intention to destroy by fire a noncombatant population,' as if starvation was a more humane process. Meanwhile silently, and hardly observed by the correspondents of the English Press, enormous preparations for the renewal of the contest were made in every part of the country. Arms were produced in prodigious quantities, old soldiers were recalled to their colours, recruits were summoned in hundreds of thousands, the nuclei of several armies were formed, and the splendid memories of 1793-4 were invoked by the representatives of the people, and created wide-spread martial enthusiasm. While Bismark jeered at the 'gentlemen of the pavement,' and cynically redoubled his confident insults, while telegram after telegram announced that town after town was capitulating, France was becoming a vast camp, and sternly, proudly, and in a very different spirit from that in which it began the war, the nation girded up its loins for the strife. M. Gambetta, whose journey from Paris in a balloon excited considerable ridicule at Versailles--for a while--was the mainspring of this remarkable movement, of which, if we cannot predict the success, the patriotism and force cannot be disputed. The first symptom in the turn of the tide which made itself distinctly perceived, was an engagement which took place on the 9th of November. A mass of raw levies and depôt battalions, to which had been given the name of the Army of the Loire, had been driven out of Orleans in October; and it was generally supposed that it had been all but destroyed. But a general had been placed at its head who had given it consistency and strength; it had been furnished with good artillery, and on the ninth of November it recrossed the Loire and defeated the Bavarian force in its front, which it succeeded in almost surrounding. After this the nuclei of armies, in the west, the north, and the south-east of France, have made their appearance, and are growing formidable; and the military strength of what had been deemed the effete and worn-out nation, has shown itself to be great and threatening. The attitude of the armies of the Loire and of the West has compelled the Germans to draw in almost their whole available forces to cover the immense circle of their lines around Paris; and though as yet they have suffered no reverse, and have even gained some important successes, their enemies still confront them in the field with rapidly improving power and discipline, and so long as they hold their present positions, they are exposed to considerable danger. In fact the German armies round Paris would be placed in imminent peril, if the covering armies on the circumference outside, were to meet anything like a defeat; and as the French levies are day after day acquiring an increase of numbers and force, this is by no means an impossible contingency. Meanwhile the beleaguered capital of France has offered to the besiegers a resistance which has astonished and confounded the world, and its illustrious