boys in England to plead for any great outlay on girls, even when the moral and physical health of the nation is at stake. But what I do plead for is that a saving should be effected in one direction which would more than meet the need in the other. I do earnestly urge that men should listen to a consensus of thoughtful women on their own question, which I think I may say is unanimous in condemning the present barrack system of training for our orphan girls, from the honoured name of Mrs. Nassau Senior and that of Miss Florence Davenport Hill, down, I venture to say, to that of almost every woman who has thought at all upon the subject. If the thousand permanent girls in the London district schools alone were boarded out, taking £25 a child as the average expenditure (in Kensington* and Richmond they are paying £56 a child) and £11 as the average in boarding out, this alone would effect a saving of £14,000 in the public expenditure, and would go far to supply the additional industrial training for girls needed to work the Industrial Schools Act Amendment, 1880. If emigration were had recourse to as well, the saving would, be still greater. Our orphan and deserted girls would be depauperized and brought up in the natural and healthy conditions of the home and family which God has ordained as the proper sphere of a woman; and our neglected girls would be saved from the saddest and deepest degradation on God's redeemed earth; while the nation would be the better for respectable and capable wives and mothers, in lieu of the waste and unproductive material which breeds corruption and disease, and crime and death.

ELLICE HOPKINS.

* In Kensington this high rate is owing to the initial expense of starting the Banstead Cottage Homes.

CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND THOUGHT IN

FRANCE.

M.

THIERS once used a phrase often repeated since by the partisans of the Republic: "The Republic is that which divides us the least." But M. Thiers did not mean in 1849 to say that the Republic was the régime which then least divided Frenchmen. He meant to say that it was that which least divided the Conservative party, because that party was united in opposing it, but were not unanimous enough to create a Monarchy. Unhappily it seems that, in a sense contrary to that usually given to M. Thiers' words, the Republic has the fatal property of introducing infinite division among its own partisans.

Up to the formation of M. Gambetta's Ministry of the 14th of November, the Republican party no doubt failed to present an example of perfect union, but the immense majority of the party at least entertained feelings of fraternal harmony among themselves, and the different sections of the party grouped themselves on rational bases. The Ministry of Jules Ferry drew its support, both in the Chamber and in the country, from the moderate mass of the party, from that which was then called the Republican Left, to which was joined the wisest and most intelligent portion of the Gambettists, called the Republican Union. The most advanced of the Republican Union were more independent of the Ministry, but were not hostile to it; and the Extreme Left alone maintained an almost unvarying opposition. When M. Gambetta came into power by the nearly unanimous wish of the electors and the Republican deputies, one would have expected that the union of these groups of the majority would have grown closer, and that the Government would have had on its side the whole body of the Republican Left and the Republican Union. This is what would have happened if, as was at first expected, the Gambetta Ministry had in

cluded the most eminent men of the preceding Ministries—MM. Ferry, Léon Say, and De Freycinet. But this combination would have demanded a great deal of self-abnegation and conciliation on all sides; in a certain measure even the subordination of the personal views of Ministers to the superior interests of concord. This was not possible with a personality so powerful and absorbing as M. Gambetta's. He formed a Ministry representative less of his political group than of himself. It was composed of the personal friends of the Premier; largely of his colleagues on the staff of his paper, the République Française. Indeed, M. Gambetta appears to have sought in his colleagues not so much agreement in his views as fellowship in his habits. Thus M. Paul Bert, Minister of Public Instruction, was not meant, either by temperament or ideas, for a fellow-worker with M. Gambetta. M. Allain Targé was notoriously incompetent for the Ministry of Finance.

Not only was the Ministry of the 14th of November formed under the influence rather of personal than of political ties, but from the moment of the opening of the Chamber politics centred in a wholly personal question -the question of the scrutin de liste. Not that the question of the electoral system was not one of a very high degree of general political importance. Eminent thinkers, whose opinions I share, think it impossible, with the scrutin d'arrondissement, to obtain a homogeneous majority which would energetically support a ministry, and would be capable of subordinating local to national interests. But M. Gambetta had so identified himself and his cause with the scrutin de liste that his enemies were able, with some show of reason, to accuse him of seeking in that electoral system an engine for procuring a chamber personally devoted to him and pliable to his whims, thanks to the influence of his journal and of his committees, and to his profound acquaintance with electoral strategy. Il luck would have it that the scrutin de liste by itself represented to him the whole of his political programme. No one knew, and to this moment no one knows, exactly what were his ideas about the army, the magistracy, finance, economic reform, free trade, or foreign policy. All that was known was that he wished for the scrutin de liste, and that he was ready to sacrifice everything to it. In fact, he had been inimical to the revision of the Constitution and the remodelling of the Senate, while he yet hoped that the Senate would vote for the scrutin de liste; but because the Senate rejected it he brusquely changed his view and undertook a campaign for revision.

