how to resist the people as well as how to humour them.

DE M. Yes to resist them in trifles in order that surrender in greater matters might wear an air of independence. For in what policy of the slightest importance did you dare to oppose them? Come, my good M.

Gambetta, speak frankly; you are among friends, or, what is the same thing, if not better perhaps, opponents who have no power to harm you. L'ennemi c'est le cléricalisme. Was that precious mot the free and unforced expression of your own opinion? And was it out of Christian charity pure and unqualified that you emptied New Caledonia, and invited home again the survivors of that party with whom you had your little difference in the streets of Paris?

GAM. The Church was infect with Imperialism and Legitimism from end to end. ·

DE M. Legitimism you could have laughed at; and if the sympathies of the Church were with Imperialism so much the more imperative was your need of winning her to your side. Besides, how came she to be Imperialist? Do you suppose that there is any natural affinity between a priest and a Bonaparte? You know that there can be none. But the temporal friendship of Rome is to be had by any ruler who will guarantee to her her spiritual dominion, and both Bonapartes were wise enough to see that it is better to have her for a friend than a foe. When, then, the founder of a Conservative republic declares war against the most powerful Conservative organization in the country I must regard him either as incompetent in the