the opening of the trial. Of these, three were excused on the ground of age and infirmity; one was exempted as a servant of the Crown; and two were challenged by the counsel for the defence. Thus the exact number required was left, and the trial proceeded. The last few days of the year were occupied with the AttorneyGeneral's statement of the case for the Crown. FOREIGN HISTORY. CHAPTER I. FRANCE AND ITALY. I. FRANCE. The De Freycinet Ministry-The Unauthorised Orders-The General Amnesty-The fall of M. de Freycinet-The Execution of the Decrees-The Ferry Cabinet-Foreign Affairs-The Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce. THE student of modern French politics cannot fail to be struck with the fact that the leading men of all parties-with one notable exception--are strangely wanting in that force of character and moral power, which rarely accompanies, it is true, the most brilliant intellectual gifts, which is not always an indication of any great elevation of nature, but which is absolutely necessary to inspire the confidence or obtain the obedience of other men. M. Gambetta is eloquent, but his eloquence is not the secret of his strength; his eloquence is but a powerful tool which renders him good service in the work on which he has been for the last ten years engaged. He has, indeed, had not only his party, but also his country, to educate, and the difficulties of the parliamentary situation at the beginning of 1880 arose chiefly from the fact that the country as a whole had been learning its lessons rather quicker than its representatives, either in the Senate or in the Chamber. The Waddington Cabinet of January 1879, which was composed almost entirely of members of the Left Centre, was not, even at the very moment of its formation, abreast of public opinion in the country. For a while it commanded, however, the support of a parliamentary majority expectant of the reforms to which it had pledged itself, but as the months passed without any attempt being made on the part of Government to fulfil its undertakings, the Republican Left was encouraged by the more pronounced attitude of the constituencies to insist that the reforms which had been promised by M. Waddington and his colleagues should be carried out, and carried out not only in the letter but in the spirit. K Unfortunately, whilst the Republican Left had advanced a step, the Government had remained stationary, and was so far from being prepared to redeem the pledges which it had given that the Minister of Justice, M. Le Royer, retired sooner than touch the magistracy, and, when M. Waddington's attention was persistently called to the necessity of making provisions in the Foreign Office for something like honest service of the existing institutions, he also threw up his portfolio. M. de Freycinet, who succeeded M. Waddington as Premier on December 26, 1879, modified the Cabinet by taking in several members of the Republican Left-men who were ready to answer to the special demands of the moment, but who were hardly more likely than himself to be of good counsel should any unforeseen emergency arise to tax their powers of discernment and foresight. The Extreme Left remained, of course, unsatisfied, and held themselves ready, by a policy of coalition with the Right, to vex and embarrass the Government whenever this could be done with safety to themselves, and they showed their temper as soon as the session opened by abstaining or voting against the re-election of Gambetta as President of the Chamber (by 259 out of 308 votes) on January 13, 1880. Three days later (January 16) M. de Freycinet made his public statement of the Ministerial programme. declared that the Senate should be pressed to vote the laws on public instruction which had been agreed to by the Chamber in the previous July; that the magistracy should be reorganised; that the administration should be reformed; that Bills should be introduced regulating the right of association, the liberty of the press, and other minor matters which urgently demanded legislation. There was, indeed, very little difference between the declaration of M. de Freycinet and that which had been made by M. Dufaure on January 10, 1879-the reform of the magistracy, of the public services, and of public instruction formed the main points of both, and critics of all shades of opinion were naturally inclined to protest :- Ce n'est pas la peine, assurément, But the pledges given by M. Dufaure had not been kept, whereas it was now understood that no trifling would be allowed. Considerable prefectorial changes were immediately gazetted (January 14), accompanied by an even longer list of those effected in the magistracy; the Judges of course could not be touched, but men holding subordinate posts, and who had shown marked hostility to the Republic in the discharge of their duties, were pensioned off or dismissed the service in large numbers. Bills embodying all the reforms which had been declared urgent were also introduced without loss of time, and as the only questions on which the great body of the Left-made up of the pure Left and the Republican union-were seriously at variance seemed to be questions of degree rather than of principle, an attempt was made to bring about the fusion of these two groups so as to afford the Cabinet the support of a certain majority. This attempt, however, fell through, and the Cabinet remained exposed not only to the surprises which might be prepared for them by the unnatural alliance of the Right with the Extreme Left, but also to the accidents which might arise from any division taking place between the two principal groups of their party. Occasionally, too, the Left Centre -like Dufaure's group in the Senate-would