rope. A great favorite at the Tuileries fort published in the Figaro most slashing during the time of the second empire, he articles against the second empire, till, at received much court protection. At Se- last, the editor was afraid to keep him, for dan he was taken prisoner. After his fear of incurring the ill-favor of the emrelease he re-entered political life, and be- peror. He turned him off, but advised came director of Le Pays, and Imperial him to found a newspaper of his own. champion in the Chamber. Duel after This was the origin of the famous La duel did he fight in the Imperialist cause, Lanterne. The popularity of the new pauntil at last, perhaps tired of this amuse- per was tremendous, much to the alarm of ment, he refused successively to fight both Napoleon and his court. Every effort was M. Rochefort and Clémenceau, alleging made to throw discredit upon Rochefort. that he had entered la phase du travail. At last, one day, tired of being calumniClémenceau added, la phase où l'on se ated, he went to demand satisfaction of an dérobe. The Chamber has had to con- editor who had published a number of demn him again and again for offensive scurrilous pamphlets against him. The behavior and insults to deputies, and his editor was insolent. Rochefort knocked violent language in Le Pays draws down him down; and for this he was condemned upon him repeated fines and various im- to a year's imprisonment and a fine of ten prisonments. It was he who tried to ex- thousand francs, together with the loss of cite Marshal MacMahon to make a coup his civil and political rights. This send'état. During the discussion of Jules tence amounted to extinguishing his career Ferry's educational laws, he publicly ac- as a journalist and a politician. Rochefort, cused Ferry of having falsified a docu- therefore, fled from France, and took refment, and refused to retract the accusa-uge in Belgium, where he continued to tion. It caused no little surprise, on the prince imperial's death, to find there was no mention of Cassagnac in his will. The journalist transferred his allegiance to Prince Jerome, whom a few years before he had reviled. But in 1880, in consequence of a battle between his paper and another, there arose that schism between Prince Victor and Prince Jerome which is so notorious. Cassagnac sided with the younger man. It may be said that he is the high priest of N'importequiism, or solutionism that is to say, anything and anybody rather than the present régime. It was this N'importequiism which led France to Boulangism. Another hot-headed member of the French Chamber is Henri Rochefort, a noble belonging to the very ancient family of Berry. He began his career by writing dramatic reviews for the newspapers- -the only form of criticism that was then allowed by the jealous censorship of Napoleon III. His articles proved an enormous success; for, though they pretended to deal with the drama, they were really levelled at the empire, and he had a way of saying things so subtly that it was difficult to bring against him an action for ibel. Moreover, he wielded his sword with as much skill as his pen, which not a little helped his reputation as a journalist in a country where duelling is as much a part of a journalist's profession as the correcting of proof-sheets. As soon as the restrictions imposed on the press with regard to politics were a little slackened, Roche publish his Lanterne, which, although it was prohibited, found its way into France in large numbers. Many French exiles were at the time living in Brussels, among them Victor Hugo, who received Rochefort with open arms and the words, "Voilà mon troisième fils." The imperial government had hoped to snuff out Rochefort and extinguish La Lanterne at one breath; but Rochefort safe across the frontier continued his fiery denunciations of the emperor and his satellites, and La Lanterne flamed as brilliantly as ever. Amongst the adherents of the court of the Tuileries, one and one only, young Baroche, son of the Garde des Sceaux, had the courage to challenge the fire-eater. The duel that ensued was a peculiarly fierce one, both parties displayed great courage; young Baroche was wounded in three places and Rochefort came off triumphant. Soon the difficulties of finding new dodges for smuggling the prohibited Lanterne into France became insurmountable. So Le Rappel was started, with Vacquerie, Meurice, Charles, François, Victor Hugo, and Rochefort, as its staff, and a fresh campaign was begun against the empire, despite fines and imprisonments. The signs were not wanting that the empire was beginning to totter towards its fall; how that fall was to come, and the depth to which it was to drag France, no one could then foresee. At the election for the Corps Législatif in 1869, the Republicans felt that the time had come to make an effort, and pass from words to action. The Quartier Latin called on Rochefort to stand for the seventh circumscription. Rochefort accepted, but was defeated by the imperial candidate, Jules Favre. There was joy at the Tuileries, but it was short-lived. Gambetta elected for Marseilles and Belville opted for the former, Rochefort was called on to stand for Belville. He replied by at once crossing the frontier. Arrested, he had soon after to be set at liberty, the government fearing an insurrection. His return to Paris was a triumph, and he was elected for Belville by an overwhelming majority. same had escaped. After a short stay in London he went to Switzerland, and from Geneva continued to publish La Lanterne, and to contribute to Le Mot d'Ordre, Le Reveil, Le Droit de l'Homme. In July, 1880, profiting by the amnesty, he returned to Paris in triumph. La gare de Lyon was literally besieged. The next day appeared the first number of L'Intransigeant, a paper devoted to the doctrine that