The French Prefect of .Police, M. Leon Renault, has made
a speech, explaining at length his reasons for adopting the Repub- lican solution of the Constitutional difficulty, and for being a determined opponent of Bonapartism. He is not, he says, a party man. He looks to the welfare of France, not to the triumph of any section of the political world. He was full of regrets when all rational hope of constitutional monarchy disappeared. But for all rational men, they have disappeared. The Assembly in 1875 had really no choice at all between legalising the system under which France had lived for five years, and returning to the regime which closed with the fatal battle of Sedan. Now recurrence to the Empire would have been the return to a system which binds the democracy in fetters. and M. Leon Renault preferred greatly the organisation of the democracy in liberty, to such a result as that. "The Empire at home," he says, with as much truth as epigrammatic force, " is authoritative socialism, a dictatorship holding out as compensa- tion for suppressed public liberties, the solution by the State of the painful problems of suffering and poverty, thus accustoming' the nation to look to it for everything, and soon to require of it the impossible." Its natural sequel was the wild attempt of the Commune "to cut by decrees the knot of all economical and social problems, inspired by the monstrous idea, the very prin- ciple of Ctesarism, that domination has no limits, and that to order is to solve." There is real statesmanship in that criti- cism. M. Leon Renault ought to be in the Cabinet, and not merely the Minister of Police.
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