French centre still fighting obstinately was obliged to evacuate Bazeilles and Balan; and the whole French army was compelled to recoil inwards upon Sedan, where it was crushed by a death-dealing artillery. No alternative but a surrender remained; the German tactics had completely succeeded; and on the 2nd of September, the last army of France in the field had passed under the yoke, and was a mass of prisoners of war. The Emperor was one of the trophies of the conqueror; MacMahon, more fortunate, had been severely wounded and did not witness the capitulation; but upwards of 90,000 men and from 400 to 500 guns in the hands of the triumphant Germans attested the magnitude of the catastrophe. The results of the terrible battle of Sedan--a catastrophe unparalleled in the annals of war--were the destruction of the only French army that remained to the nation in the field, the complete isolation of Bazaine at Metz with a certainty of his ultimate surrender, the exposure of Paris to an immediate siege, and the prospect of the subjection of France to the will of an implacable conqueror. At no conjuncture in military history has a strategic error of the gravest kind been fraught with such calamitous effects; and the march to Sedan will long be noted as one of those frightful mistakes of generalship which have deeply influenced the fate of kingdoms. A day or two after this dire event a revolution broke out in Paris; the empire collapsed with the captive Emperor; the Empress Regent was compelled to fly; and, although a Government of National Defence was formed, composed of men of very great eminence, who--after fruitless attempts to negotiate--bravely resolved to carry on the struggle, sooner than consent to the dismemberment of France, hardly anyone believed that the defeated nation would be able to offer serious resistance. The situation of France, indeed, appeared desperate even to her well-wishers--even to those who resented the dictum of the cynical scorner of popular rights, that whether their inhabitants liked it or not, Alsace and Lorraine 'would belong to Prussia'--and for several weeks her exulting enemies remained absolute masters of the situation, and trampled down the defenceless country. The German armies which had fought at Sedan marched without a moment's delay to Paris, arrived before the forts on the 18th September, and, having routed a few raw troops, who endeavoured to harass them at Versailles, invested the capital on all sides, and inclosed it in impenetrable lines. The surging waves of the tremendous invasion meanwhile flowed furiously over the northern provinces, carrying with them devastation and ruin. Strasburg, after a siege which clearly indicated the temper of the people of Alsace, and their assumed sympathy with their 'German liberators,' fell on the 29th September; most of the fortresses of the Vosges, with the exception of Bitsche and Phalsburg, submitted; Toul,