"But rivalries suddenly sprang up. It was necessary to make new arrangements in order to appease the Isambert group. Durand left the Public Instruction. "He was, during twenty minutes, Minister of War; he had the Post-Office and Telegraphs three-quarters of an hour; he was Minister of Foreign Affairs at a quarter to seven. "Finally, at seven o'clock, M. Peytral convoked him once again and said to him: "'My dear colleague, I appeal in this moment to all your republican energy and to your patriotic disinterestedness. My cabinet is constituted. You are no longer a member of it.' "'Good,' replied Durand, coldly. 'I hereby give notice of my intention to interpellate the government.'" The second of these contemporary documents professes to relate actual facts. "We announced, the other day, that the ex-deputy Fabérot, not re-elected at the late elections, had philosophically resumed his former occupation of journeyman hatter. "Another victim of universal suffrage, the barber Chauvin, has also returned to his dear razors. Is it quite certain, moreover, that he ever left them, even in the Chamber of Deputies? "However this may be, he has just reopened his shop. Only, M. Chauvin has abandoned his former quarter of the Rue des Archives, and has established himself in Passage Tivoli, near the Gare Saint-Lazare, where, in the most democratic fashion, he will shave you for twenty centimes and cut your hair for six sous. "This melancholy return to former surroundings has, moreover, nothing in it but what is very honorable,--only, it is necessary that the customers should be notified. "Which we hereby do." The great question of the army, of its relations with the civil authority and of the apparent hopelessness of any attempt to reconcile its maintenance and effectiveness with the democratic evolution of the age,--never a more burning question in France than at the present day,--scarcely admits of any of these pleasantries. But seldom have the amenities of discussion more completely disappeared than in the polemics now raging over the trial for treason of an officer of the general staff. One of the more recent of these dispassionate studies of the military problem appears in an article by M. Sully-Prudhomme in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and the failure of his attempt to solve the antinomy is striking. "To say, with Renan," he prefaces, "that 'war is essentially a thing of the ancien régime,' is to say that it is not of the essence of the new one; and as formerly war would be considered as destitute of any cause in the case where there were no enemies, that is equivalent to supposing that to-day no people have enemies. Such an assertion assuredly does not express Renan's meaning. He intended to say, doubtless, that in our day the use of force to decide international conflicts is in contradiction with the moral principles professed by civilized nations; in other terms, that, logically, they should never have enemies.