It is already admitted on all hands that so slight a thing as the reappearance of General Boulanger at Paris on September 21, 1889, would have completely reversed the general result of the elections of the next day. The birthday of the First Republic would have been celebrated by the funeral of the Third. The failure of General Boulanger then to reappear may have made an end of General Boulanger, but it certainly did not establish the Republic.
On the contrary, here as we see is the Minister of the Interior, who knows the situation better than any of his colleagues, invalidating election after election in the Chamber of Deputies, and beginning the work of financial reform by demanding an enormous Secret Service Fund to protect the Republic against conspirators!
Sooner or later this tragi-comedy must end. It concerns Europe and the world that it should end sooner rather than later, and that it should end with a pacific restoration of France to her proper place in the family of European States. Surely the most imperious necessity of the immediate future in Europe is a general disarmament. No French Republic can possibly propose or accept such a disarmament. No French Empire even could easily propose or accept such a disarmament. For the Republic and the Empire are jointly though not equally responsible for the humiliations and the disasters of the great Franco-German War. The historic French monarchy, restored through a revision of the existing Constitution by the deliberate will of the French people, might propose such a disarmament with a moral certainty that it would be accepted. Would not England necessarily stand by France in such a proposal? And is it not clear that the refusal of Central Europe to accept such a disarmament so proposed and supported would make that alliance with the Russian Empire, which is impossible to a French republic, both easy and natural with a French monarchy?
I should have visited France to small purpose if I could suppose that such considerations as this will much affect the masses of the French people. Their present Minister of Public Instruction, M. Fallières, gave his measure of their average enlightenment on such points when he actually called upon the electors of the Lot-et-Garonne in September to vote against M. Cornelis Henry de Witt because a monarchical restoration would 'be followed by a revival of the _droits des Seigneurs_, and--by a Cossack invasion!'