TOPICS OF THE DAY.

MARSHAL MACMAIION'S GENERAL ORDER.

THE President of the French Republic ,has made another step in the wrong direction, another step which seems to indicate how little he cares that the President should remain the President, and the Republic the Republic. In the General Order addressed to the Army after the review on Sunday, Marshal MacMahon made an appeal to the soldiers, which, if it does not mean that he looks to them to support him against political enemies, has, at any rate, been so inter- preted not merely by those political enemies themselves, but by the loudest and most active supporters of the Marshal's political intervention. " You feel," says the Marshal to the Army, "that the country has entrusted to you the custody of its dearest interests. On every occasion, I count on you to defend them. You will help me, I am certain, to maintain respect for authority and law in the dis- charge of the mission which has been confided to me, and which I shall fulfil to the end." Now, how do the party of the majority interpret this Order of the day ? The Bonapartist journal, the Gaulois, asserts that "the Marshal has taken a solemn pledge before the Army, his companions in arms, never to undergo the yoke of a hostile majority. If necessary, he would know how to summon the Army to defend the Constitu- tion which orders him to remain till 1880, the sword defending social principles and necessary institutions." The Pays, also

Bonapartist, goes still further. "Blows will fall on you citizens like hail, if you do not march straight. If you under- stand the meaning of words, you will see that, even if victorious, you would reap nothing from the victory The head of the Army has spoken ; he has appealed to bayonets, and everything is going to be as it should be." We need not say that the Republican papers understand this threatening language in just the same sense. The Marshal has done what the Conservatives are never weary of condemning,—personally recommended a political bias to the Army. He has, in fact, told his soldiers, as both his friends and his opponents under- stand him, that he relies upon them to sustain him in his con- flict with the Chamber of Deputies ; and that in that reliance he will remain, up to the end of his term of office, whatever the result of the appeal to France, fulfilling what he calls his "mission," which is apparently a mission to resist "Radi- calism." A more formidable prospect for the country can hardly be conceived. Here is a President, elected for a given time by an extinct Assembly, an Assembly, moreover, chosen in the panic caused by the surrender of Paris, and chosen solely to conclude peace, but who, nevertheless, insists on regarding himself as so essential and integral a part of the Constitution, that even if the country, speaking deliberately, and speaking a second time after an interval of more than a year, should again condemn his policy, and declare its disapprobation of his present advisers, he would regard it not a jot, but fall back upon the Army to sustain him against the voice of the people. This at least is what Conservative France insists on interpreting Marshal MacMahon's declaration to mean. And if that interpretation be a malicious libel, one of those Press-prosecutions in which M. de Fourtou delights, should be directed against the Conservative journals which insist on putting so evil an interpretation on the Marshal's words. If no such prosecution is instituted, the country will infer, and will rightly infer, that the President of the Republic does not regard this interpretation as in any way derogatory to himself, or as gravely misrepresenting his purposes to France, —will infer, in other words, that the intention so attributed to him is at the very least one which he regards as quite open to him, though not, it may be, definitively decided upon.

Now, a more fatal prospect for Constitutional Government in France cannot easily be conceived. No complex Constitu- tion can be worked at all, except on the understanding that the less distinctly representative elements in it should not be allowed to outweigh the more distinctly representative elements, except for very brief periods of time,—such periods only as will suf- fice to secure a reconsideration by the country of its resolves.

Yet Marshal MacMahon prefers to inaugurate the Republic by establishing two monstrous precedents,—first, that the Presi- dent of the Republic, though elected by an extinct Assembly, shall, whenever he can obtain the adherence of a majority

of the Senate, however small, have the right to paralyse the Chamber of Deputies, elected, as it is, by the universal suffrage of France, for any number of years for which his unexpired term may still have to run ; and next, that he may

appeal to the Army of France to support him against the most deliberate expression of their will by the people of France. That one who wishes to make such pre- cedents as these, should call himself a friend of the political institutions founded by the late National Assembly, is the gravest possible abuse of words. The ruin of these institutions

could not be legally attempted in any more efficacious way. Legal, no doubt, in the narrow sense of the term, the Marshal's

procedure still is. There is nothing in the letter of existing laws to prevent him from defying the Chamber of Deputies, if he chooses, as long as any remnant of the Septennate still keeps him in power. There is nothing in the letter of the laws to prevent him from talking to the soldiers of France as if the great majority of the Chamber of Deputies were open enemies of France, and were to be told that if they gave trouble they would be met like invaders, by fixed bayonets or long-range rifles. But to expect such institutions as were established in 1875 to grow and flourish under such a

regime as this, would be the dream of a mere madman. What is the meaning of universal suffrage, if its deliberate and con-

firmed results—results obtained, too, in the very teeth of an active and determined Executive—are to go for nothing, as against the will of a man who was certainly at no time the direct choice of the country, and who is still less its present choice, only because he happens to be supported by a very small majority in a body composed of elements as complex and difficult to interpret as are the elements of the Senate ? Universal suffrage speaking repeatedly and decisively, and yet contemptuously set aside by the will of what, relatively speaking, are such mere political accidents as these, is an anomaly too monstrous to survive at all.

No institutions can be intended to provide the means by which a nation shall speak only to be ignored. A provision of that kind of course could not last, The Government which resists such popular authority as that, is far too well aware of the weak- ness of its position to allow it to remain, if it has the power to destroy it. And of course, if it has not the power to de- stroy it, it will itself be destroyed by the nation, which will not and can not allow its deliberate wishes to be thus defied.

Hence what Marshal MacMahon is doing in the interests, as ho and his Government are pleased to say, of the institu- tions established in 1875, must lead, and lead by a very short path indeed, either to the destruction of these institutions by the Marshal's Government, or to the destruction of the Marshal's Government by these institutions.

We are far from supposing that the Marshal sees all this as clearly as we, looking at the struggle from a distance, see it. But his recent appeal to the Army betrays more con- sciousness of the nature of the struggle on which he is enter- ing, and of a design which must be called deliberately uncon- stitutional in connection with it, than any other event of his Administration. M. do Fourtou wishes, it is true, to repre- sent devotion to " the institutions " established in 1875 as the Marshal's ruling purpose. If it be so, he will hasten to dis- claim the violent meaning attached by the Conservative Press to the Marshal's manifesto of Sunday, and to promise complete deference to the will of the country, when once deliberatively expressed, whatever that will may be. But we confess we entertain very little hope of any such de- claration. The appeal to the Army is a step in the

opposite direction, and must be meant, if it was deli- berately planned at all, to indicate the physical force on which the President of the Republic would fall back, in case the moral force of the country declares itself against him. If it does mean that, we shall have to regret not merely a political blunder, but a moral stain on a reputation which hitherto all

parties in France have agreed to respect. Marshal MacMahon is not a clever man. He is very far from an astute politician.

But he does know well enough that it is simply bad faith to profess devotion to such institutions as France now has, and yet to fall back on physical force to overrule the issue, if the result of an appeal to those institutions should turn out to be adverse to his own wishes.