Dieu, were elected by a combined majority of 7,094 votes. If the Boulangists carry Amiens, therefore, at the legislative election this year, it may be taken for granted, I think, that M. Goblet and his friend the senatorial mayor have not educated their fellow-citizens into very staunch and trustworthy supporters of the Republic. M. Fleury, the editor-in-chief of the Conservative _Echo de la Somme_, who made a pretty thorough canvass of the department before the election of August 19, 1888, gives me some curious details as to that election. The monarchists, both royalists and imperialists, gave a general and tacit, and in many cases an overt and active, support to General Boulanger, their object being the same as his--to bring about a repeal of the existing law of 1884, which was passed to prevent any real revision of the constitution in a sense hostile to the existing republican form of government. Of course if the people of the Somme had really cared anything about the Republic as a form of government, they ought to have defeated General Boulanger. It is the opinion of M. Fleury that the people of the Somme, and indeed of Picardy, not only care little or nothing about the Republic as a form of government, but actually and by a considerable majority prefer some monarchical form--probably, on the whole, the Empire. They are not in the least likely to express this preference at the polls, because, in common with the vast majority of the electors throughout France, they have been born and brought up to take their form of government from Paris. So long as the government at Paris--be it royal, imperial, or republican--controls the executive, the people of the provinces are extremely unlikely to make an emphatic effort of their own to be rid of that government. If Louis Philippe, in 1848, would have allowed Marshal Bugeaud to use the force at his command in Paris, the Republic improvised in February of that year would have been strangled before birth, to the extreme satisfaction of an enormous majority of the French people. This was afterwards overwhelmingly shown by the election of Louis Napoleon, when General Cavaignac, with all the advantage of the control of the machinery of government at Paris, could secure only a relatively insignificant popular vote at the polls against the representative of the imperial monarchy. I spent the winter in Paris two years afterwards as a youth, during my first tour in Europe, and I there heard an American resident of Paris, well known at that time in the world of French politics, Mr. George Sumner, a brother of the senator from Massachusetts, relate in the _salon_ of M. de Tocqueville a curious story of the days of February, which strikingly illustrates the disposition of the French provinces at that time to take whatever Paris might send them in the way either of administration or of revolution.