The working-class demonstrations in favour of the French Republic have
not hitherto been very effective. The meeting at St. James's Hall on Saturday night was addressed by Professor Mealy, Mr. Bradlaugh, Colonel Dickson, and other gentlemen of extreme opinions, while some of the more thorough-going Radicals, like Professor Fawcett and Mr. P. A. Taylor, held carefully aloof, their sympathies being pretty evidently German. Professor Beesly was certainly more accurate than Mr. Gladstone as to the part taken by Lord Palmerston in recognising the Government of the coup d'etat, but he made a rather unmeaning attack on the Government, in saying that it is a hand-to-mouth Government which does not know its own mind. We should rather say that it does not know which of its own minds is the ruling one — Mr. Losve's, for instance, or Mr. Glad- stone's. Almost all the Ministers have minds, or some- thing like minds, and some of them, like Mr. Lowe, kaow that mind exceedingly well. But they certainly do seem to speak a somewhat different language, the one from the other, and it would be well to elicit which of these languages is the language of power.
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