the republic exists in name, but not infact, and that the question of government is a social one. con An ardent adherent of Boulanger, Rochefort was obliged to fly, together with the "brave général," and was demned, together with him and Dillon, in the famous Réquisitoire of August 12, 1888, pronounced by the procurateur, M. Quesnay de Beaurepaire. In the Corps Législatif Rochefort was more remarkable for his ironical interruptions than for his set speeches. He soon understood that the press, not the Tribune, was his field, and forthwith he founded La Marseillaise. In the fresh campaign thus entered on, the tactics were the as before on both sides. Fiery In naming M. Jules Simon, we are namaccusations, bitter invective, shamefuling one whom many account the most revelations, fines, imprisonments. Then attractive man modern France has to came the tragic incident of the murder show, and the man who most profoundly (the word is not too strong) of young has at heart the public weal. Alas, that Victor Noir, one of the staff of La Marseillaise, by Prince Pierre Bonaparte. Republican France thrilled with indignation, and Rochefort burst forth into language so openly seditious that on February 7 he was arrested and imprisoned at Ste. Pélagie. The next day the rest of the staff of La Marseillaise were imprisoned along with their editor; but from their prison they wrote, and their words found an echo throughout the country. Seven months later, Napoleon III. was himself a prisoner, and Rochefort was carried in triumph from Ste. Pélagie to the Hôtel de Ville. His dream was résistance à l'outrance; he strove by words and deeds to encourage it. He was elected deputy for Paris; but his career was short, for in company with twenty-five other deputies, he resigned in disgust when the Assembly voted the peace. Shortly after his paper, Le Mot d'Ordre, was suppressed by the then governor of Paris, but when the Commune was triumphant Rochefort hastened to Paris and resumed its publication. His opinions, however, were not sufficiently ferocious for the Place de la Grève, but were too revolutionary for Versailles. Obliged to quit Paris to avoid being seized by the Commune, he was arrested at Meaux by the Versaillais, tried by court-martial, and condemned to perpetual confinement. Some years after, France was electrified by a telegram which announced that Rochefort with five of his companions he should be no longer in his prime! Born in 1814, he belongs to a generation which heard the voices of Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, Sismondi, Demaistre, Cousin, Lamartine, Béranger, and other great men -a generation which, as M. Ernest Daudet remarks, seems to have inherited some of the merits of its elders, and preserves the stamp of that pre-eminently grand epoch. Poor by birth, Jules Simon had from his childhood to work for his daily bread; yet, nevertheless, he managed to educate himself so thoroughly that at the age of twenty-five he was called to fill Cousin's chair of philosophy at the Sorbonne. From that time forward his private life has run smoothly; and though he has been connected with nearly all the great events of the last fifty years, he has played no decisive part in any. His action as a politician has been comparatively small; his influence as a thinker, however, has been considerable, and, as it has been well said, we all know that the world is governed by the men of whom it hears least. In any other country but France, M. Jules Simon's influence would have been even greater than it has been. Of all the public men of the day in his country he has this pre-eminent advantage that he is of an honesty and uprightness unquestioned even by those who affect to despise him as a vieux bon homme. Were he to die to-morrow, all parties would uaite in rendering him the same kind of homage that was rendered to John Bright. Simon has had the disadvantage of being a moderate man in a country where moderate men have seldom, at any period of history, been listened to. The very name is almost a term of reproach; and this is more truly strange of a land which, with characteristic self-complacency and exclusiveness, claims that Le bon sens est né français. If so, it seems to have had some difficulty in coming to maturity in the land of its birth. The Liberals of 1840 listened with scant respect to Simon's first lectures, and read his first books with impatience - they wanted fire and thunder. One quality, however, none could deny him: his sweetvoiced, penetrating eloquence. Thirty years later, in 1871, during the disaster of the war, Simon proved that there was strength as well as sweetness in the storehouse of his mind. It was he who obliged Gambetta to renounce his dictatorship. He plainly declares himself an enemy of Socialism, and has always fought for the cause of order against anarchy. Questions of education have occupied him above all others, and in his day he defended the university against Montalembert, not from any anti-Catholic spirit, for he is himself a liberal-Catholic, but from a repugnance to seeing the liberty of any one set of men domineered over by that of another. It is to the honor of both men that from this contest arose a mutual esteem which ripened into friendship. The coup d'état | of December drew from him an eloquent protest, which caused him to lose his chair; he fell back on his pen, and made good use of it against the empire. At the same time he produced that series of books on "Duty," "Natural Religion," Liberty of Conscience," "Schools,” and "Working Men," with which his name will always be associated, and interested himself in all great philosophical and social questions. Under the republic he became minister of public instruction, and he strenuously opposed Ferry's educational scheme, particularly Article 7. It was then he made his