quantities as to fully satisfy the appetite.

A great point in the use of fish as food is to vary the form in which it is given. The cook must be charged to devise new dishes and new ways of cooking, and to provide the several kinds of fish in season or procurable. No diet should on any account be allowed to become monotonous. In less excited cases, where there is rather depression and despondency than a high state of irritability, I allow milk, butter, and eggs in moderate quantities, but no butchers' meat; and, as far as possible, I give fish at every meal. This is important. In a class of cases which is particularly noteworthy, consisting of badly or imperfectly nourished children, in whom there would appear to be disproportionate development of the several parts of the organism-for example, the muscular system may outgrow the brain and nervous system-the fish diet produces the best possible results. Such cases abound. The offspring of parents between whom there is a considerable difference of age, commonly suffer from disproportionate development, as also do children born late in the lives of their parents. Children SO situated

are

peculiarly likely to be delicate and to suffer from some neurosis, which may later on in life culminate in constitutional nervousness, "mind-weakness, or even insanity. I do not say that the fish diet will cure all these cases, but I believe they will be, as a rule, largely benefited by its adoption.

This is a matter of popular interest, and I make no scruple to address nonmedical readers frankly on the subject. Special feeding may be a measure of treatment, but it is more truly a matter of natural prudence. The aim should be to prevent disease, and I conceive it to be a duty to give expression far and wide, and by every means in my power, to the strong faith I entertain that by rational modes of self-management and generally wise care for body and mind, bad health, both mental and physical, may be avoided. If this worried, brain working, and nerve-straining population could be induced to substitute fish for the flesh of warm-blooded animals in its ordinary diet, it would, I am convinced, be relieved from some of its worst sufferings and weaknesses, both mental and physical, and spared many mind and body destroying troubles.-Good Words.

THE old idea that principles ought to be as permanent in politics as in morals, has no place in the theory of government by the people which is now spreading about Europe. The new democracy pretends to work for progress alone, and evidently feels, at the bottom of its heart, that progress and principles are incompatible. Principles, in its eyes, present the inconvenience of not adapting themselves to circumstances; they are, by their essence, rigid and uncompromising; they have no elasticity, no opportunism. Yet, so long as they continue to nominally exist, they must be externally respected, and must be taken into account as guides and counsellors. Consequently, as they get into the way of radicalism, it has been found useful to deprive them of their character of invariability, and even, in many cases, to totally suppress them. It is true that

the democrats have not invented this notion of the non-durability of principles

Pascal asserted, before their time, that "natural principles are nothing but habits;" but the more advanced politicians of the Continent have got a long way beyond that, and evidently feel that, in politics, principles have not even the value of habits. Like the Californian farmer who said, "No fellow can go on always believing the same thing; one wants a fresh religion from time to time"-so do the leaders of the new school assure us that political principles must change according to the wishes of the populace. They apply to the men of our generation (without knowing it, perhaps), the theory of La Bruyère, that most women have no principles; they simply follow their hearts." They, too, follow their hearts, like women; they proclaim that the science of govern

ment should be independent of enthralling rules; that it should be purely tentative; that it should consist in experiment based on opportunity. In their eyes there is no longer any eternal truth at all. Policy, as they apply it, is an accident of the moment, an expedient of to-day, which was not yesterday, and may no longer be to-morrow. Its former constancy is gone; it is a passing condition; it is a fancy, not a principle. Monarchy, hereditary succession, religion, were in other days regarded as State principles. It is proposed to replace them now by popular will, universal suffrage, free-thought, and, above all, empiricism, which are thus far mere ideas, or, at the utmost, facts; though they, too, according to Pascal's argu-, ment of habit, may assume the form and name of principles hereafter if ever it should become the interest of a new

despot to base a throne upon them. But they will never grow into principles of the ancient sort; for the old ones imitated the ways of nature and cherished uniformity of processes, because, like nature, they knew the resistless power of repetition; while the new ideas, on the contrary, are like the human nature from which they spring; they seek for newnesses and strangenesses, because they take them to be signs of freedom.

