Léon Gambetta had but fourteen years of active political life, and during only eleven of those years was he in a position to make himself seriously felt. But what an amazing career this was of the grocer's boy of Cahors who stirred all France to enthusiastic support or ferocious denunciation between 1871 and 1882! When William Morris died, the doctor who attended him was asked what he died of. "He died of being William Morris," was the reply. Although Gambetta's death was due to a pistol-shot received under circumstances never fully explained, it may be said that he also died of being Léon Gambetta. For his inner fires had burnt the man out. He crowded all the excitement and passions of a long lifetime into those stormy eleven years, and without some account of him and his efforts for the foundation of the Republic the story of Clemenceau is not complete. Born in 1848 and enabled to come to Paris by the touching self-sacrifice of a maiden aunt who believed that her nephew's confidence in his destiny to do great things would be realised, Gambetta was soon regarded as a leader among the young men of the Quartier Latin, who were in full revolt against the Empire. He distinguished himself by his easy-going, rough-and-tumble mode of life, his carelessness about study of the law which was to be his means of earning a livelihood, and his perfervid eloquence in the political circles which he frequented. Lawyer, journalist, bohemian orator of the clubs, strongly anti-Imperialist, he had much personal magnetism, but was not generally recognised as a man of exceptional ability. The few cases he had had in the Courts did not give him any considerable standing. Such was Gambetta when a number of Republican journalists were arrested on November 12th, 1868, for starting a subscription to erect a monument to M. Baudin, the Republican deputy who had been shot down in cold blood during Louis Napoleon's massacre of the people of Paris on December 2nd, 1851--seventeen years before. Among these prisoners was the famous Delescluze, then editor of the _Réveil_. His counsel was Léon Gambetta. Gambetta's speech was not merely a defence of his client, it was a scathing indictment of the Empire, from its foundation on the ruin of the Republic of 1848 by the _coup d'état_ onwards. "Who," the advocate asked, "were the men who 'saved' France at the cost of the death or transportation or exile of all her most eminent citizens? They were, to quote Corneille, 'un tas d'hommes perdus de dettes et de crimes.' These are the sort of people who for centuries have slashed down institutions and laws. Against them the human conscience is powerless, in spite of the sublime march-past of the martyrs who protest in the name of religion destroyed, of morality outraged, of equity crushed under the jackboot of the soldier. This is not salvation: it is assassination." And this was no longer a press prosecution: it was the Emperor and his set of scoundrels who were now