stood at bay at last, and boldly declared that the Government of France had taken measures to render impossible any political cohesion of North and South Germany. A day or two after, Count von Bismarck effectively and contemptuously replied to this declaration by unfolding in the Prussian Chamber the treaties of alliance already concluded between his Government and the South German States. It has always been a matter of surprise to me that Thiers did not prove a success at the bar, to which at first he applied his abilities. He seems to have the very gifts which would naturally have made a great pleader. All through his political career he displayed a wonderful capacity for making the worse appear the better cause. The adroitness which contends skilfully that black is white to-day, having argued with equal force and fluency that white was green yesterday, would have been highly appropriate and respectable in a legal advocate. But M. Thiers did not somehow get on at the bar, and having no influential friends (he was, I think, the son of a locksmith), but plenty of ambition, courage, and confidence, he strove to enter political life by the avenue of journalism. Much of Thiers's subsequent success as a debater was probably due to that skill which a practised journalist naturally acquires--the dexterity of arraying facts and arguments so as not to bear too long on any one part of the subject, and not to offer to the mind of the reader more than his patience and interest are willing to accept. Most of the events of his political career, up to his reappearance in public life in 1863, belong wholly to history and the past. His long rivalry with Guizot, his intrigues out of office, and his conduct as a Minister of Louis Philippe, have hardly a more direct and vital connection with the affairs of to-day than the statecraft of Mazarin or the political vicissitudes of Bolingbroke. One indeed of the projects of M. Thiers has now come rather unexpectedly into active operation. The fortifications of Paris were the offspring of the apprehension M. Thiers entertained, thirty years ago, that the Eastern question of that day might provoke another great European war. Since that time many critics sneered and laughed a good deal at M. Thiers's system of fortifications; but the whirligig of time has brought the statesman his revenge. No one could mistake the meaning of the smile of self-satisfaction which used last autumn to light up the unattractive features of the veteran Orleanist, as he made tour after tour of inspection around the defences of Paris. This chain of fortifications alone, one might almost say, connects the Thiers of the present generation with the Thiers of the past. There were malignant persons who did not scruple to say that the author of the scheme of defences was not altogether sorry for the national calamity which had brought them into use, and apparently justified their construction. It is very hard to be