If it were possible, as happily it is impossible, that the American people could be afflicted with a single year of such a Republic as that which now exists in France, we would rid ourselves of it, if necessary, by seeking annexation to Canada under the crown of our common ancestors, or by inviting the exiled Dom Pedro to recross the Atlantic and accept the throne of a North American Empire, with substantial guarantees that if we should ever change our minds and put him politely on board a ship again for Europe, the cheque given to him on his departure would not be dishonoured on presentation to the national bankers! It is the penalty, I suppose, of our position in the United States, as the first and, so far, the only successful great republic of modern times, that we are expected to accept a sort of moral responsibility for all the experiments in republicanism, no matter how absurd, odious, or preposterous they may be, which it may come into the heads of people anywhere else in the world to try. I do not see why Americans who are not under some strenuous necessity of making stump speeches in or out of Congress, with an eye to some impending election, should submit to this without a protest. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery: it does not follow that it is the most agreeable. I do not know that Western drawing-rooms take more delight in the Japanese, who most amiably present themselves everywhere in the regulation dress-coat and white cravat of modern Christendom, than in the Chinese, who calmly and haughtily persist in wearing the ample, stately, and comfortable garments of their own people. The framers of the French Republican Constitution of 1875 did the United States the honour to copy incorrectly, and absolutely to misapply, certain leading features of our organic law. In order to accomplish purposes absolutely inconsistent with all American ideas of liberty and of justice, the parliamentary revolutionists who got possession of power in France in 1879 have so twisted to their own ends this French Constitution of 1875, that their government of the Third French Republic in 1890 really resembles the government of the Akhoond of Swat about as nearly as it resembles the government of the American Republic under Washington.