M. Ferry has succeeded in his little plot. The Senate,
as he expected, rejected M. Floquet's amendment that all Senators should be elected by Departmental Household Suffrage, though by an unexpectedly narrow majority, many Senators apparently thinking that the English suffrage must be Conservative. The Senate's amendment was then sent down to the Chamber, which was told by M. Ferry that it must accept the vote, and rescind its own decision of last week. The Deputies, not seeing their way to a new Ministry, and afraid of taking up the question of Ton- quin without M. Ferry to help them, were in the most obedient humour, and resolved to eat their own words by 280 votes to 227. This saves M. Ferry; but the Deputies were not at the time aware that negotiations with China had been broken off, and that they must either continue a desultory and expensive war, or decree a march on Pekin, or sanction retreat within their old limits in Cochin China. They cannot hold Tonquin or Anam with China victorious. Even if they had been aware, however, they might not have ventured on mutiny, for, failing M. Ferry, who is to manage the elections ?
