When a political leader in the course of some fifteen years of Parlamentary life has upset, or has helped to upset, no fewer than eighteen administrations and has always refused to take office himself, that leader is likely to have created a few enemies. When, in addition to these feats of destruction, he has during the same period secured the nomination and election of three Presidents of the Republic and has thus proved an insuperable obstacle to the realisation of the legitimate ambitions of the most important public men in France who were not elected, it is clear that personal popularity was not the object he had in view. It is impossible for the ordinary politician or journalist to judge fairly a man of this sort. Politics in modern Europe is an interesting game and, quite frequently, a remunerative profession. Party interests sap all principle and the attainment of personal aims and ambitions in and out of Parliament is, as a rule, quite incompatible with common honesty. Instead of Court intrigues and backstair cabals there are nowadays lobby “transactions” and convenient sales of titles and positions arranged, for value received, at private meetings. That is as far as democracy has got yet. It is all an understood business, often complicated with more flagitious pecuniary dealings outside.  
Republican Government, or Constitutional Government, means, therefore, the success or failure of vote-catching and advantage-grabbing schemes, quite irrespective, from the public point of view, of the merits of the proposals which are put forward. Honest enthusiasts, who really wish to get something done for the benefit of the present or the coming[81] generation, are only useful in so far as they act as stokers-up of public opinion for the profit of the political promoter of this or that faction. Steam is needed to drive the machine of State. Men of real convictions furnish that steam. But they are fools for their pains, all the same. Half the amount of energy used in the right direction would gain for them place, pelf, and possibly power, which is all that any man of common sense goes into politics for. Anybody who carries high principle and serious endeavour into political life is not playing the game. Everybody around him wants to know what on earth he is driving at. The only conceivable object of turning a Ministry out is to get in. To turn a Government out in order to keep out yourself is an unintelligible and therefore dangerous form of political mania, or a persistent manifestation of original sin.
 
Clemenceau was found guilty on both counts. But he was the ablest public man in all France. Moreover, he was successful in the diabolical combinations he set on foot. The thing was uncanny. That he should begin by overthrowing other politicians was all in the way of business. But that he should go on at it, time after time, for year after year, while other and inferior men took the posts he had opened for them, was not to be explained by any known theory of human motives. If he had been a cranky religionist, now, that would conceivably have met the case. He might have been “possessed” from on high or from below. But Clemenceau was and is a free-thinker of free-thinkers: neither Heaven nor Hell has anything to say to him. Clearly it is a case of malignant atavism: Clemenceau has thrown back to his animal ancestry. What is the totem of the tribe which has entered into him, whose instinct of depredation pervades his every political action? We have it! He is of the jungle, jungly. His spring is terrific. His crashing attack fatal. He looks as formidable as he is. In short, he is a Tiger, and there you are. That accounts for everything!
 
When Clemenceau was re-elected Deputy for the 18th Arron[82]dissement to the National Assembly, on October 14th, 1877, and took the active part in the renewed struggle with Marshal MacMahon already spoken of, Gambetta was the leader at the height of his power and influence, with a solid Republican majority of more than a hundred votes. But from this period he became steadily more and more Opportunist, which gained him great credit in Great Britain, and Clemenceau was thenceforth the recognised leader of the advanced Left. MacMahon having resigned, M. Grévy was elected President with the support of Gambetta.
 
From the first Clemenceau had vigorously opposed the establishment of a Second Chamber in the shape of a Senate divorced from a direct popular vote. This was a step calculated to hamper progress at every turn, and at critical moments to intensify those very antagonisms which it was Gambetta’s intention, no doubt, to compose entirely, or at any rate to mitigate. Clemenceau did not view the matter from Gambetta’s point of view. The Monarchists and Buonapartists were the domestic enemy, as the Germans had been and might be again the foreign enemy. The only sound policy for strengthening the Republic to resist both was to favour those measures political and social which would make that Republic, which they had established with so much difficulty and at such great cost, a genuinely democratic Republic. Any surrender to the reactionists and the clericals must inevitably dishearten those parties, now shown to be the majority of the whole French people, who were for the Republic and the Republic alone. Opportunism also gave the anti-democrats and intriguers a false notion of their own power, virtually helped them to carry on their underground agitations for a change of the new constitution, and provided them in the undemocratic Senate with a political force that might be turned to their own purpose.
 
