ENGLISH OPINION ON FRENCH AFFAIRS.
THERE is no longer any necessity to justify the defence of Paris. The great city, after the patient endurance of an investment of seventy-four days, during which she has sup- ported her chiefs in organizing armies, has at last poured them out to battle, and, beaten or victorious, there will be no more ridicule either of Paris or of Trochu. They are doing their part, and Englishmen, however prejudiced, or however prone to worship success, are seldom unjust to energy, action, or endurance. If Ducrot reaches Fontainebleau, we shall hear no more of the silliness of resistance to irresistible force; nor, if his army is destroyed, shall we be told that Paris is a city of shams, and that her leaders, with 300,000 men, still call on the provinces to achieve the success towards which she will make no active effort. But it is still necessary to point out the amazing illusions to which the English want of imagination sometimes gives rise. Our countrymen every now and then, particularly when excited by the spectacle of victory, suffer their minds to fall into ruts, out of which it is almost impossible to extricate them, and in which their only creed seems to be the second sentence of the doxology, "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end." Because the Germans have beaten French armies for a month, therefore they will always beat them. Because Metz capitulated, therefore Paris, which is to Metz what a Mirabeau is to a serjeant-major, is certain also to capitulate. Because the German telegrams, when truth was more effective than romance, were always accurate, therefore those telegrams will be accurate when romance tells more effectively than truth. And conversely, because the French when beaten fight badly, therefore they will fight badly when -victorious ; and because, in their wounded vanity, they hide defeat in lyrical phrases, therefore in their gratified pride they are sure to indulge in lying bombast. Everybody in fact is, like a Teuton, to be always true to one and the same character. The Teuton, whether German, or Englishman, or American is always pretty much the same man, does his duty gravely and without chatter, fights as hard when beaten as when successful, and with his day's work cut out for him does not care two straws whether he has been beaten else- where or not. Englishmen have fought magnificently in retreat, as witness Corunna ; and we have not the least doubt that if Von Moltke's hosts were whittled away to a battalion, that battalion would charge as one battalion charged at Amiens, "as if it were on parade ;" and the last surviving officer would be obeyed as if he could summon the whole military hierarchy to his support. English admiration of that kind of conduct is well justified, and is in itself rather a splendid trait in the national character, but it is none the less stupid to be unable to perceive that there are other characters in the world—men who are not always alike, soldiers who require stimulants other than beef and beer, who must have hope, and confidence, and excitement, before what is in them can come out. Englishmen without legally appointed leaders, or without a consciousness that law is on their side, or without a sense of duty of some sort, so far from fighting well, fight infamously, shrinking from attack like the most volatile of Southerners. There is scarcely a creditable eineute in our history, scarcely an instance recorded in which an English or an American crowd has not fled before a few soldiers or policemen, or, as in the Forrest riot in New York, a few untried volunteers, in a style which in any other race would have indicated abject cowardice. A troop of lancers would have scattered the London crowd that welcomed Garibaldi like so many sheep, and a squad of yeomanry scarcely able to ride have repeatedly frightened the manhood out of a great city. A French, or Italian, or Spanish mob would have eaten those fellows who won Peterloo and who restored authority in a whole district. Our people, to fight splendidly, want the stimulus that fires them, and so do the French ; but because it is not the same stimulus, English observers will have it that it is not a stimulus that is wanting, but pluck, and after an ex- perience of six hundred years still believe, because some de- moralized Generals surrender at Sedan, therefore the character of their ancient enemy is totally changed, therefore Frenchmen, and: especially the Zouaves, who charged by the side of the the Empire set in motion before its downfall. If not the Guards at Inkerman, have become cowards, incapable of dis- equals of the Prussians in military power, they are, at all cipline, from whom victory is not to be expected. No general events, no despicable foes. M. Gambetta is quite right in experience seems to teach us to disregard the teaching of the saying that the Republic " has accomplished all we have moment. French Mobiles ran at Amiens as American Mobiles seen." And that " all " is in its way a really gigantic effort. ran at Bull Run, and so Ducrot must have been repulsed, and D'Aurelles, in spite of maps and geography, is running for- ward on Prince Charles's army in order to get out of its way. The plain fact that an army as good as any army France ever had has beeen collected on the Loire, is regarded with incredulity, for why should one army be better than another And the s. ill plainer fact that Paris means fighting is denied, because if Frenchmen will not fight at Sedan, why should they at Champigny ?
The truth is, that the French are before all things an imaginative people ; that their weakness, as their strength, is sentiment ; and that till their imagination has been fired, or their sentiment fairly roused, they are no more good fighters than the English are till it is their duty to fight. Their sentiment has been roused to fierce vigour by what they think the harshness with which they have been treated, by the insults lavished upon men whom they obey, and by the demand that they should desert fellow-citizens in misfortune. They have, therefore, filled up the armies, and now suddenly a hope of victory has stirred the imagination without which their courage sinks like the courage of an Englishman without food, and the French armies have become armies of soldiers again. If suddenly defeated once more their courage may sink again ; but if not, the war is but just begun, for army after army will rise in France just as brave and determined and enduring as the Germans, inferior to them only in the training of their officers, and far superior to them in numbers. Should the Germans begin to retreat, all France will hurl itself upon them, till it may well be that in January English journals will be criti- cizing with imperturbable inconsistency "the reckless con- tempt of life and common-sense so characteristic of the French in war." The very soldiers who ran will fight then, to the surprise of English mankind, who next day will quote with approval the description of Clive's felons, who in their first battle shrieked with fear, and in their last, under the same chief, conquered Bengal at odds of one to thirty. Cannot our people, who are par excellence the people of travellers, under- stand that something other than " a strip of silver sea " separates us from France ; that a race full of sentiment and emotion, of impulse and of vanity, of genius and of daring, utterly dependent on its leaders, needing the brandy of suc- cess to evoke its courage, will not, in great crises, act like a stubborn borne people, as incapable of forming a device as of abandoning one when formed ; which derives, if not new courage, new energy from defeat ; and is as free from the liability to despair as it is wanting in the power to recruit its vigour on mere hope? Cannot a nation of mechanics imagine that a people " unstable as water " may be as incompressible as that element, or believe that water, once rigidly bound, may force its way through iron ? And above all, cannot we, with our unique experience in Ireland, where the bravest race in the world skulk in frieze from the cause of their hearts, and fight like heroes in red for causes which they detest, comprehend that there are races to whose success in war there are certain precedent conditions, who need stimu- lants differing utterly in kind from those that we require Those stimulants have, we believe, been found in France, and if both armies in the field are not crushed, and crushed at once, we believe that within a month Englishmen will be compelled to confess their error, and allow that Republican France is the equal in war of any State in Europe, —even of that terrible State in which a soldier Bing governs a people of soldiers as a martinet general would govern a camp, sacrificing half the ends of civilization to the discipline which is only divine when it secures them.
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