creators, if not of the human race, at least of human civilization, this calendar is not there as a dry tabular synopsis for the use of classes in history. Nor is it there, as the Catholic calendar is, as an external object of reverence and ceremonial obligation. It is there to teach us types of human duty, and facts of social philosophy, as we find them, as they fashion our life, inspire our own efforts, and supply us with examples to follow. These are no saints, these men, nor are they to be reverenced in the way that the Catholic worships saints. They are simply men who have done good work in their time, some more, some less well; none of them perfect, many of them most faulty; but all able to teach us by their faults no less than by their virtues. At any rate, they are men like ourselves, and with powers that we can recall with profit at any hour of our working lives. That vague and unreal vision, the Christ, or perfect man, whom the good Christian professes to take as the embodiment of all human excellence that transcendental figment we replace with the collective Host of the real men who exhibit every trait of human greatness, and never cease to be as frankly human as any one of us. There is no superstitious line that severs the past from the present, the Living from the Dead, or the most revered servant of Humanity from the street sweeper, who is serving it to-day. They have not passed into another world, nor have they any other life but ours. The gates of Death open and close each day, encircling new multitudes within, as new multitudes each day press on into the vacant place. But the unbroken human stream is all one, within and without those adamantine doors. We hear their voices and the vast murmur of their lives as we hasten on ourselves to join them, and Living and Dead form one Humanity for ever.

I invite you to think of this, in order that, in forming our judgment of public duty, we may remember that the honour of the dead is no bit of antiquarianism, but that the men of to-day, and yesterday, like the men of to-morrow, are all employed on the same work, and furnish similar types, for our practical understanding of duty. Yesterday it was Gambetta, to-morrow it may be Gladstone, whose personality absorbs us and forces us to judge; but we are all making history day by day, and the leaders of men whom we see no more, and those who are amongst us, and who are growing into power, are all in one plane, as much and as little saints as the rest, as much the makers of humanity.

Last Sunday we met here to reflect on the work of Mahomet and the foundation and history of Islam. To-day-how vast a sense of humanity does it imply, to note the interval and contrast!—we turn to judge Gambetta and the Republic in France. The few weeks have passed that Comte judged expedient as an interval for the fair judg ment of the dead; the flowers in the wreaths upon his grave are

hardly withered, and how much has happened since his death! Within a month we see (as we could not see in the hour of his disappearance) all that his death involved.

It would only be strangers to us who could wonder what especial concern of ours is the career of a French politician, or what the religion of humanity has to do with Léon Gambetta. Those who know us at all are well aware that to us the social movement in Europe as a whole is of far deeper moment than any local matter of national politics; they know that to us the foundation of the Republic in France is the condition of all healthy political progress in the world. They know how we recognize the social initiative which the great Revolution gave to France, and of which no errors and no disasters can at present deprive her. The Republic is to us the sole guarantee of any stable progress or order. The Republic in France is the turning-point in the second half of the nineteenth century; it is that whereby, for good or for evil, the century will stand in history. And every one can see that, for good or for evil, Léon Gambetta was bound up with the Republic as no other contemporary life was bound up. Nor can we forget that he was the first statesman of European importance formally to offer his public homage to Comte as the greatest mind of the nineteenth century; and formally to adopt, as his leading idea in politics, Comte's great aphorism: "Progress can only arise out of the development of Order." But it is not for this that Gambetta holds a place of prime importance in our eyes. The doings of a statesman are what concern us, and not his protestations. And it is in the region of action that we see how distinctly Gambetta foreshadows the type of the Republican statesman-rudely and incompletely, no doubt-but with all the essential elements. He is the first European statesman of this century who is heart and soul Republican; the only one whose fibre is entirely popular; who saw that the Republic implied a real social reconstruction; he is the only European statesman who is equally zealous for progress and for order, and most assuredly he is the only statesman of this century who has formally thrown away every kind of theological crutch.

This is no panegyric of a public man. Of such we have had enough. It is no critical analysis of a striking personality. We are met here neither to bury Cæsar, nor to praise him. Brutus and Cassius and the rest have told us that he was ambitious, and had many grievous faults. I am not about to dispute it. There are many things in his public career, especially in its later years, which we wholly fail to reconcile, not only with the best type of the statesman, but with any reasonable version of his own principles. As to his private life, there are things, perhaps, gross and unworthy, and a public man has no private life. But unworthy if they be, they were not of the kind which seriously disable a public career. He was not

a corrupting pedantocrat like Guizot, nor a corrupted cynic like Thiers; he was not a king of gamblers like Napoleon, nor a king of jobbers like Louis Philippe. He was a jovial, unabashed son of Paris; without special refinement of life, or sensitive delicacy of conscience. We have yet no means of proving the truth of the stories that we hear of the kind of men who from time to time shared his intimacy, and of the enterprises or adventures to which he allowed himself to be made a more or less blinded accomplice. Let us leave these tales for time to reveal. However they turn out, the essential man in the main is known to us now. If he allowed himself familiarity with unworthy adventurers, certain it is, that in all parts of France he retained till his death the devoted attachment of the most honourable spirits of his country. If his name was used at times to back up a financial job, it is yet most clear that with portentous opportunities for serving himself, he neither made nor spent a fortune. If his policy was not always consistent with a high sense of honour, it was never dictated by vulgar ambition. Coarseness of nature, both in private and in public life, is no final bar to greatness in a statesman. The greatest names in political history have often been soiled with unedifying weakness and unscrupulous expedients. The statesmen of history are as little the types of moral purity as the saints are types of practical sagacity. A statesman in an era like this is a man by necessity of compromise and expedients. His agents he takes as he finds them; and he takes them with good and bad together. And when all this is said, we must judge them in the rough as they are. Energy and sagacity, and the genius to give the true lead to forty millions of men, are qualities of such transcendent value to mankind, that we must hail them at all costs wherever we find them. And these qualities were assuredly in Léon Gambetta.

