much more easy to uneducated men is loyalty to a monarch. A nation
which does not expect good from a Parliament, cannot check or punish
a Parliament. France expects, I fear, too little from her
Parliaments ever to get what she ought. Now that the suffrage is
universal, the average intellect and the average culture of the
constituent bodies are excessively low; and even such mind and
culture as there is has long been enslaved to authority; the French
peasant cares more for standing well with his present prefet than
for anything else whatever; he is far too ignorant to check and
watch his Parliament, and far too timid to think of doing either if
the executive authority nearest to him does not like it. The
experiment of a strictly Parliamentary Republic--of a Republic where
the Parliament appoints the executive--is being tried in France at
an extreme disadvantage, because in France a Parliament is unusually
likely to be bad, and unusually likely also to be free enough to
show its badness. Secondly, the present polity of France is not a
copy of the whole effective part of the British Constitution, but
only a part of it. By our Constitution nominally the Queen, but
really the Prime Minister, has the power of dissolving the Assembly.
But M. Thiers has no such power; and therefore, under ordinary
circumstances, I believe, the policy would soon become unmanageable.
The result would be, as I have tried to explain, that the Assembly
would be always changing its Ministry, that having no reason to fear
the penalty which that change so often brings in England, they would
be ready to make it once a month. Caprice is the characteristic vice
of miscellaneous assemblies, and without some check their selection
would be unceasingly mutable. This peculiar danger of the present
Constitution of France has however been prevented by its peculiar
circumstances. The Assembly have not been inclined to remove M.
Thiers, because in their lamentable present position they could not