25th July.
Tue Franco-Russian Alliance has much to commend it to the world in general as well as to the two parties to it, for it has undoubtedly tended like the Tripartite Alliance to the maintenance of peace in Europe. It has seemed to onlookers, indeed, a somewhat one-sided alliance, the union of patron and client rather than of equals;'but the patron seems to be going too far when he dictates to the client how he should be governed. The Czar doubtless considers himself the Arbiter of Europe, and there have been self-constituted arbiters before him and will be others when he has joined his ancestors; but it is only an arbiter who has curved his way to that position with his sword, like the first Napoleon, who has the right to dictate to another Great Power whom it shall assume as its ruler. The Greeks would have looked for a speedy Nemesis to follow such an act as this. Is it possible that France, high-spirited in all her misfortunes and rightly proud of her past and her hardly-earned liberty, will throw off the public and take another Napoleon lo Petit as her ruler at the Tidding of the Czar? Of all the pretenders to the throne of France Prince Louis Napoleon is one of the most insignificant, though he has the commission of a Colonel in the Russian Imperial Guard. By what possible eke does the Czar disinherit Prince Victor? Or why does he so pointedly ignore that other pretender, who has Socially a better claim than either of Plan-Plan's sons, the Duke of Orleans? As the Princess Mathilde told the anti-Dreyfusard General the other day, Emperors and Kings do not do things like this, and it must be that Reuter has been made the victim of a practical joke. If the story is true, it is impossible that the Czar's Ministers who keep him ordinarily so well in hand can have seen this telegram before it was sent; and the least that President Loubet can do is to write to the Czar and say that France is still a Republic, and when she wants a monarch she will choose him for herself.
But is it possible that the Czar has been perpetrating a somewhat cruel joke? Is there a cryptic meaning in the phrase "the highest period of his life"? _And after all, to say that Prince Louis' friends are as numerous in France as in Russia does not necessarily convey that there are a great many of them in either country.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.