of whom Lareveillere says that "n.o.body could endure his vanity and self-conceit;" and, lastly, Lareveillere himself, whom Carnot in his Memoirs, published at London in 1799, compares to a "viper," and says, "after he has made a speech he coils himself up again"--these were hardly the men to give their nights and days to reconstructing the educational system of France!
Merlin (of Douai), Minister of Justice under the quintette, really ruled France for nearly five years. This was Merlin, author of the "Law of the Suspects," which Mr. Carlyle, though obviously in the dark as to its real genesis and objects, finds himself constrained to stigmatize as the "frightfullest law that ever ruled in a nation of men." Mr. Carlyle does not seem to have observed that the author of this "transcendental" law, the aim of which was to convert the French people into a swarm of spies and a.s.sa.s.sins, was not only one of the first of the Republican" t.i.tans"
to fall down and kiss the feet of Napoleon, but one of the first also to desert Napoleon, and embrace the knees of the returning King. On April 11, 1814, this creature, who had caused the Convention to reject a pet.i.tion for a pardon presented by a man condemned for a crime, the real authors of which had confessed his innocence and their own guilt, on the ground that "every sentence p.r.o.nounced by the law should be irrevocable," joined in a most fulsome address of welcome to the legitimate sovereign of France! His namesake Merlin (of Thionville), another "t.i.tan" whom Mr. Carlyle admires as riding out of captured Mayence still "threatening in defeat," was nimbler even than Merlin of Douai. On April 7, 1814, he wrote to King Louis begging to be allowed "to serve the true, paternal government of France!"
Concerning Merlin (of Douai), Barras, who made him "Minister of Justice," placidly says: "Poltroons are always cruel. Merlin always hid himself in the moment of danger, and came out again only to strike the vanquished party." Proscription and confiscation kept the Government which this worthy Republican directed much too busy to leave it any time for looking after the schools of France.
When at last Napoleon gathered up the reins, he postponed the interests of public education to other, and from his point of view more pressing, concerns.
The Concordat re-established the Church in France, but it did not re-endow the Church on a scale which would have enabled it at once to reconstruct its own educational system. In fact, the Concordat can hardly be said to have re-endowed the Church at all. Under the thirteenth article the Pope formally recognized the t.i.tle of the purchasers of "national property" in France to vast domains, the property through purchase, donations, or bequest of the Church, which had been made "national property" only by the simple processes of exiling or murdering the owners and confiscating their estates. In consideration of this recognition, the State bound itself by Article XIV. of the Concordat to "ensure to the bishops and the curates salaries befitting their functions," and by Article XV. to "protect the right of the Catholics of France to re-endow the churches."
As to the "rising generation" of the French people the government of Napoleon concerned itself much more with the conscription than with the reconstruction of the schools, and though the Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, took this work in hand very early in the century, it was necessarily with inadequate means.
Under the First Consulate a general law regulating public instruction was enacted, on May 1, 1802. Another was enacted shortly afterwards, and in 1808 appeared the famous decree of the Emperor founding the University system of France. Heaven knows how many schemes for founding this University system had been elaborated and submitted to him before, only to be torn up as "ideological." Cuvier affirms that he drew up twenty-three such schemes one after another.
This decree of March 17, 1808, forbade the establishment of private schools without the authority of the Government, set up three degrees of public instruction, primary, secondary and superior, organised a body of Inspectors-General, and, in short, "laicized" public education in France effectually as a machine to be controlled by the Imperial Government.
Under the ancient Monarchy, France possessed twenty-four Universities.
The Convention suppressed them all at a blow on September 15, 1793. This was little more than three months after the Convention itself had been "suppressed" and forced to kiss the hand that smote it by Henriot and his cannoniers on June 28, 1793. A law abolishing the freedom of education was to have been expected from an a.s.sembly itself enslaved by an oligarchy of rogues and a.s.sa.s.sins. And this law left nothing standing in France to impede the execution of the Imperial decree of 1808, the first article of which was:--"Public education in the whole Empire is exclusively confided to the University." Another article ordained that all the schools in France should take as the basis of their instruction "fidelity to the Emperor, to the Imperial monarchy, the trustee of the happiness of the people, and to the Napoleonic dynasty, the conservator of the unity of France and of all the liberal ideas proclaimed in the const.i.tutions of France." The theology of all the French schools was to be in conformity with the Royal edict of Louis XIV., issued in 1682.