It was more important all through, thought Clemenceau, to inspire your own side with confidence than to placate your opponents by half-measures. It was, in fact, not enough to[83] eject officials who were known to be hostile to the Republic; it was still more essential to give such shape to the political forms and so vivify political opinion that even the most unscrupulous officials could not turn them to the account of reaction. Both steps were necessary to carry out a thorough democratic programme. In fact, the whole scheme of administration in France could not be permanently improved merely by substituting one set of bureaucrats for another. Much more drastic measures of a peaceful character were indispensable, and these Opportunism thwarted. Gambetta may not have given up his desire to carry these Radical measures in 1877 and 1878: he still retained and expressed his old opinions upon clericalism and its sinister influence. But he was no longer the vehement champion of the advanced party at Versailles, and the position which he had abandoned Clemenceau took up and pushed further to the front.
 
There was no matter on which the lines of cleavage between the Republicans and the reactionists were more definitely and clearly drawn than on the question of the Amnesty of the Communists. No man in the Assembly was stronger in favour of their complete amnesty by law than Clemenceau. This he showed in 1876, and in his powerful advocacy of the release of the great agitator and conspirator Blanqui in 1879. Every reactionary and trimming man of moderate views was bitterly opposed to a policy of justice towards the victims of the wholesale measures of repression formulated by M. Thiers and so frightfully carried out by General Gallifet and the Versailles troops in 1871. Even when measures of partial amnesty were passed, their application was nullified as far as possible by Ministers. It was part of an organised policy to frighten the bourgeoisie and peasants into another Empire. The reprisals of the Bloody Week and the transportations to Cayenne and New Caledonia had not by any means fully satisfied the enemies alike of the Commune and the Republic. So Clemenceau and his friends never ceased their attacks upon M. Waddington and others who took the rancorous conservative view of un[84]ceasing persecution of the men and women who, after all, were the first to declare the Republic. M. Waddington, as Premier, got a resolution passed by the Chamber in his favour. But this did not silence either Clemenceau’s friends or himself. Here, in fact, was a crucial case of his power of getting rid of an obnoxious Ministry even in the face of a Ministerial majority. The Tiger showed his claws and made ready to spring. But first he gave fair warning of his intentions. Nothing could be plainer than this: “Why has the Minister of Justice demanded a partial amnesty? Because he is anxious that the country should not forget the horrors of the Commune. But then, if you do not wish it to forget the horrors of the Commune, why do you desire that those who have been condemned should forget the horrors of its repression? Because for eight long years we have kept under cover the abominable facts at our disposal, you have thought yourselves in a position to trample on us! You say: We shall not forget the hostages and the conflagrations. Very well. I who speak here tell you: If you forget nothing, your opponents will remember too.”
 
The speech from which that passage is an excerpt was regarded as a distinct menace on Clemenceau’s part. It was followed up by the extreme Left with a series of interruptions, interrogations and denunciations which ended in the retirement of M. Waddington. He had his majority but he had no Clemenceau. So out went Waddington and his colleagues. In came M. Freycinet—“the white mouse.” “We have had,” said Clemenceau’s organ, La Justice, “in the Waddington cabinet a Dufaure cabinet without M. Dufaure. To-day we have a Waddington cabinet without M. Waddington. It is a botch upon a botch.” A nice welcome for M. Freycinet! A pleasing congratulation for the President, M. Grévy! The administration was regarded as a political monstrosity. It had two heads, M. Freycinet and M. Jules Ferry, one looking to the right and the other to the left. The friends of Freycinet could not stand Ferry: the friends of Ferry abhorred Freycinet. This new political marriage not only began but went[85] on with mutual aversion. It stood at the mercy, therefore, of Clemenceau, who was less inclined to be merciful since the Premier declared himself bitterly hostile to the plenary amnesty proposed by the famous old Republican, M. Louis Blanc. Also on account of clerical tendencies. Out goes Freycinet, therefore, in his turn, and in comes M. Jules Ferry, with various clerical, educational and other troubles of his own hatching to clear up. Ministries, in short, were going in and out on the dial of Presidential favour like the figures of a Dutch clock. Clemenceau was getting his claws well into the various political personages all the time. As none of them had any blood to lose in the shape of principles there was no great harm done—except to the Republic! It was the perpetual immolation of a sawdust brigade. A keen critic of the period said of the Ferry Ministry—which was beaten on its proposal to postpone on behalf of education the reform of the magistracy and all that this carried with it in regard to the amnesty—that it wished to die before it lived. Down it went for the moment, and returned to place out of breath and half-ruined. But there the Ministry still was, and that by itself was something in those days of political topsy-turveydom, with Clemenceau and his party ever ready to assert themselves.
 