So the radical world-especially in certain countries of the Continent-has given up principles in politics; and, as it has abandoned the old principles, so also has it forsaken the old forces. To a certain extent the adoption of new forces was a necessity; for, as some of the old ones were nothing more than principles at work, it is manifest that they could not be retained in use when once the principles on which they rested were destroyed. In France, indeedwhich is the country we are going to talk about, and which happens to be the land where the newest procedures of government are being essayed-no force whatever seems now to be accepted as a permanent auxiliary. We see there that nearly all the forces formerly utilized by governments have already been excluded from national action; and though some new ones have been taken on trial-to see, experimentally, what they will produce-it would be premature to suppose that any of them will necessarily last.

Loyalty to the sovereign was a force; it has been swept away. Religious teaching was a force; it is being suppressed. The so-called governing classes were a force; they have been replaced by the nouvelles couches. Society was a force; it has been kicked away. Women were a force; they have been thrust aside. These and other impulses, many of them knotted up with the history of France, many of them ancient mainsprings of the life of the nation, have been temporarily (perhaps, indeed, permanently) supplanted by fresh producers, especially by the great new agency-experiment.

Now it would be absurd to pretend that progress can always be realized without experiment; but it would be equally foolish to argue that no experiment is possible without entirely new forces. All knowledge, all philosophy, all science, have been built up on observation of, or on induction from, pre-established facts; and no reason is conceivable why, in politics, old motors should not be utilized by new governments. Some, at all events, of the levers which have aided to raise France to greatness in one direction, could equally serve, under no matter what rule, to elevate her in another. But the present Republic has, thus far, refused the assistance of any of the old forces. It sees adversaries in them all; it will have nothing to do, even experimentally, with any one of them; it labors, indeed, to uproot them integrally; or if it cannot eradicate them altogether, so to reduce and enfeeble them that they can no longer contribute, even indirectly or occultly, to national results. It has declared war against them all round-against the extinct governing classes as against "the ancient parties''-against society as against clericalism. It makes no distinction; it treats all the former springs of action as foes to be vanquished.

It is, however, just, to acknowledge at once that in this the Republic has been acting, to a certain extent, in legitimate self-defence. Let us remember that the present shape of government is not only accepted by the nation, but seems to be really desired by it; and that the time has passed for arguing that the Republic is the result of accident, not of conviction, or for insisting that it has grown temporarily into existence

solely for the want of something else to take its place. It may now be said with truth that France has ceased (for the moment, at least) to be monarchical, and that it sincerely wishes to keep the Republic it has got. Consequently no honest observer can presume to deny that the Republic is entitled to claim the allegiance of the entire population, from top to bottom, as thoroughly and as absolutely as any of the dynasties which preceded it, and to extinguish all who refuse that allegiance. But in the exercise of this right the Republic should allow itself to be guided by circumstances, and that is precisely what it has not done. When it found, as it did find during its early struggles, that the old forces stood across its road, and tried, conjointly, to bar its way and upset it when it observed that they all resisted it together, with equal aversion -it not unnaturally, in its inexperience as a beginner, viewed them all with the same spiteful eye, and regarded them as one great group of antagonists, to be vanquished collectively and indivisibly. But though this general impression was comprehensible a few years ago, when the embryonic Republic was fighting for life, it has ceased to be excusable now. In the consolidated position which the Republic has attained, and which entails. duties as well as rights, it commits both an injustice and an error in continuing, as it does still, to rank all bygone resistances together in one indiscriminating hate; for though the old forces have been accustomed to work together, and to feel sympathy for each other, it is manifest that they were composed of two totally distinct classes of elements, which might probably be separated without any excessive difficulty. The purely monarchical components must, of course, continue to be fought against, and so far as they alone are concerned, the Republic cannot be blamed for its animosity; but the intellectual, the religious, and the social constituents present another character. They are in no way necessarily anti-republican; they are of all times and of all systems; they are national; they are French; they are inherent in the race, or, at all events, in large sections of the race; and no one can seriously urge that they can never be utilized in the future for the good of the Repub

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXIV., No. 6.