Many accessory causes hastened the fall of the Gambetta Ministry : for instance, the disorganization of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, for which M. Gambetta was personally and nominally responsible; unfortunate appointments, such as that of M. de Chadordy as Ambassador to St. Petersburg, and of M. J. J. Weiss as Secretary for Foreign Affairs; the incoherence and imprudence of the financial plans of M. Allain Targé, which rapidly brought down the public funds; the blundering agitation

of M. Gougeard, the Minister of Marine; an underhand opposition emanating from the Elysée, and very cleverly conducted by M. Wilson, the son-in-law of M. Grévy; the inexperience, the dry and arbitrary manners of most of the Ministers; the want of good breeding of one or two of them. But however powerful may have been the secondary causes of M. Gambetta's fall, the real one was that the Chamber feared he would prove a too imperious master. No one ever seriously feared that he would make himself dictator. Spiteful pamphleteers might say it, but nobody ever believed it. Still, it was felt that his ideal was that of a very strong and practically uncontrolled Executive, served by a very docile Chamber. Since M. Gambetta's political programme was vague, and he himself not universally sympathetic, there was naturally found in the Chamber a majority to refuse him those means of government which he demanded; and he fell. know that he fell on a vote relative to the question of the revision of the Constitution, but that was only an accident of Parliamentary tactics. The truth is that M. Gambetta fell before the personal hostility of the majority of the deputies. The fact that the event of the 26th of January is called, not the fall of the Gambetta Ministry, but the fall of M. Gambetta, shows how purely personal the matter was.

This fall of M. Gambetta has been held to have many different significations, and indeed was capable of many different interpretations. It is certain that so rapid a fall was in many respects a calamity. M. Gambetta, with the immense prestige which surrounded him, was a power, a force, which it was as well to have in reserve; and it was deplorable to see it so quickly squandered. M. Gambetta has many great qualities as a politician: a fund of varied information, a remarkable gift of assimilation, quick insight, prompt decision, vigour in action, and, above all, a certain breadth and generosity and fire of patriotism which might at certain moments, as in 1870, make him the one man of France, and not the mere head of a party. It is very true, also, that many shabby feelings and pitiful interests contributed to overthrow him; that in a Chamber largely composed of mediocre men there was envy and jealousy of him, such envy as is the fatal malady of all democracies; that the public which had been infatuated with him delighted in making fun of him, scoffing at him, and pulling in pieces the idol it had set up, like a child amusing itself by breaking the plaything it has long desired. But M. Gambetta owed his fall, nevertheless, to himself. He acted and spoke too much as master; he showed too openly his contempt for the Chamber, which he considered as useful only to vote for whatever was presented to it; above all, he wanted a system of government which, while it had the appearance and name of a Republic, would really have been fatal to all liberty. M. Gambetta wished for an Executive which should be strong and free in all its acts, emancipated from that insupportable meddling of the deputies and senators which habitually paralyses ministerial activity, because it

interferes with all the details of the administration. In all this he was right; but this free and powerful action of the Executive is only tolerable when the citizens enjoy a very great amount of individual and social liberty, when associations, communes, departments are largely autonomous-in a word, when the power of the Executive is confined to the general interests of the country as a whole. Unfortunately, M. Gambetta believes in centralization in its extremest form. His conception of government is that of Bonaparte, First Consul. He would have it that at every step and at every point of the administration, governmental and ministerial action should make itself directly felt. Like Bonaparte, he would have his hand not only on the army but on the whole of the Executive, the magistracy, the educational bodies, the clergy. No doubt it is not as a matter of personal domination that he desires all this, but in order to ensure the triumph of republican ideas. Under one name or another, it would always be a reign of authority from above. People felt it, and kicked. So long as France continues to be centralized as at present, weakness in the central power is almost a condition precedent of liberty. As soon as that power becomes strong, liberty will be in chains. If a strong central power is desired in conjunction with a reign of public liberty, a diminution of administrative centralization must be resolved upon.

If the Freycinet-Say-Ferry Ministry had been able to occupy this ground, and to oppose principles of liberty and of decentralization to the centralizing and domineering ideas which the Gambetta Ministry to a certain degree represented, the purely personal question which was the cause of M. Gambetta's fall might possibly have been transformed into a question of principle. Unfortunately, it is not certain that the present Ministry has any very definite programme on this head, and at all events it would not have found a majority in the Chamber to support it. The majority which has supported the Ministry of M. de Freycinet since the 28th of January is altogether factitious, formed out of the most incongruous elements, united solely by a personal passion-the fear of seeing M. Gambetta return to political life, antipathy to M. Gambetta. This majority is composed of the Democratic Union, which is the old Republican Left under another name, of part of the Radical Left, and of part of the Extreme Left. The Democratic Union, which represents the most moderate portion of the Republican party de Left Centre counting ery four or five mom'ers', is the only group which by its tendency and prouse shade of epivion is in true sccord with the Ministry, but it is far from having a definite liberal and decentralizing programme. It eersists of frem 110 to 120 members. The Republican Union, the ging nearest to the Democratic Union, is half formed of Gambettists. A verts a number of its members often rete with the Ministry; but gonấy thy me it their suppert and abstain from voting, thus working it withem wishing to myset in because they know that they would not fill is place. They namber frem 100 to 1800 of which a