Thus the Republic stumbled rather than marched on, from the date of Marshal MacMahon’s resignation and the installation of M. Grévy as President up to the period of the declaration of July 14th, in remembrance of July 14th, 1789, and the Fall of the Bastille, as the fête day of the Republic after the passage of a practically complete amnesty. This was really a great triumph for all Republicans, as it put the Republic in its true historic relation to the past, the present and the future. With such a national fête day, with the certainty that Republicans, if they chose to keep united, could always command a large majority in the Assembly, the elections of 1881 might well have been a first step towards a thorough political and social reorganisation of the Republic. Unfortunately there were several causes of disunion. President of the Assembly though[86] he was, and therefore excluded by his position as well as by M. Grévy’s prejudice against him from coming into immediate competition with M. Ferry for the Premiership, Gambetta was actively supporting the scrutin de liste, or political appeal to the whole country, against scrutin d’arrondissement, or local elections. This was regarded as a bid on his part for a clear Parliamentary dictatorship. Already on October 20th, 1880, Clemenceau had denounced the hero of the dictatorship of despair of 1871, fine as his effort had then been, as aiming at personal power ten years later. A victory at the polls gained through scrutin de liste would probably ensure him success in this venture.
 
Nevertheless, in spite of open and secret opposition, Gambetta had sufficient influence to carry the scrutin de liste through the National Assembly. But with the curious irony of fate he was defeated by a majority of 32 in the Senate which he himself had been so largely instrumental in forcing upon the Republic! This was on June 9th, 1881. Three months before, M. Barodet had brought forward a resolution backed by 64 deputies which, if carried, would have abolished the equality of rights between the Senate and the National Assembly, would have withdrawn the right of the former to dissolve Parliament, would have made the Chamber permanent like the Senate, would have modified the system of election of the second House; would have prevented the re-enactment of the scrutin de liste by again making the electoral law for the deputies part of the Constitution; and lastly would have summoned a Constituent Assembly in order to carry out these reforms. This whole project was discussed in the Assembly on May 31st. There was no mistake about Clemenceau’s attitude. He formulated a vigorous indictment against the Constitution of 1875 and attacked the Senate with great violence. The Constitution of 1875 was, he declared, a powerful weapon of war expressly forged for use against the Republic. The Senate with its anti-democratic method of election was a permanent danger to the State. It was not in any sense an element of stability[87] but an element of resistance. “What is the use of talking of a brake on the machine or a weight to counterbalance popular opinion? Does not universal suffrage provide its own brake, its own regulator?” This time, however, Clemenceau missed his coup. M. Barodet’s motion was rejected and the conservative Republic rumbled on comfortably, though Clemenceau shortly afterwards very nearly toppled M. Ferry’s Cabinet over, the Ministers only securing a vote in their favour by a majority of 13 made up by their own votes.
 
Looking back to that period when the whole Constitution seemed almost certain to go into the melting-pot and come out again in a thoroughly democratic shape, it is remarkable to notice how, in spite of the efforts of Clemenceau, M. Naquet and other democrats, the Republic of compromise has steadily adhered to its old machinery. Why the cumbrous and often reactionary Senate, elected in such wise as to exclude democratic influence, should have been maintained for more than forty years is difficult to explain. But nations, as our own belated and unmanageable Constitution proves, when once they have become accustomed to a form of government, are very slow indeed to adapt it to rapidly changing economic and social developments. This, it may be said, su............