lic, just as they have served in the past for the glory of the monarchy. Who can argue, for instance, that it is quite impossible to convert society to the Republic? Who can assert that the gentlemen of France will never consent to serve the new system, or that their wives and daughters are so resolutely opposed to it that it is useless to attempt to win them to its flag? It would be folly to aver that the best of the women of France can never become republicans as sincerely as they were monarchists or imperialists. And yet the Republic is so behaving toward them that it is not only repelling them from itself, butwhat is infinitely graver-is beginning to enfeeble their old-established national authority, to debilitate their action and their value in the land, and to lower the admirable position which they occupied before Europe. A distinctly marked commencement of decadence of Frenchwomen has set in under this Republic. They are ceasing to be themselves; and it is time that the attention of the friends of France should be seriously directed to the situation in which they stand.

Let us first see what French women have been; we shall then observe more easily what they are, and what they are in danger of becoming.

She

In no country and at no time have women exercised such power, or played such a part, as they had gradually assumed in France during the last two centuries. The Frenchwoman had formed herself by degrees into an institution of a peculiar kind. Nothing like her was to be found elsewhere. had invented, for her own use, a type of womanhood which was special to herself, and which no one else could appropriate. Her quickness, her inventiveness, and her imitativeness, enabled her to perceive and seize all the means of action which could serve her; and she used these means with such dexterity, that, after a few generations of evolution and development, she reached the fullest consummation of intelligence and of charm which the world has yet seen. And she was not only remarkable for her individual capacities-it was not solely in her personal attributes that she shone; she was even more striking in her associated action, in the royalty which her corporation collectively exercised over

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her own country and over Europe. Her very name had grown to be a proverb and a power. There is no other example in history of the women of any single nation standing out in a class before the world as the universally accepted uncontested type of superiority in all that constitutes feminine brilliancy, in skill and taste, and wit and winningness. And there is no other instance of the women of a race acquiring and wielding a national influence, social, moral, intellectual, and therefore indirectly political, such as Frenchwomen exercised around them until a few years ago. The nation had accorded to them by degrees, and perhaps without quite perceiving what it was doing, a place in which their abilities and their influence mutually reacted upon and fortified each other. Their inborn potentialities were evolved into full work by their situation, and the situation in turn was aggrandized and vivified by the growth of the faculties which had created it. The interworking of these two causalities carried them to the triumphs which they achieved. But, of course, their victory varied with their means; it was, in each case, proportioned to their place and properties; and it was necessarily limited to the educated classes; for, by its nature, it was a fruit of graces, of refinements, of acquired delicate efficiencies which good teaching, good example, and good contact can alone bestow.

The woman of society-the "lady," as she would be called in England, the femme du monde, as she is defined in France-held her empire by an accumulation of these bright capacities. Of beauty, as we narrowly understand it in England, she had but little; but she possessed so many other witcheries that her habitual want of features and complexion ceased to count against her. Expression redeemed the absence of prettiness, and the designation jolie laide was invented for her in order to express her power of pleasing despite her ugliness. In this first view of her she at once assumed a standing-ground of her own; for she was the only woman in Europe who could win homage and admiration without good looks. She did much more, indeed; she led men (in absolute contradiction to our insular theory) to regard mere fairness of face

as only one, and not the most important, of the many spells which a true woman should wield. Her bearing was all her own; she had no aristocracy, as we English understand it; but she had a something more gentle and more winning, less dominating, less impressive, less grandiose, but infinitely more persuasive, more sympathetic, more human -she had distinction, a distinction peculiar to herself, all brightness, symmetry, elegance, and finish. Her manner, again, was exclusively her ownits ease, its lightness, its gayety, its unaffectedness and naturalness were never caught by women of other races. Others had their merits too, but they were not those of Frenchwomen. Her eloquence, which was made up of an unconscious mingling of paradox and common-sense her facility of talk, her thorough possession of her language, and her flow of amusingness — made every listener hang upon her lips with delight. The grace of her figure and of her hands and feet, the use she made of them, the adroitness with which she put in evidence every seduction which nature had bestowed upon her or art had created for her, threw around her a physical charm which was still further heightened by her dressing. And above and beyond all stood her feminineness, her thorough womanness, the greatest, the noblest, the sweetest of her allurements. These were the powers which the true femme du monde displayed; these were the sources of her sovereignty.

