The sudden suppression of the National Executive by a parliamentary conspiracy at Paris in 1792 violently interrupted the orderly and natural making of France, just as the sudden suppression of the National Executive in 1649 after the occupation of Edinburgh by Argyll and the surrender of Colchester to Fairfax had put England at the mercy of Cromwell's 'honest' troopers, and of knavish fanatics like Hugh Peters, violently interrupted the making of Britain. It took England a century to recover her equilibrium. Between Naseby Field in 1645 and Culloden Moor in 1746 England had, except during the reign of Charles II., no better assurance of continuous domestic peace than France enjoyed first under Louis Philippe and then under the Second Empire. During those hundred years Englishmen were thought by the rest of Europe to be as excitable, as volatile, and as unstable as Frenchmen are not uncommonly thought by the rest of mankind now to be. There is a curious old Dutch print of these days in which England appears as a son of Adam in the hereditary costume, standing at gaze amid a great disorder of garments strewn upon the floor, while a scroll displayed above him bears this legend:
I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here,
Musing in my mind what garment I shall wear.
Now I will wear this, and now I will wear that,
And now I will wear—I don't know what!
There was as much—and as little—reason thus to depict the England of the seventeenth, as there is thus to depict the France of the nineteenth century.
If there had ever been, a hundred years ago, such a thing as a French Republic, founded, as the American Republic of 1787 was founded, by the deliberate will of the people, and offering them a reasonable prospect of maintaining liberty and law, that Republic would exist to-day. That we are watching the desperate effort of a centralised parliamentary despotism at Paris in the year 1890 to maintain a 'Third Republic' is conclusive proof that this was not the case.
France—the French people, that is—- had no more to do with the overthrow of the monarchy of Louis XVI., with the fall of the monarchy of Charles X., with the collapse of the monarchy of July, or with the abolition of the Second Empire, than with the abdication of Napoleon I. at Fontainebleau.
Not one of these catastrophes was provoked by France or the French people; not one of them was ever submitted by its authors to the French people for approval.
Only two French governments during the past century can be accurately said to have been definitely branded and condemned as failures by the deliberate voice of the French people. One of these was the First Republic, which after going through a series of convulsions equally grotesque and ghastly, was swept into oblivion by an overwhelming vote of the French people in response to the appeal of the first Napoleon. The other was the Second Republic, which was put upon trial by the Third Napoleon on December 10, 1851, and condemned to immediate extinction by a vote of 7,439,219 to 640,737. I am at a loss to see how it is possible to deduce from these simple facts of French history the conclusion that the French people are, and for a century have been, madly bent upon getting a Republic established in France, unless, indeed, I am to suppose that the French Republicans proceed upon the principle said to be justified by the experience of countries in which the standard of mercantile morality is not absolutely puritanical—that three successive bankruptcies will enable a really clever man to retire from business with a handsome fortune!
If it were possible, as happily it is impossible, that the American people could be afflicted with a single year of such a Republic as that which now exists in France, we would rid ourselves of it, if necessary, by seeking annexation to Canada under the crown of our common ancestors, or by inviting the exiled Dom Pedro to recross the Atlantic and accept the throne of a North American Empire, with substantial guarantees that if we should ever change our minds and put him politely on board a ship again for Europe, the cheque given to him on his departure would not be dishonoured on presentation to the national bankers!
It is the penalty, I suppose, of our position in the United States, as the first and, so far, the only successful great republic of modern times, that we are expected to accept a sort of moral responsibility for all the experiments in republicanism, no matter how absurd, odious, or preposterous they may be, which it may come into the heads of people anywhere else in the world to try. I do not see why Americans who are not under some strenuous necessity of making stump speeches in or out of Congress, with an eye to some impending election, should submit to this without a protest. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery: it does not follow that it is the most agreeable.
I do not know that Western drawing-rooms take more delight in the Japanese, who most amiably present themselves everywhere in the regulation dress-coat and white cravat of modern Christendom, than in the Chinese, who calmly and haughtily persist in wearing the ample, stately, and comfortable garments of their own people.