ON THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS.
IT is useless, as we have always maintained, to prophesy about France—for who can tell what a capricious woman drunk with intellectual absinthe may at any moment resolve to do ?—but if there is any guidance in history her present institutions are rocking to their fall. The Re- public, which during the twenty-eight years of its exist- ence has thrown up no strong men, is now entrusted to a Cabinet of Ministers who have neither convictions on which they dare to act nor consciences which they venture to obey. Since the later days of Louis XV. there has been no Government so feeble in France. When we left the Dreyfus affair last the Ministry had resolved to seem to believe in some measure in M. de Beaurepaire's charges against the Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation, and while exonerating the Judges of that body from all reproach, to punish them for being irreproachable by transferring their jurisdiction to the entire Court of Cas- eation. God forbid they should discredit them in words, they would only slander them by Act of Parliament ! They came to this resolution, it is well understood, " for political reasons," that is, from fear of the Army and the popu- lace; but though they prepared their Bill, and even added to it a shameful clause directing the full Court to refer the accused, who is appealing from military prejudice, if innocent, back to a second Court-Martial, they did not demand urgency for it, but sent it in the regular way up to a Committee. That Committee of eleven competent men has read and heard all the evidence against the Criminal Chamber, and has decided unanimously that there is nothing in it but " the tattle of underlings," and the irritated feelings of supersensitive military witnesses. The allegations to the contrary are formally pronounced " inane." This report has been read and considered by the Cabinet, which, if it considered the honour of France, should have been delighted with such a vindica- tion of her greatest Tribunal, and the Cabinet has decided to go on with its Bill, and, if possible, extract from the fears of the majority a condemnation of the Criminal Chamber in the teeth of evidence, as a political necessity. The debate was fixed for Friday, and the result will arrive too late for us, but there can hardly be a doubt as to its nature. The majority will not have dared to overthrow the Government on such a question, and so risk revolution, but will have maintained, perhaps openly, that the safety of the State is above all other considerations, and that it is better to punish one man unjustly than to risk the overthrow of the Republic. We say this will have been their line of argument, for it has already been employed by two members of the refrac- tory Committee. M. Cruppi and another member, who took the lead in denouncing the Bill as in one clause unjust and in the rest inane, informed their colleagues that nevertheless they should vote for the Bill as a political measure. After that what is there to be said except that France is panic-struck, and rather than risk a dangerous crisis would authorise by law a sacrifice to Moloch ? There is, of course, one chance remaining. M. Pelletan, who is to be the orator against the Bill, has the power by his eloquence of raising a question out of the ruts of circum- stance into a higher atmosphere • and it is just possible that the Chamber, overpowered by a sudden emotion, may have rejected the Bill ; but, for ourselves, we have no hope. If men competent to fill a Cabinet are prepared, rather than encounter popular and military wrath, to destroy the very foundations of justice in their country, we cannot expect that average Members, less informed and less responsible, will rise above their leaders and insist that, come what may, justice shall be done.
We have the less hope because the thing has occurred before in French history. It is not without reason that the Paris correspondent of the Times constantly recurs to the precedent of the Terror, though we think he fails to drive home the true analogy. There was in the Terror an element more disgraceful to France than the carnival of murder in which the members of the Mountain, maddened, let us hope, by their long draughts of what we have called intellectual absinthe, permitted themselves to indulge, and that was the astounding cowardice of those who were not mad. If there is one thing certain about the Terror it is that it was approved by a small minority, that the troops loathed it, that the respectablea feared it, that even the populace, who three times moved the guillotine, at heart condemned it as ruthless and unjust. The moment a minute group in the Convention, in fear for their own necks, defied it, it was over, and could not by the most desperate efforts be re-established. Not only were the silent majority of the Convention, who were constantly voting proscription lists, opposed to them, but physical force was wholly on that side, and once appealed to, drove the true Terrorists into hiding as mere human vermin. Not a shot was fired when the Jacobin Club was closed, and the " furies of the guillotine " whipped with canes. For months, in fact, France, which was all the while rushing to battle on the frontiers, lay paralysed with nervous terror, afraid. of pasteboard giants, who on the first symptom of real resistance exploded with a smell, leaving behind them a recollection which has been more fatal to true liberty than all the Kings and all the reactionary leaders who have succeeded them. Is France approaching one of these fits now ? To us, we confess, it appears not only probable, but certain, that if France is not, Republicans are, that the Red Spectre of 1852 has been replaced by the Helmeted Spectre of 1899, and that we shall not reach the twentieth century without seeing liberty suspended in France.
For, and this it is which lends such intense interest to the situation, France will not die as an Asiatic country dies, nor even sink into the kind of trance in which she lay in the latter years of Louis XV. It is her way when weary of her own madnesses suddenly to call on some one to save her from them by putting her in a padded room, and then in a generation, during which she has no liberty, to recover herself and regain the strength with which to commence a new kind of existence. Henri Quatre did the work for her with his nobles and the Army, Napoleon with his Army and his genius, Louis Philippe with his craftiness and his pays legal—that queer despotism of two hundred thousand bribed bourgeois—Napoleon with his Army and his gift of prosperity-making, Thiers with his Army and his power of words, but always there has been some one found, and always he has been for a few years irresistible. France, as we read her, is hungering for some one now, and though in a generation of mediocrities she is terribly perplexed and bewildered where to find the person, she will, as we believe, discover one yet, and sink once more into the automatic obedience which with her is the signal and the preparation for a coming return of perfect reason. We really do not think those two last words exaggerated. Nothing but an access of mental delirium can explain thoroughly some of the actions to which France is now giving her apparent sanction. Revolutions one expects in Prance, a cry in Paris for an unwise war one can understand, even a craze against a powerless sect can be explained, but to see a great country hamstring its highest Court because it suspects it will do justice—that is beyond the capacity of reasoning human beings to comprehend. An army of Kensits would not do it here, even though their Dreyfus had been tried in a chasuble for asserting the power of his Church to absolve sinners from their sin.
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