M. GREvY.
GREVY seems to be the coming man, now that M. Thiers .1.11 • is dead. Public opinion distinctly points to him as the future President of a Conservative Republic. It is a pity that the coming man is not known better, not merely here, but also in France. He is, it is true, much esteemed by all who are acquainted with him. He has long been marked out by his friends for the highest political offices. But his fame does not visibly extend much outside Paris, always excepting his own Department of the Jura, which has never failed since 1848 to return him as its favourite Deputy by large majorities. He has not earned the ordinary penalties or rewards of great popular celebrity. His portrait is not on match or bonbon boxes. You do not find him sketched in the portraits in- times of public men which the French are so fond of pub- lishing. We do not know whether. M. de Mirecourt, who has written the lives of most of his contemporaries, from Lola Montes to the Marshal President, with mixed feelings on their part, has included M. Grevy in his endless series. And yet he is not at all a new man. He is one of the oldest of the present race of statesmen. He took part in the Revo- lution of 1830, and was a distinguished advocate in Louis Philippe's reign. When 1848 came, he was in the front rank, and was deemed worthy of being made Vice-President of the Assembly and member of the Committee of Justice. He was a power in the Republic of that time, but not a sufficient power, for had his voice been listened to when he proposed, with clear foresight of the perils ahead, that the President should be removable by the Assembly, the Coup d'itat might have been averted. When it came, he quitted politics in disgust, and refused to make any terms with the Empire, of which he was the most uncom- promising, though not the most violent enemy. In the interval between 1851 and 1868, he laboured at his profession, and rose to be Bdtonizier of the Bar. In the latter year he was returned as Deputy to the Corps 146gisla.tif, and again he pursued his policy of calm but undeviating resistance to the Empire, disdaining to take part or lot in the supple Liberalism of M. 011ivier, and refusing to be convinced by the arguments of M. Thiers that the Empire having granted "the necessary liberties," its opponents might sink their differences and accept it as inevitable. When the Empire fell, and the Bordeaux Assembly met, the choice of President fell on M. Grcivy. Let us add to this creditable, if not remarkably brilliant record of honest, consistent work that he is an able and effective speaker ; that he is an author, as well as orator ; that office has been often within his reach ; and it will be acknowledged that if M. Grevy's name is not a house- hold word—that if it is not one of those names which common people use as shorthand, symbolical expressions of principles— it is not because he has not been much before the world.
The explanation is that he is of the stamp of man who in- fluences men of influence. His talents are not of the obtrusive or conspicuous character which sway a crowd. He is an ad- mirable speaker, according to English notions—neat, precise, pointed, and effective ; but his is oratory which reasonable men would best like in their most reasonable moments, and it might be a trifle too academic in form and delivery to suit a mis- cellaneous audience. And then, too, he has never said or done startling things, echoes of which vibrate in the pro- vinces,—has never been fond of uttering, after the fashion of his countrymen, epigrammatic sayings which become the wisdom and wit of the many. He has been engaged in revolutions, he has been a member of the advanced guard of Liberalism ; but he has uniformly been temperate in manner, and has advocated thorough-going views with remarkable moderation of tone. Had he been an Englishman, he would have been lost to political life. His character and the nature of his training and successes would have narked him out, with universal concurrence, for the highest judicial promotion. He would have been pronounced by solicitors and persons more potent than solicitors a safe man, fit to be made a Puisne at fifty, and to be elevated to the Court of Appeal as soon as room could be found for him. In truth, his faults and virtues have a legal flavour, and he is always reminding close observers of his career that a large portion of it has been spent in Courts of Law. Though a convincing speaker, he is apt to weaken the general effect of his addresses by giving rather disproportionate prominence to the dry, legal view. He delights to pursue trains of reason- ing which a non-legal mind might regard as a little repulsive, trivial, or sophistical. For example, in a speech with respect to the Septennate, he argued ingeniously, but we fear only with the effect of puzzling or confusing most of his audience, that one Assembly could not bind its successor, and that a vote which prolonged the Septennate to 1880 could be properly and legally reconsidered, and, if deemed necessary, revised. On the other hand, he has in full measure most of the judicial virtues. His conduct as president of different Chambers in troubled times was such as to command universal esteem. He was fair and temperate ; he was firm, too ; he rarely intervened, and when he did, it was only to set matters straight by a brief, pointed remark. He knew well the weak- nesses of French Legislative Assemblies, as was revealed in his remark during a confused debate, "We lose all our time in incidents. We shall never get done. We incident too much, and without occasion." M. Grevy hates, and always has hated, incidenting; he has nothing theatrical in his composition,—the Duo de Broglie's organ complains that he is too plebeian in demeanour; and his political influence gives the lie to many fashionable common-places about the ineradicable levity or love of sensationalism of his race, and to numerous harsh dicta, such as Mom/wants, that the Gaul lacks the moral depth necessary for a politician.
M. Gr6vy, though lacking the qualities which made M. Thiers a Minister about thirty-five, and M. Gambetta a party leader and Dictator about thirty, has some virtue which will stand him in good stead whenever he is put in nomination for the Presidency of the Republic. He has uniformly been suc- cessful in all he has put his hand to, and his countrymen have come to believe that he is a lucky man,—which is of itself a passport to fresh success. He was a successful advocate ; he won astonishing electoral victories in the Jura against the Empire ; and he was, on the whole, a remark- ably successful Speaker of the Bordeaux Assembly. He failed, indeed, to retain the complete confidence of that curious Assembly, so hard to rule, in its later days ; but no one now doubts that he was in the right in the episode which led to his resignation in 1873. He had ruled that the expression " impertinence " was an unparliamentary word ; and the Right, taking offence at this unexceptional decision, his resignation and the appointment of M. Buffet followed. Let us also re- collect that though the peasant has not come to talk of M. Gr6vy as he once did of M. Thiers, the former is a man of a very intelligible type. There is no mistaking him. What he is, he always has been, and in all human probability, will be. He has no inconsistencies in his past to clear away. There are no rash, violent words set down to his debit in history. •He has, all his political life, held fast to the views which he enun- ciated in his able, discreet speech over M. Thiers' grave last Saturday, that no dynasty can ever be stable in France, and that a Conservative Republic has become "the necessary Government." That is now a common creed, but most of its votaries arrived at it by long and circuitous routes. M. Tillers was, until recently, an Orleanist ; in M. Dufaure's career there are such diverse episodes as his attachment to Orleanism, and his subsequent voting for the banishing of the family. M. Gre'vy, on the other hand, has been all his life a Conservative-Republican. We trust that if he is put in nomi- nation for the Presidency, he and his friends will do so subject to one important reservation. They are bound to recollect that they cannot counsel the Government to be constitutional with much effect, unless they are themselves prepared to be so also ; and it would seem to be their first duty to accept Marshal MacMahon as the President until 1880, provided he is willing to rule in a constitutional manner.
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