celebrated speech in favor of teaching duty to God, independently of any religious denomination. He is a pronounced enemy of the dogmatic irreligion of the third republic. fresh in all minds. The old man continues to interest himself in the well-being of the working classes, from whom he himself has sprung. He is president of a philanthropic society for the education of poor children, as well as secretary of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. It will be an evil day for France when she no longer has such men to show. From all that we have written, it will be seen that modern France may be said to be in a transition stage. It is always difficult in a Latin country to gauge public opinion, and it may not be too much to say that in France, two-thirds of the population are absolutely indifferent to politics. The only people who appear to have really hard-and-fast ideas are the members of the Extreme Right-men who have inherited, rather than thought out, their political creed. The manner, however, in which the Boulanger bubble burst, without bringing about the terrible danger which it menaced, is an evidence of a more balanced public opinion. The incident has certainly taught the republic and its rulers some salutary lessons; the latter especially realize that the country requires from them less wrangling and more useful practical work. It is to be hoped that a new and better state of things is about to be ushered in. In one matter there is a marked improvement - the intense strain which the antagonism of Germany created among the French people has been happily and suddenly removed; first, by the unexpected fall of Bismarck; secondly, by the improvement in tone and policy, of the German emperor. That witty poet and acute observer, Heinrich Heine, said: "When I speak of France I speak of Paris, not of the provinces; just as when I speak of a man I speak of his head, and not of his legs; to talk about the opinion of the provinces is like talking about the opinion of a man's legs." Not the least important issue of Boulangism has been that it has shown that France, as a country, is no longer at the beck and call of Paris. There remains a genuine rectitude under the immense majority of the French population, and it is these who chiefly inhabit the provinces, Simon now sits in the Senate. The and who have been less affected by that speeches he there holds, and that delivered deplorable deterioration of French moral but a few months ago at the unveiling of worth, through her mental culture, which Lamartine's statue, show that age has not has been the most disastrous feature of lessened his oratorical power. The honor her literature since the downfall of the shown to him by the German emperor, first empire. It is by no means improbwho specially invited him to came to Ber-able that the French people may find lin to attend the Liberal Congress, will be some fine morning that the legs will sud denly wake up with a very positive opinion | French missionaries to China of the sevof their own, and the result may be a most important change, not only in the government of Paris, but in the government and character of the whole country. From Temple Bar. THROUGH CHINESE SPECTACLES. CHINA, we all know, is topsy-turvydom. Every visitor or writer — and every visitor to China is sure to become a writer on China sooner or later insists on the strange perversity that leads the Chinese to do everything the wrong way. Their men wear petticoats, their women-folk the trews, as Wingrove Cooke announced some thirty years ago; they build their houses from the top downwards, in defiance of all Western laws of gravity. Even in the lesser concerns of life this contrariness of disposition pursues them; their chess manuals give black the lead, and at all card games the cards are dealt niddershins, the way the sun does not go, while the dealer deals to himself first. Perhaps, however, the most convincing proof of perversity is to be found in the fact that the one perfectly delightful month, the month of bright blue skies and balmy breezes, the month in south China wherein it is enough for any reasonable lazy European -"not to be doing, but to be," is November. Yet all this, when we come to think of it, is slightly unphilosophical. The Chinese sat at the feet of Confucius in the decorum of embroidered skirts and flowing sleeves, when our doubtless noble, but certainly unlettered, ancestors ran wild in woods, with very little to cover them except a layer or two of woad. What right, then, have we to stigmatize Chinese customs as perverse because they differ from those we borrowed from our more civilized neighbors a mere trifle of a thousand years or so ago? Surely it is the Chinaman who has the right, as first finder, to call his ways and habits orthodox, and to set them up as a standard by which to gauge our own. And this, indeed, is what he has done and will continue to do. Yet it is not easy even for the most philosophical of us to put ourselves in a Chinaman's place and view our Western civilization through Chinese spectacles. The idea is a new one, of course. Goldsmith struck it in the "Citizen of the World," but all Goldsmith had to work with was a volume or two of the "Annales " published by the enteenth century. Lien Chi Altangi would be scoffed at nowadays as a most palpable fraud; there is not enough of the real Chinaman in him to pass muster at a fancy-dress ball. The story of Charles Lamb's anent the discovery of roast pig might as well be brought up as a serious sketch of Chinese manners. But it is not likely that Goldsmith hoped or intended to deceive any of his readers, or to delude them into the belief that there was a genuine Mongolian chiel among them takin' notes. The case is slightly altered nowadays. We sometimes read, usually in an American paper, but sometimes