further complicate matters by voting with the Conservatives, and it was by a combination of this nature that M. Léon Say, the ex-Minister of Finance— whose conduct in the matter of "conversion" was still regarded by many with suspicion-obtained the Presidentship of the Finance Committee of the Upper House on January 29. His successor, M. Magnin, had been instantly interrogated (January 18) as to the intentions of the Government in respect of the same vexed question of the conversion of the Five per Cents. ; he at once declared that no explanation or hint would be given on the subject either then or at any future time, and the order of the day which he demanded was promptly voted by a majority of nearly a hundred. Two days later his colleagues, M. Cazot and M. Ferry, brought in their respective Bills for the reform of the magistracy and for that of primary education. On the same day the House agreed to the Bill dealing with girls' secondary education; and on the 23rd the Senate began the discussion of the proposed reconstitution of the Council of Superior Education, in the course of which the Right was enabled to carry an amendment against the Government by the aid of their friends in the Left Centre. In spite of the same combination the Cabinet succeeded in carrying on February 5 the election of Professor Broca to the life senatorship vacant by the death of M. de Montalivet, an election which was regarded as important because it secured a vote in favour of the Bill on Higher Education which would shortly come before the Senate, and some hopes began to be entertained that the celebrated Clause 7, embodying the proposal to take away the right of teaching from all those who belonged to unauthorised congregations, would be accepted as a compromise. The agitation which for many months past had been actively carried on throughout the country against this clause, if it showed that a large section. of the community were violently opposed to it, had also brought to light the indisputable fact that there was a deep and widespread feeling in its favour. On this point, at least, the majority of the Chamber was to the full as advanced as the constituencies, but the Senate was to a great extent without the circle of the influences which largely affected the deputies of the Lower House. On February 24, the day on which M. Lemoinne was elected Senator, the Senate proceeded to discuss the Bill. Clauses 1 to 6 were passed without difficulty, and on March 4 M. Bérenger opened the debate on Clause 7 with an impassioned pleading which he ended with the words: "I stand here, not as the advocate of the Jesuits, but as the defender of the cause of freedom." M. Bérenger divided the honours of the first day with M. Buffet, who devoted himself to the task of producing a very skilful rhetorical confusion between what was meant by the words Clericalism and Catholicism; but on the 5th M. Bertauld intervened in reply with great effect from a strictly legal point of view; and after a stormy debate-lasting into the following week--at the close of which M. Ferry himself spoke at great length on the political aspect of the question, the division was taken and the clause rejected by 148 to 129. The votes of the Right had been strengthened by the adhesion of Jules Simon, of Dufaure and Laboulaye, whose example was followed by twenty-six moderate Republicans, and the honourable names of Littré and Fourichon were to be counted amongst the seven intentional abstentions. There was not the slightest chance that the Senate would reverse this decision at a later stage of the Bill, and all the world awaited with the greatest anxiety the further action of the Cabinet. The composition of the majority by which the clause had been defeated in the Senate furnished the means of analysing the exact nature and extent of the opposition in the country. It consisted, as has been seen, of the Right-that is to say, of the three dynastic groups, Legitimists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists, strengthened by a handful of Conservatives or moderate Republicans—and one or two Liberal doctrinaires, who, charmed by M. Bérenger's appeal to the name of liberty, gave occasion to their friends to repeat Madame Roland's protest, "Ah! Liberté, Liberté, comme on t'a jouée!" It was now perfectly clear to those in power that the class which protested against Clause 7 had comparatively small support in the country, and that support almost wholly confined to the enemies of the existing institutions, whilst, on the other hand, it became daily more evident that the whole of the working and thriving population, the thews and sinews of commercial France, the class which formed the foundations of the modern power, would not be satisfied unless measures were at once taken to regulate the whole question. The communications received from heads of electoral committees, who have now begun to exercise great influence in political life, made it clear that Ministers were face to face with a political necessity which no longer left room for the discussion of the question on the grounds of theoretical desirability, and it may be as well here briefly to mention the principal causes which had produced this state of opinion. The French Republican majority argue that the members of the religious orders have long enjoyed in France all the privileges of citizens, together with complete exemption from their responsibilities. The people see with anger that civilians are torn from their homes and from the steady exercise of their peaceful industries to perform their term of forced military service, whilst thousands of able-bodied men are exempted without question. The whole of France is covered with a network of |