The future of France has now rather better prospects of stability, or might have them, if the effects of the next war with Germany were not so difficult to foresee. The reason is not because the French are less fickle than the English, but simply because they have got through more of the long revolutionary process, so that the new order is more under the protection of popular conservative instincts. There is also a strong desire for rest, a weariness of change after the most disturbed century of the national existence. The single wish of the people is to pursue their avocations in peace, and if the plain truth must be told, they have no longer the old capacity for political enthusiasm. The genuine royalist sentiment is almost extinct; if it lingers at all, it is only in a few aristocratic families, and hardly even in these since the death of Henri V. deprived it alike of object and aliment. Even the Count of Paris himself does not reverence the Divine Right of royalty in his own person, since he condescends to bid against the Bonapartists for democratic acceptance. [Sidenote: Coolness of French Republican Sentiment. Coolness of the Young.] [Sidenote: Coolness a Sign of settled Possession.] On the other hand, the republican sentiment, though resolute as to the preservation of republican forms, has certainly become wonderfully cool. The coolness of the young men is especially remarkable and significant. They are mostly republicans, it is true, and have no belief in the possibility of a monarchical restoration, but the more intelligent of them see the difficulties and the defects of a republican government very plainly, and they have a tendency to dwell upon those difficulties and defects in a manner that would astonish the militant republicans of the past. This composed and rational temper is the state of mind that comes upon all of us after the settled possession of an object, and it is a _sign_ of settled possession. I myself have known two generations of French republicans, the ardent, hopeful, self-sacrificing men who looked forward, as from the desert to the promised land, and now their sons, for whom the promised land has the incurable defect of being no longer ideal. [Sidenote: Reason for the Probable Duration of the Democracy.] [Sidenote: Sir Henry Maine. His Contemptuous Estimation of a French President.] [Sidenote: Influence of a French President.]