THE FRENCH RADICALS AND THE NEW REPUBLIC.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 115, 9 July 1875, Page 9

THE FRENCH RADICALS AND THE NEW REPUBLIC.

— ++ — •M. Gambetta made a great speech to his constituents at BellevzUe, on St George's Day. It filled sixteen columns of his organ, 'La R6pTibhque Fraucaise/ and has excited even more -attention than the utterances of so. prominent a leader usually do in France. It has marked the attitude and sketched out the policy of the Red towards the Conservative Republic, and completely justified the misgivings with which the majority of the Assembly voted in their late momentous division. On the other hancl it indicates a change in the views of French Radicals.. Their leader has certainly prontted by the criticisms and alarm which his unguarded words at the enterrement civil of M. Edgar Quinet had excited. The ex-Dictator is no longer aptly described by the epithet which M. Thiers hurled at him m the moment of terror and conflict. If he then deserved to be called unfoufurieux, he is now a sincere convert, not perhaps to the Republique sage, but to the absolute necessity of yielding so far to circumstances as to seek the accomplishment of Radical ends by means exclusively Conservative. It; is true that he told the Communists of Belleville, whom he thanked for his first introduction into public life, that he was come among them once more to show himself unchanged as ever— one of themselves, untamed by his long contact with Conservative preponderance in the Assembly not having been induced, as he phrased it, to " cut off his tail," and as firm as ever against any such base compliance with the prevailing fashion ; but it is reassuring to be able to detect the senatorial aims thinly veiled under the conventional claptrap of the demagogue ; to find himself stigmatizing " revolutionists " as " a class worthy of execration;" and setting before an audience commonly supposed to be at war with society such political objects as "future social peace, a domestic and foreign polirr, education morahty, and order." A party that cares for these' things oven m its own acceptation of the terms, is less an ob jest of suspicion and fear to reasonable well-to-do citiz3ns than M. GambotU's following has been heretofore. We see that their political education has commenced, and they will not be formidable if they cease to slaughter, to plunder, and to burn, and turn to constitutionalism with a sincere heart, though they remain Red still. They wore taught on Friday how to view the Conservative checks devised for the safety of the new Republic as so many means for securing the attainment of their cherished ends. By the recent enactments Republicanism is definitely established, at least in name aud no man now dare call himself a partizan of Henry V. or Napoleon 111 Those hopes, together with the Septennat, " have withdrawn into darkness." If the President of the Republic is to be chosen by the Chambers, that is a guarantee against the calamity, and disgrace of another plebiscite. The Senators are to be chosen not ' by themselves, not by the Chief of the State, but partly by the National Assembly, ana partly by the Communes, that is to say by the councillors whom the Communes elect. Thus the municipal constituencies will at length develope into political constituencies and become emancipated from the dictation of the maires and m-efel / What better could a Communist ask ? Let not Radicals then be lazily indifferent to tho Senatorial elections, nor regard the new institution as a h« -stile bulwark, or as a Vendoine column, marked for abolition at the first gleam of Radical ascendancy, but let them determine to utilize it as an excellent means of attaining the complete realization of the " conquests and principles of '89°" In one word, let the Commune of Paris elect one such as Garobettn, to the Senate. Then the Monarchists will not be able to turn tho new Republic to account ; and as for the seventy-five Senators to be elected by the Assembly, the orator assured his hearers that there would not be a single Bonapartist amongst them. In the con eluding part of his speech he threw a sop to the German Cerebus by asserting, in terms plagiarized from Dr. Falck, tho complete supremacy of the State over "religious matters." French Conservatives may be congratulated on these revelations of tho new policy proposed for adoption by their opponents. At all events such outspoken declarations are many times less dano-erous than secret plotting.-*-' Tablet.'