All this seems mournful to men of Renan's type, and to young men of fashion who sigh for the "elegance" of the Empire or the Restoration, and pose consequently as imperialists or as adherents of Henri V. But the mass of the nation is supremely contented. The peasants say that the Republic is the only government which does not go to war; the middle classes, richer and more numerous in France than in any other country, are happy in having the care of their material interests in their own hands, and especially in the consciousness that they are now the ruling class, and that bourgeois intelligence and respectability, rather than imperial frivolity or royal pietism, is the prevailing idea. Even Renan admits that "the present hour is sweet:" what troubles him is the thought of the future. But the republicans are not troubled at all. They don't intend to carry out any great reforms; they wish to avoid all foreign complications until the yearned-for hour arrives when Germany will be forced to disgorge what they are pleased to term its ill-gotten booty; they have in their ranks almost all the administrative and oratorical powers of the country; and they tell you that M. Grevy, the present president of the Chamber of Deputies, will succeed to the presidency, when the "stupid" MacMahon goes out, with just as little difficulty as the latter had in coming in, and that he, in turn, will in all probability be succeeded by Gambetta. These two men are bourgeois to the tips of their fingers, as was Thiers--modest, leading a regular life; well-informed on all local matters, and naively ignorant of the rest of the world; not strong believers in political economy; prudent and anti-clerical. Only, Gambetta, being twenty years younger than Grevy, is by twenty years more fiery and radical.