What we propose is neither a history of Gambetta's life, nor a critical estimate of his nature and career. Take two or three points in his career which need no proving and no refining, and in these we may find enough to convince us that with him France and the cause of progress have lost a great force, one that ranks amongst the very few great personalities in modern politics.

I will take but four cardinal facts about his career, and consider him, firstly, as the true creator of the Republic; secondly, as a type of the statesman of the people; thirdly, as the representative of the union of order and progress; and fourthly, as representative of the secular movement in politics.

In every one of these, and in all of them in combination, Gambetta is the only French statesman of the first order whom this century has produced.

Of the first order? it is asked. Yes! Whatever judgment we may pass on his work there can be no real dispute about his power.

He

was hardly laid in his grave, when the very existence of the Republic was suddenly challenged, and through all ranks of Republicans a sudden panic arose, men's hearts failing them for fear. A week before his death, in spite of disquiet and confusion, the Constitution in France seemed as much a thing of course as the Constitution in England. A week after his burial everything seemed an open question again, as on the eve of Sedan. He is the one Frenchman whom the keen statesmen of Germany took to be of paramount importance to Germany; he is the one Frenchman who represented something definite to every man throughout the civilized world possessing the simplest notion of politics; and he was the one Frenchman whose name and character were known to every elector in France. The death of Gambetta was to France what the death of Cavour was to Italy; what the death of Bismarck will be to Germany. At the day of his death he filled the minds of French politicians more than Guizot ever did, or Thiers, or any of the nameless Ministers of empire and monarchy-more than Peel ever filled men's thoughts amongst us, more even than Gladstone does now. His brief hour of office was a mere interlude. He is almost the one Frenchman of our times who could fall from office without disappearing from public life. Office made no difference to his personal power, except that it hampered it by arousing a storm of jealousies. Death, as usual, is the true measure of greatness, and death has revealed to us with startling force what is the Republic with Gambetta and what it is without him. Right or wrong, this is power; this is one of those pre-eminent personalities which occur but now and then in a century. Here is the great man (it is one of those facts which we must take as facts, whether we like it or not), and it is with justice that his followers say, "Here is the man who is not of the order of the Jules Favres and the Jules Simons, or the Jules Ferrys, or even of the Thiers and the Guizots-here is a born leader of the order of the Dantons and the Hoches."

I. Take him as the creator of the Republic. There were three successive epochs in which Gambetta was the true author of the Republic in 1868–9, in 1870-1, in 1876–8. For sixteen years the Empire had lain like a nightmare upon France; corrupting it from above, crushing it within, weakening it without, degrading and stifling the entire French nation. All the better elements of the people revolted; all were ready for a resurrection-but who gave the word? Always and everywhere Gambetta. His energy, his courage, his faith in the Republic, his scorn of the Empire, rang like an electric shock through France. In November, 1868, the date of his famous speech, he was a briefless, unknown barrister. In the early spring of 1869, he was the rival, the terror, and the judge of the Empire. The Empire in these last two years shook and cowered before a young lawyer.

It is easy to say that hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen felt this, that Paris was seething with insurrection, and the whole thinking class, and the entire working class, was in defiance. True; but both wanted the tongue, the soul, the heart, and they found those in Gambetta. The Jules Simons, the Rocheforts, and Prévost Paradols, might write smart articles; Delescluze and Blanqui could conspire; but neither epigrams nor conspiracies could shake the Empire. It needed an agitator who was also a statesman. Gambetta was both; and he struck the Empire as neither fifty Jules Simons nor a hundred Blanquis could strike it.

The Empire ended, as we know, in an utter wreck; and again, ou the morrow of Sedan, the Republic was the work of Gambetta. He planned it, he organized it, he established it. In that shameful overthrow of France, in the winter of 1870, the one redeeming effort stood out clear; and again, one man alone struck the imagination of Europe, of Germany, of France. Such a negation of all that is sound and manly as the Empire was, cannot afflict a people for a generation without leaving a heritage of blight and corruption; and with all my love for the French name and people, I cannot deny that in 1870 it had sunk as low as a nation can sink without death. From that torpor France was saved by the energy of Gambetta. That one man, a young, unknown, penniless lawyer of thirty-two, roused France from her slumber, upheld her banner against hopeless odds, made the French people feel again they were a people, and planted in their hearts the image of Republic instead of Empire. Then it was that the Republic was formed: Gambetta's name was made a household word in France. Into every village, from Ushant to Nice, from Dunkirk to St. Sebastian, the conscript of 1870 carried back the tale of a leader who had kept alive the French name. Since the days of the First Napoleon, no name had ever penetrated into every heart in France as did Gambetta's. He was the one man known to all living Frenchmen-man, woman, and child—and known as the inspirer of a new sense-love of the country. He was the moral inspirer of the nation; for he recalled the spirit of the men who fought at Valmy and Jemappes; nay, it is no profanation to say it, he recalled Jeanne Darc herself. He restored the French nation to itself, giving France back to Europe as one of her great forces. This is the imperishable work of the Republic of 1870; and for this the Republic of 1870 will be remembered when Bismarck and Moltke and the German Empire are names for historical

research.

It failed. Yes! it failed, because the miserable monarchies and empires, which have succeeded each other in France since the Revolu tion, had crushed out of Frenchmen the national spirit; and no energy or genius can make a nation in an hour. But I say it advisedly