NEWS OF THE WEEK.
FATE is unfriendly to France just now. M. Jules Ferry, almost the only Republican politician of the first rank who has escaped smirching in Panama mud, died on Friday week, after six hours' illness, of heart-complaint. His heart had been wounded by a madman named Aubertin, who fired at him on December 10th, 1887, and his doctors knew that it was weak. The excitement attendant on his election to the presidency of the Senate, which occurred on February 24th, had overtaxed it ; and he passed away after a brief struggle, during which he fancied himself choking for want of air. He was sixty-one years of age, and had been for eight years one of the most unpopular men in France. The Conservatives detested him because in 1879 he proposed the Bill forbidding all unauthorised clergy to meddle with educa- tion, and, the Bill failing, in 1880 carried out its policy by a series of Ministerial decrees ; and the Radicals detested him because he was a friend of order, and devoted to the Colonial expansion of France. The latter threatened, when he was candidate for the Presidency in 1887, to rise in insurrection if he were elected ; and on M. Car- not's appointment, he was considered a dead politician, till the Senate, alarmed by the Panama scandals, called him to its chair. He was an unusually brave man, an aggressive politician, who never changed his opinions or yielded before any resistance, and he had every governing power except that of conciliation. The Chamber voted him a national funeral by 283 to 168, and the splendid ceremonial was attended by all parties except the Right, who objected to the purely civil character of the burial. M. Jules Ferry was less malignant against Germany than most French statesmen, but he was a deadly foe of Great Britain, whose preoccupa- tion, he fancied, was to resist the expansion of France.
