One thing at least the new France has done with magisterial style: she has introduced into her political machinery respect for political habit. The French government of to-day is distinctly an outgrowth of conditions, and not of theories. Its constitution has none of the fatal marks of completeness which her other republican constitutions have borne; on the contrary, there never was a period in modern times when to the outsider French institutions seemed as crescive as they do to-day. And they have abundant material on which to work. There are signs that the system of nations as armed camps, for which Napoleon set the example, is breaking by its own weight; modern armies are mostly national schools controlled by scientific inquisitiveness and permeated by a civic spirit; the pacific federal system of the great European powers sometimes seems feeble and rickety, but it is in existence. Alliances are now federations for peace; the Triple Alliance continues to be a federation for peace; so too the Sextuple Alliance, so energetic and persistent in its support of Turkey, has been a federation for peace. Perhaps the day is nearer than we think when the Hague tribunal shall develop a vigorous, practical working system of international understandings, without appeal to war. Then certainly, but long before, let us hope, France may anchor her liberties in a bill of rights, destroy judicial inquisition, begin to slacken the bonds of her prefectoral system, emancipate her universities and academies, regenerate public feeling as to the increase of population by modifying her laws of the family, and go on not only to populate her own fertile fields, but to make the magnificent colonies which she has acquired the future homes of countless children, a field for exerting her superfluous energy--in short, when she may slough off her now superfluous Napoleonic institutions.