M. CARNOT'S TOURS.
MCARNOT has discovered, or had discovered for • him, a new use for a President of the French Republic. He is most serviceable when he is kept moving. The best President is a President en voyage. One of M. Carnot's tours is hardly over before he is making prepara- tions for the next. In Paris he is not perhaps a very imposing personage, for Paris is critical and captious in its well-to-do quarters, and hankers after the Commune in the rest. And then a man in a black coat, who has done nothing to make outward pomp superfluous, is not a man who can be seen every day without suffering the usual consequences of familiarity. When M. Carnot goes on a journey, he is only visible for a few hours at each place at which he stops. The crowd gets but a glimpse of him, and there is not time for the enchant- ment of distance to be undone. The President is seen as an incident in a procession the component parts of which are very much smarter than the high official in whose honour it is organised. He is surrounded by troops, and welcomed by all the officials of the district. To the towns- people, who seldom see anything in the way of a pageant, to the peasantry, to whom the town itself even in its work-a- day guise is an object of wonder, the brief visit of the President is an event to be remembered. It makes the Republic a little more real ; it translates into visible form the ideas of obedience and order which are the foundation of civil society. It is a weakness of the French Republic that it is too abstract. It forgets that if men are to obey and feel devotion towards the Government under which they live, that Government must have some visible symbol. An elected President need not be less magnificent than a hereditary King. Indeed, if democracies were logical, an elected President, as embodying in himself, by the free choice of the citizens, the whole authority of the State, should be more magnificent than any King. At present, however, the taste of democracies takes a different direction. They are more anxious to bring down their rulers to their own level than to raise themselves in the persons of their rulers. The very modest splendour with which M. Carnot surrounds himself is as much as it is believed Frenchmen will tolerate. It is necessary to impress the multitude, but it must be impressed cheaply. Still, M. Carnot is an advance on M. Gravy. He represents the Republic with something more of dignity ; and if his speeches are less interesting, they are more frequent, and delivered with rather more of circumstance. He is better known and better realised, and the Republic has gained by the change.
There is one feature, however, of M. Carnot's journeys which marks them off from the ordinary progresses of Sovereigns. Officials from far and near come to wait upon him at each town. He is surrounded by all the visible machinery of government. Of the men by whom France is governed, not one is absent. But, with few exceptions, the men who play the chief part in receiving him are all officials. The social rulers of France, the great families, the historic names, are not there. They are sulking in their castles, determined not to give the implied sanction of their presence to the President of a Republic which they despise or distrust. M. Carrot's progress is like the progress of the Commander-in-Chief or of the Lords of the Admiralty in England. He is everywhere surrounded by " the services." He is the Chief of the Executive, the pinnacle of the official hierarchy, and it is part of his subordinates' duty to attend his official receptions. Out- side there is the crowd in the street, but there is nothing to bridge the gulf between the two. The men with whom interest in public affairs is a family tradition, the men who are politicians by inheritance as well as by taste, the men who take the lead among their neighbours by reason of greater wealth and wider experience, for the most part stay away. It is impossible that France should not suffer by their absence. They are no longer emigrants in the literal sense, but they are emigrants morally. The concerns of their country are not their con- cerns, except when they enter the Chamber for the sole purpose of making the chariot of the State drive heavily. It is a misfortune alike for themselves and for France, but for the time it seems a misfortune for which there is no remedy. A pamphlet which the Due de Broglie has lately printed explains the intellectual basis of this attitude. The Duke does not favour opposition to the Republic without regard to consequences. He is willing to give a cold and distant support to the Government when they do what he thinks right. He is not one of those Monarchical Irreconcilables who would welcome the Commune itself in order to upset the existing Republic. On the contrary, he belongs to the moderate party among the Royalists, the party which has no wish to see things worse than they are, and is prepared to accept a Conservative and moderate policy from the hands even of Republicans. But the hostility of the Due de Broglie to the Re- public is as rooted and intense as that of the most fanatical Legitimist. It is a hostility founded on the con- viction that Republican forms are incompatible with Parliamentary government. One Republican Ministry may do less harm than another, and so may be more worthy of favour. But even the best Republican Ministry cannot be trusted to do good except by fits and starts. The merits of a Republic are accidental ; its vices are inherent and incurable. To give anything like active support to such a Government, would not be to sacrifice principle to convenience—the Due de Broglie, as we understand him, does not hold that Royalty exists by divine right—but it would be to sacrifice substance to shadow. Parliamentary government, the only government under which freedom and order can coexist, must die if the Republic lives. Consequently, the only attitude that men who believe in Parliamentary government can assume towards the Re- public is an attitude of incredulous acquiescence. They cannot profess a faith which they do not feel.
The proper line for the Republican Government to take in view of this distrust, is a line which it is very hard for them to take. It is to convince the unbelievers that Parliamentary institutions can coexist with Republican forms by showing the two in operation at the same time. But the difficulty is, that even a Republican Govern- ment must live ; and in order to live, it must command a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. How is this majority to be secured ? Not by the help of the Right, for no section of the Right will give a Republican Cabinet so much as a lukewarm adherence. All that the most moderate Royalist will do is to vote in particular divi- sions, and leave Ministers to their fate at other times. Not by the help of the Moderate Republicans, for they are not strong enough to defy the Radicals, rein- forced as they often are by a large part of the Right. The utmost the Republican Cabinet seems able to do is to live from hand to mouth,—appealing sometimes to Repub- lican sentiment, which commonly means submission to the Extreme Left, and sometimes to Conservative fears, which extort a momentary encouragement from the Moderate Right. We do not believe in the Due de Broglie's diagnosis of the political malady ; but we cannot wonder that the symptoms should seem to many to bear out his conclusion. Yet here possibly such incidents as M. Carnot's tours may be of some benefit. They may convince the indifferent multi- tude, which is Republican, but not Radical, that there are men at the head of affairs ready to govern them in the way they wish to be governed, and that, if they wish these men to remain at the head of affairs, they must bestir themselves at election time, and not allow an active minority to return its candidate over their heads. In this way a Moderate Republican majority would be sent to the Chamber, and there would be some chance of carrying out that practical and tolerant policy of which the Due de Broglie despairs. That the Duke himself would be con- vinced even by such a spectacle as this, is hardly likely ; but there would at least be a chance of bringing home the fact to a younger generation.
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