THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume III, Issue 309, 8 June 1889, Page 2

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

THE ENGLISH AMBASSADOR Pams, June 6. The Chamber of Deputies do not consider that the absence of Lord Lytton at the opening of the Exhibition can be regarded as a manifestation of hostility to France in her commemoration of the Revolution.

On the above subj act one writer remarks l — The address of the 180 members of the English Liberal party to President Carnot, expressing their regret at the significant absence of the British Ambassador from the Paris Exhibition, very properly saved England from the discredit which the official action of the Minister would have otherwise entailed upon it. The intention, of course, was to show a deliberate abstention on the part of the English Government from anything that could bo construed into sympathy with the Exhibition which celebrates the outbreak of the French Revolution of 100 years ago. If that intention was only what was to be expected from the monarchical and feudal elements of English society, the resolve to express sympathy with the principle behind the great Paris celebration is only what was to be looked for from the party representing the liberal and democratic and progressive mind of the English people. In estimating such an event as the French Revolution, the only considerations worth the attention of practical men are the condition in which it found France and that in which it left her. It found her as a people slowly decaying under the weight of institutions which seemed to have killed out the life of the people and were now themselves at once perishing and putrefying. It left her torn and tossed and exhausting and bleeding as the result of the tempest through which she had passed, but alive and free and tingling with life and hope and national pride in every fibre. Whether the same great result could have been reached in a more moderate way would be a question as fruitless to discuss as any of the “ might-have-beens ” of history, That' it was not reached in any better way was chiefly due to the condition of impudeuce and corruption into which the ruling classes and institutions of the country had fallen, At any rate, what we know is that the results of national freedom and selfgovernment of the peop’e which Frenchmen were compelled to get by the road of revolu, tion Englishmen have been enabled to reach by the milder road of liberal progress. And when we remember that these results were gained by the labor and struggles of the Liberal party who now address President Carnot, and that they were opposed by the monarchical and feudal and class influences which now try to estrange England from sympathetic co-operation with her great neighbor in this national celebration, then we see that both parties are now acting In this matter in strict aocordanoe with their principles and with their past.