TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MARSHAL MACMAHON'S RESIGNATION.
NOTHING in Marshal MacMahon's Presidential career has become him so well as its close. Its commencement was hardly creditable to him, for M. Thiers understood that he had his personal support, and no one but Marshal Mac- Mahon could have had any chance of turning M. Thiers out of office. From the first it was his great mistake to regard him- self as the nominee of a party, rather than the representative of France; and this initial blunder was often repeated, and even exaggerated, during his tenure of office. But he has shown dignity and patriotism in the fashion of his resignation. It may well be, indeed, that the question on which he resigned was not the question on which his mind chiefly dwelt in deter- mining on his resignation. M. Gambetta appears, in some sense, to have forced his hand, by holding out the prospect of a still greater difficulty in the background, if the difficulty of the military supersessions should be overcome. He knew that in that case he should be asked to assent to the impeachment of the De Broglie Government,—the Government of combat,— before the Senate ; and he knew that it was impossible for him, who had made a personal appeal to France in favour of that Government, to acquiesce in a proceeding which, on his part, would have had something of the character both of cowardice and treachery. We cannot say that we think well of M. Gambetta's policy in thus forcing the Marshal's hand. Had the Marshal signed the decrees superseding General Bourbaki and those other distrusted military colleagues whom the Re- publicans thought it right to remove, it would have been a foolish and dangerous thing to revive all the bitterness of the past by an impeachment of a Government which is no longer among the political forces of the present, and whose sins, great as they were, would be much better forgotten than punished. Moreover, it would have been a very hard measure to the Marshal himself, to reward him for a novel pliancy to the Con- stitution by involving him in the disgrace of an almost obso- lete offence. There was something of Jesuitical finesse, and something, too, of vindictive acrimony, in the more distant threat with which it was sought to convince Marshal Mac- Mahon that it would be of no use for him to yield to the im- mediate request of his Ministers, indeed, that by so doing he would only prepare for himself new and more serious perplexities. But though we cannot but condemn the Radical manceuvre by which the Marshal was warned of the uselessness of concession, we are disposed to think that it has turned out better for him as it is,—especially if he would really have otherwise hesitated whether or not to acquiesce in the dismissal of his brothers- in-arms. The only grave blot on his personal conduct was his surrender of the civil functionaries whom he had promised to protect., to the just wrath of the Republican majority. If he had abandoned his own colleagues in the army in the same fashion, he might well have felt, as he is said to have stated that he felt, that he should feel ashamed, after such a course, to embrace his children. There is a point beyond which it is not possible for even the chief of a Constitutional State to ignore his own acts and convictions. And we think that point would have been passed if the Marshal had surrendered to the Liberal distrust of them his old comrades-in-arms, even on the advice of such a Minister as M. Dufaure. We do not admire M. Gambetta's strategy,—successful as it has been,—but we do think that it has been far from injurious to the Marshal, if it put an end at once to any hesitation which he might otherwise have felt as to the course which he should pursue in relation to the military commands. The Marshal could not be anything but a transitional President of Such a Republic as the present Republic of France, and we are glad to see him fairly out of the entanglements of a position which it was far from easy for him to hold with untarnished honour, and far from easy for the Republican majority to allow him to hold, without a long series of provocative attacks on his well- known personal leanings and aims.
His successor, M. Grevy, will have a task at once much easier and much more arduous than his predecessor. It will be easier, because he will not have to struggle with personal convictions and predilections entirely opposed to the policy of his chief advisers ; it will be more arduous, because on this very account he can hope to influence much more seriously the nature of their advice, and to set the precedents by which the success of a rather novel constitutional experiment will eventually be determined. M. Grevy, if he is the strong and sagacious man whom his friends represent him to be, will not be what Marshal MacMahon has, since the elections of 1875, to. some extent almost necessarily been,—a reluctant constitutional instrument in the hands of others, but a great power, probably the greatest power, in the Cabinet. A genuine adherent of the majority, if he differs from his Ministers on matters of serious importance, it will always be on the cards that by the mere announcement of his difference of opinion he may alter the views of a majority of the Chambers, and have it in his power to form a new Ministry, which would command their confidence better than the old. Hence, while M. Grevy will not feel half the awkwardness and delicacy which Marsha MacMahon must have felt for the last year back, he will have a much more complex duty to perform in mediating between the public opinion of France and the opinion of his temporary advisers. It will take a very strong man to make the function of President what in such hands it ought to be,—a function almost equally distinct from that of a Constitutional King, and that of a Constitutional Prime Minister. M. Grevy ought to be able so to manipulate his influence as to exercise a much greater, or at least a much more direct, influence over political affairs than an English monarch, and yet at the same time to guard himself against any appearance of such an identification with an unsuccessful policy as to- injure his own prestige as President by his apparent adoption of it. His object should be rather to secure a fair discussion for any policy which he prefers to that of his constitutional advisers for the time being, than to identify himself personally with such a policy. In that way he may both exert a most healthy, controlling, and modifying influence over the counsels of his dinisters, and yet entirely avoid the appearance of actual partisanship. But this will be a difficult course to steer, and it is one in which the experience of Marshal MacMahon's Pre- sidency is not likely to afford much help to M. Grevy.
And he will have another immediate difficulty which the Marshal had not, in relation to his foreign policy. It is already sufficiently obvious that Germany looks upon the new unity between the Parliament and the President of France with extreme jealousy and suspicion. Hitherto Germany has been well aware that the majority of the electors did not half trust the chief of the State, and that the chief of the State did not half trust the majority of the electors. In this mutual distrust there was a real check on any- thing like an active military or foreign policy,—a policy of revenge. This check is now gone. If the chief of the State perceived a great military or diplomatic opportunity welcome to the people of France, there would be no mutual jealousy between him and the popular majority, of a kind to weaken his action. M. Grevy, therefore, will have to pursue a very frank and cautious policy, if he wishes to convince Germany that there is no secret scheme of revenge hatching against her. With an army led by irreproachable Republicans, Germany will watch far more anxiously the signs of anything like the old Republican propagandism than she has felt it necessary to watch them hitherto. M. Grevy, because be is one with the nation, will be in a much more delicate position towards the German Empire than was Marshal MacMahon.
One aspect of the situation is certainly satisfactory,—we mean the probable election of M. Gambetta to the Presidency of the Chamber, and the probable retention of office by the Dufaure Ministry, if not even by M. Dufaure himself. M. Ga,mbetta as President of the Chamber will be removed into a political siding, though one of great dignity and promise, where it will be at once his duty and his policy to show his superiority to- party feeling, and his fitness at some future time for the office which M. Grevy already fills. That will itself be a great,. guarantee for the exertion of M. Gambetta's great political influence on the side of a quiet and Conservative Republican policy, and will separate him from that close alliance with the extreme Left which has hitherto seemed, in some measure, essential to his position in the country. It is a great omen that already the rumours as to the very foolish impeachment of the De Broglie Government represent the design as abandoned, and that M. Grevy has asked M. Dufaure to remain in office, and so to prove that the general policy of the country under the new regime will not be very different from what it was under the old. Nothing is more essential to France than that her policy, for some time to come, should be magnanimous, sober, and sedate. And so long as M. Dufaure and his col- leagues remain in office, not only France, but Europe, will have every assurance that it is likely to be what it has hitherto been, certainly both sober and sedate, and if not in every sense magnanimous, at least as much so as it is possible for a popular ministry to be after a victory over rivals so unscrupulous and so audacious as the Cabinet whose political craft was repre- sented by the Due de Broglie, and whose conscience was measured by that of M. de Fourtou.
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