But, remarkable as were all these elements of her empire, the use she made of that empire was more striking still; for the elements, admirable as they were, had limits, while the empire was unlimited. In her drawing-room the Frenchwoman was a mistress of an exceptional kind she was not merely chief of the house, she was, effectively, president of an assembly; she invented, regulated, and directed the movement of thought around her; she tilled the ideas of those who had any, and she furnished fancies to those who had none; her fireside was an oasis and a resting-place. The action so commenced indoors spread outside into the life of her friends; she made herself felt even in her absence; her arguments and her counsels were remembered and practi

cally applied; her teaching fructified. In her place and her degree she stamped her mark on those she lived with, and, as a natural consequence, the organization of feeling, of sentiment, and of tendencies, in the centre in which she moved, was, in reality, her product. French literature is full of biographies and monographs of women such as these; but numerous as are the books about them, they tell only of a few privileged exceptions. Tens of thousands of unknown good spirits have done their work in life, but have left no record of their passage; that work, however, has been none the less real, none the less national, none the less French. The men have not attempted to resist this absorption of action by the women; knowingly or unknowingly, by weakness or by will, they have accepted the pilotage which was offered them, and have allowed the women to become the real conductors of the moral life of the land, of its emotions, its pleasures, and even its ambitions and its objects.

Thus far we have spoken only of the qualities of the typical Frenchwoman. Let us see, now, what her faults were. In both cases we consider her in her public character alone; neither her private nature nor her home action concern us here.

Notwithstanding her extreme feminineness-perhaps, indeed, because of it -she was frivolous, vain, and ignorant. In other words, she attached undue importance to the surface of things; she was entirely convinced of her own efficacy; and she had scarcely any bookknowledge. Her frivolity, however, contained no falseness, and her vanity no snobbishness; while her want of reading was compensated by her special faculty of picking up information by contact. But her true demerit, from the wide point of view at which we are placing ourselves here, the great defect for which she offered no set-off, was the narrowness and pure Frenchness of her view on foreign questions. She was full of prejudice, of dogmatism, of foregone conclusions. Never was a temperament less cosmopolitan than hers; it was indeed so limitedly local, so circumscribedly national, that it is difficult to comprehend, when we first look at this particular aspect of her, how she ever

managed to stretch her hold beyond her frontiers. The explanation is, that she influenced from a distance, by a magnetic transmission of herself, by the power of example and reputation, not by the immediate pressure of personal presence. Her success abroad was reflected, not direct; it was the recoil of her ascendency at home. She achieved it in spite of her dislike of other races. And, curiously, this ungenerous littleness, though common to all classes, became more and more visible as the social scale rose higher. It reached the maximum of its development in the women of the set known as the Faubourg St. Germain. Nowhere was there, in modern Europe, a group of persons more intolerant and more illiberal, less reasoning and less impartial, than the "pure Faubourg," as a whole. Never were the high-class women of any land so unlike their equals elsewhere. The bestborn of all the European races (except the French) have a feeling of instinctive sympathy for each other, as being of one great family, and as representing the same interest; they are all impelled, by the mutual consciousness of gentle blood, to meet without mistrust, on the common ground of social equivalence. But never have Frenchwomen felt that. Putting aside some few exceptions, the rule among them is, that they shun foreigners, show them little hospitality, and hold their opinions in contempt. The Faubourg St. Germain, especially, which had concentrated itself into a fortified refuge of antique bigotries, admitted scarcely any stranger inside its walls. It is true that no stranger really wished to pass them, unless it were out of simple curiosity, to see what the once fainous Faubourg looked like, for no one who was not born in it could find pleasure in such a social dungeon. Of course there were, and are, within its precincts, certain corners which have become modernized. The names of the houses which, though still placed on the southern bank of the Seine have adopted the habits and ideas of the northern side, will rise to the lips of every one acquainted with the society of Paris; but, taken as a whole, as a clan, as a sect, the Faubourg St. Germain was, and is, the gloomiest of all the coteries in Europe. It was always a laboratory of fanaticism; but