The victorious Prussians were at the door in the humiliating crisis of 1870 and ’71 to which the author refers, France was prostrate. Alsace and parts of Lorraine were to be ceded to the victors, together with an indemnity of five billion francs, and Paris was in control of the Reds. In that dreadful saturnalia of violence and crime which has made the name of the Commune infamous, the honor of France was threatened, and the credit of the new Republican government, especially its ability to maintain its authority and to fulfill its terms with the Prussians, seemed hopeless and cheerless indeed. How Thiers became the brains of the rehabilitation of France, with what vigor he entered upon the task that has handed down his name as the most influential political figure in French history--with what rigorous measures MacMahon suppressed the Commune--these are spectacular incidents with which every schoolboy is familiar. But the work of the Bourse in that episode--silent, unobtrusive, and lacking the sensational features of which popular histories are made, is by no means so well known, although upon its labors devolved the real upbuilding of France. Thiers never ceased to congratulate himself on the assistance it gave the country at a time when the liberation of French territory hung in the balance. “The Paris market came out unscathed from the ruins of the war and of the Commune,” continues our author, “and straight from the hardly ratified peace and quelled insurrection it threw itself into the work for France’s regeneration; because it was, indeed, for France’s regeneration that the stockbrokers and merchandise brokers worked under Thiers and MacMahon. In the worst days the Bourse had the uncommon merit of showing an example of faith in France. When more than one political skeptic and discouraged thinker allowed themselves to write down upon the crumbling walls of our burned-down palaces “Finis Galliae,” the Bourse kept its faith in France and her fortune, and that faith in France was spread by it all around, at home and abroad. “Speculation was patriotic in its way; it exhibited a confidence in our resources which the discretion of many a wise man rated as foolhardy. Have we already forgotten our great loans for liberation? Without the Bourse, these colossal loans, the amount of which exceeded the dreams of financiers, would never have been subscribed for, or, if ever, it would have been only at rates much more onerous for the country. Without the Bourse, our French rentes would not have taken such rapid flight; our credit, restored even more quickly than our armies, would not have equaled that of our victors, on the very morrow of our defeat. In that regard, all that justice demanded us to say previously of the higher banking institutions may with right be repeated concerning the Bourse.