How far is the application to France, of the epithet employed in the title that heads these pages, a misnomer? This is a question that would be answered very differently by those who study its state of feeling, and those who judge its position by mere established fact. That the fact and the feeling are completely at issue throughout the country, is undoubted, indisputable. A republican government has been established by the _coup de main_ of a small minority in France--has been accepted by the hesitation of surprise--has been maintained by the desire of peace and order:--so far goes fact. Republican principles were hateful to the immense majority of the country at large in the past, uncongenial to its habits and sentiments, impossible according to its views; they are productive, as yet, of nothing but confusion, distress, ruin, riot, and mistrust, in the present; they are looked upon with alarm as regards their results in the future:--so much for feeling. Fact and feeling, then, are at variance and in collision. The result of the conflict lies hidden in the mysteries of that future, the issue of which, at no epoch of history, perhaps, clearseeing eyes and wise foreseeing heads could less pretend to predict, than in the present chaotic hurly-burly of European society. The politicians who declared that the general spirit of the country in France was, in their vague and fantastic language of the Chamber, _centre-gauche_, or the advocate of liberal progress, may have been very right,--but republican it never was, republican it is not. Republican--without pretension to the audacity of a prediction but just stated as impossible--it certainly does not as yet appear ever likely to become. In its present state of feeling, then, France--that is to say, the country, the provinces, the departments, or whatever France, out of Paris, may be called--is about as much genuine republican, as a white man who suddenly finds his face smeared over with the contents of a blacking-bottle is a genuine negro. But, for the sake of avoiding that confusion of terms and ideas in which the French themselves are so fond of indulging, to an extent that proves the deification of "the vague" to take far higher flights among them, especially in their republican tenets, than any flown by confused German head,--let it be taken as a rule, that fact is to have the precedence of feeling, as in most matters in the world,--and let it be supposed that the misnomer is no misnomer, that there has been no mistake, in truth, in the title of "Republican France."