in our own sober reviews, certain comments on Western life, professing to be written by a Chinaman. I don't, of course, refer to Laurence Oliphant's amusing skits, but to ebulitions signed by "Colonel" Wang or "Secretary of Legation" Chang. These must, it is regretable to say, be viewed with the profoundest distrust; Chang and Wang have had little to do with their production except the signing of their respective names, and even these have usually been spelt for them. No, the only way to discover what a Chinaman really thinks and writes about us is to go to China for it. Here we are not disappointed, but on the contrary may have (provided we can read Chinese) a treatise on our habits quite as amusing as any invented by ourselves, and, undoubtedly, genuine. Last year there appeared in the principal Shanghai newspaper, the North China Herald, a translation of a little book entitled " Desultory Notes on Western Customs." The original work was published in China in 1884, by one Hsiaoweng, of Siling, and how he came into possession of it illustrates (at least we hope it does) one striking difference between Chinese ideas of copyright and those obtaining, we will not say in America but in Europe. He called, he tells us in his preface, on a friend of his, a magistrate named Yuan Hsiang-fu, who had just returned from a tour in Western countries. On Yuan's table lay a manuscript, the record of his experience abroad. This his visitor pounced upon and borrowed. "I intended," he naively observes, "to copy it, but before I could do so the author asked for it back; and so it is only such portions of it as I can remember, that I am now able to send to press." We have then, in this brochure, not the intrepid traveller's own commentaries but his perfidious friend's fallible 66 It is, perhaps, unnecessary to observe that no principal is more thoroughly established in China than the superiority of the left hand side. Last century, how ever, the whole machinery of government was deranged for weeks by a heretic who maintained that of two tablets hung on a wall precedence ought to be given to that on the right. The Council of State was summoned, and after an anxious and protracted debate the emperor decided, ex cathedra, that the heretic was correct; for tablets hung on a wall, particularly an imperial wall, must be regarded from the point of view of the wall itself, and not from that of a mere untitled spectator. To return, though, to our womankind. Husband and wife," continues Yuan, "go arm in arm along the street, yet no one smiles; a husband will perform any menial office before his wife and no one jeer at him." The author of an ingenious native work, "The Sights of Shanghai," draws attention to this reprehensible practice on the part of foreigners and their wives who "stroll about the public garden arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder, without any show of bashfulness," for no Chinaman (except in a Frenchman's book) ever takes a man's arm, much less a woman's. In "Le Fleuve des Perles," published this year with a laudatory preface by "Général Tcheng Ki-tong,' the provincial judge is represented as walking arm in arm with a widow through a main thoroughfare in Canton. The situation is striking and novel, for the majority of Chinese judges would as soon think of walking with a balloon or a cassowary as with a widow, if, which is very, very doubtful, they ever thought of walking at all. them to make way for her, and in so making way they must pass to the right and not to the left. Now China is a country of nice gradations, where a younger brother may not presume to walk abreast of an elder. As for yielding the path to a mere female, the thought would hardly occur to an orthodox Confucian, even in his dreams. Yuan's next two notes deserve to be transcribed in toto: When taking their places at meals the men must wait till the women are first seated. They can then occupy chairs next to them. The meal ended, women and men disperse in the same order. While the women are at table, as a mark of respect to them no man is After dinner the men allowed to smoke. must leave the table and go elsewhere to smoke, or if there be no smoking-room must wait till the women have departed. Occaing, they leave at once, expressly observing sionally, when the women have finished eatthat this is done out of compassion. It is regarded as a gracious courtesy on their part. In China things are managed much more sensibly. There the women lay the table for their lords, and when these have gorged themselves, dine contentedly off the scraps. Both men and women smoke, a sickly powdered tobacco inhaled a thimbleful at a time. No Chinaman apologizes for smoking in your presence; he would expect rather an apology from you for not smoking with him. As Yuan observes later on, "a visitor in England may please himself whether he smokes or not. It is considered meritorious among us, we learn, to abstain from smoking, and smokers in first-class railway carriages are fined a pang (£1 sterling). Another discouragement to the practice in England is its cost. Manila cheroots, Yuan tells his readers, are very expensive, and a smoker will spend each day from eighteen-pence to three shillings in tobacco. Compare with this," he says, "the waste of wealth by smokers of opium in the Middle Kingdom, and what difference is there?" The latter, he remarks is never smoked by Europeans, and only occasionally by Americans. A Chinaman in England has frequently considerable difficulty in obtaining it. Although opium is sold at all druggists, yet a customer has to state for what disease he requires it before the apothecary will serve him. Even then he is given but a very little. When natives of the Middle Kingdom go to purchase it for smoking and ask for several ounces, the druggist will at first be startled, |