M. GAMBETTA.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1561, 19 February 1879, Page 4

M. GAMBETTA.

The political future (says the London " Times ") of M Gambetta is a question the study, if r.ot the solution, of which forces itself on whoever weighs the important problems of our time. It is in vain that his adversaries endeaver to underrate him. M. Gambetta has hitherto braved all their efforts; irony, calumny, insults, the most odious personalities have been baflled by his universal popularity, and he Btill remains tho most prominent and most powerful personage in France, the one on whom all curiosity is directed with the most irritating fixity. If during the recess you accompany a foreigner to Versailles and show him over the Chamber of Deputies, you will remark two seats on the left distinguished by a small paper band. Tho ushers will tell you that one of these hands indicates the scat occupied by M. Thiers, the other that titled by M. Gambetta, because those are the two seats which all visitors, without exception, ask to see. In all public ceremonies, at the theatre, in the official saloons which he visits, whenever he appears, M. Gambetta becomes the object of every gaze. A-'d this is not a vulgar curiosity, confined to tourists or people with nothing to do ; no, it is a universal curiosity, mingled with hatred or admiration, with or without an aim, but persistently directed to wards a figure absolutely modern and democratic, which is becoming more and more prominent, and is moving with irreeistible regularity towards the foreground, its final goal. Prince Bismarck remarked a few months ago, " M. Gambetta is among the few men whom I should like to know. Notwithstanding all that is said against him, he is an able man, and he eclipses his fellow-country-men by the proportions of a reputation which has become universal." What Prince Bismarck said I hear from all I meet, and never a day pasßes without my being asked, "Could you give me an opportunity of seeing or hearing M Gambetta ?" The man who excites so widespread a feeling, who, loaded with eulogies or insults, thus forces himself on everybody's reflections, is not and cannot be an ordinary man. He is among those whose every phrase deserves a special Btudy, and who are called to great destinies or great reverses. What is at any rate undeniable is that he cannot be passed over in silence or judged merely by his past achievements, for he is one of the great factors in the future of France—that is to say, in the future of Europe, governed against its will by an inevitable solidarity. Well, there has not, perhaps, for eight years been a moment when M. Gambetta's position and projects more imperatively demanded the observation of the world than the present. Never was his power more real, more unquestioned than to-day ; never was his will, supported by the will of the masses, more dominant over his party and all its members ; never has his figure cast a darker shadow over all those who, willingly or unwillingly, are ranged behind him. From time to time some striking individuality in the Republican ranks attempts to penetrate beyond the general obscurity in which the entire party seems plunged; some lustre Burrounds his name, a popularity as fleeting as the smoke of a cannon envelopes him, and then he disappears in the deep shadow cast by M. Gambetta. Hitherto nothing has been able to diminish his popularity, which rekindles in what he himself calls "a torrent of insultß which passes." Indeed, history has had few more curious figures, few personages whose rise offers more interesting or more complex problems. The problem, it will bo seen, iB equally strange and complex. Here is a man whoso talents, fortune, temperament, havo raised him to the summit of public favor, and who, relying on that favour, exercises authority over all the institutions of his country, yet who could not, without violence or danger for himself and for tho institutions he defends, attain the highest post, and before whom is gradually arising that unconscious resistance excited by overy absolute will, —a resistance also endangering the harmony of the existing institutions, unless warded off in time. What means is there of averting that danger except the will of tho very man who calls forth tho blind obedience of some of his party and the serious uneasiness of others ? Yet account must likewise be taken of the ordeal imposed on this powerful and active mind in showing him supreme power placed for nine years above his reach. It is here that a compromise would at once remove the tension of the situation. It may be expected that M. Gambetta will himself set a limit to his action which will remove all jealousies. It may be expected that he will make himself the counterpoise between the public powers, and that he will place his influence at the service of those at the head of existing institutions. One may count, in short, on his suppleness and on his love of the Republic with which his own position is bound up; but it may be asked whether he will have the courage to face without impatience nine years of such suspense, and one might almost answer in the negative. Happily, however, the Constitution is not unalterable. The Congress, without renouncing its loftiest prerogative of nominating the President, could abridge the Presidential term, after the fashion of the United States. A Bix years' interval would doubtless suffice to make M. Gambetta the exact point to which French politics would would have led up by 1884, and six years are not too Ion; a time for a man of his age and character to resign himself to when it is a question of attaining the final goal. The constitution makers of 1875 eagerly maintained the seven years' term, because it was the bequest of an anti-Republican Cabinet and still represented the Septennate ; the constitution revisers of 1880 might for different reasons curtail it, and this reduction would be for M. Gambetta a kind of nomination inpartibus, in return for which the too powerful leader of the majority of the Chamber might at once resolve not to be, as he is now reproached with being, the governor of the Government, the supreme will controlling all other wills.