These demands on the part of the French could not be accepted. Had we agreed to them we should have surrendered the greater and more important portion of the advantages we had gained in the last seven weeks, at the cost of great sacrifices and severe exertions. In other words, we should in the main have returned to the position in which we were on the 19th of September, the day on which our troops completed the investment of Paris. We are asked to allow Paris to provision itself, when even now it suffers from scarcity and will shortly be obliged to starve or surrender. We are to suspend our military operations just at the moment when the fall of Metz and the release of the army of Prince Frederick Charles enable us to extend and render them more effective. We are quietly to permit recruiting and organisation, by means of which the French Republic is to create a new field force, while we require no recruits. At the same time that we are to allow Paris and the other French fortresses to supply themselves with provisions, we are to provide for our own troops without the requisitions which are necessary in an enemy’s country. We are to make all these concessions without any military equivalent--such, for instance, as the evacuation of one or two of the Paris forts in return for the liberty to provision the city--and without being offered any clear prospect of peace. The first object of the armistice according to the Thiers memorandum, namely, the restoration of an orderly state of affairs by the lawful election of a Constituent Assembly, is unquestionably more in the interest of the French themselves than in ours; and, considering the constant excitement maintained by the inflammatory proclamations of the Provisional Government, it may possibly not be secured even under a new administration. More orderly conditions could be brought about even now without a truce if the present Government were seriously disposed to work in that direction. It was absolutely impossible on the German side to have anything to do with such proposals. A different arrangement altogether was needful, and therefore the Chancellor of the Confederation offered M. Thiers a truce of twenty-five to twenty-eight days on the basis of the maintenance of the military _status quo_, which would enable the French to carry on the elections in peace, and to convoke the Assembly thus constituted. This also was a concession on our part in which the advantages were all on the French side. If, as Thiers asserted, Paris was supplied with provisions and other necessaries for several months, it is not easy to see why the Provisional Government broke off the negotiations which, at the outside, would have prevented the Parisians from making useless sorties. France, on the other hand, would have had the great advantage of having a line of demarcation drawn which would have arrested the advance of the German forces, restricting the unopposed occupation of further districts by our army that had been