Furthermore and expressly, "the members of the University were required to keep the Grand-master and his officers informed of anything that may come to their knowledge contrary to the doctrine and the principles of the educational body in the establishments of public education!"
Here we have the "moral unity" of France organized by Napoleon in 1808 on the lines in which the Third Republic has been trying ever since 1874 to organize it! Put the word "Republic" for the word "Empire," the phrase "scientific atheism" for the phrase "propositions of the clergy of France in 1682," and you have in the Napoleonic organization of public education the organization controlled by M. Jules Ferry. Of the two despotisms, the despotism of 1808 seems to me the more compatible with public order and public prosperity. With public liberty neither of them is compatible. Under the ancient Monarchy and the clerical system of education liberty existed. The Jesuits and the Jansenists, the Dominicans and the Oratorians and the Benedictines, had their different principles of education, their different traditions, their different text-books. Under the Imperial University, and still more under the University of the Third Republic, differences became disloyalties. Under the University of France in 1808 every young French citizen was to accept the Catholic faith as defined by the clergy of France in 1682, and true allegiance bear to the Napoleonic dynasty. Under the University of France in 1890, every young French citizen is to disbelieve in G.o.d and a future life, and true allegiance bear to the Third French Republic.
In 1808 as in 1890 the rights of freemen were first vindicated in this connection by the Catholic Church. On April 9, 1809, the Emperor issued a decree that no one should be admitted to a Catholic theological academy without a bachelor"s diploma of the University. The bishops came at once into collision on this point with the Imperial prefects of 1809, as the bishops now came into collision on the decree of 1880 with M.
Jules Ferry and the Republican prefects. The Imperial prefects of 1809 (not a few of them rabid Republicans in 1792) were merely the valets of the Emperor, as the prefects of 1890 are the valets of a Parliamentary oligarchy.
The Emperor carried his point. But when the Emperor fell, and the const.i.tutional monarchy was restored, the University of France ceased to be an Imperialist training-school. M. de Fontanes, appointed grand-master by the Emperor in 1809, kept his place under Louis XVIII.
To keep it he made the University "clerical." Under Napoleon the scholars in the public schools of France had been divided into "companies." M. de Fontanes in 1815 ordered them to be divided into "cla.s.ses." Under Napoleon the hours of study and of play were announced by a drum. In 1815 M. de Fontanes ordered them to be announced by a bell. Under Napoleon the boys all wore a uniform. M. de Fontanes in 1815 ordered the uniforms to be no longer of "a military type." Then the French Liberals who had not dared to stir under the Emperor began to attack both the clergy and the University. But when the Revolution of 1830 brought these "Liberals" into power, they ceased at once to attack, and began at once to engineer the Imperial machinery of the University.
M. Thiers even proclaimed this machinery to be "the finest creation of the reign of Napoleon!"
In 1833 the truest Liberal of them all, M. Guizot, struck a strenuous blow at this machinery of despotism. He could not deal with the University as a system, but he framed a law affecting "primary education," the principle of winch was that no man should be forced to send his child to school, but that schools should exist all over France to which any man who pleased might send his children if he was too poor to pay for their education.
This principle of M. Guizot in 1883 was certainly not an outcome of the "principles of 1789;" for it had been at the foundation of all the free schools of France during the middle ages, and under the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. Talleyrand recognised it in his plan of 1791, which did not suit Condorcet and his "ideologists." It was not in the mere revival of this principle that the true liberalism of M. Guizot manifested itself. In the second article of his law this great statesman provided, in express terms, that "the wishes of families should always be consulted and complied with in everything affecting the religious instruction of their children." This was indeed a step far forward in the path of true liberalism. It was a distinct recognition of the rights of the family as against the encroachments of the State. It was the "liberalism" not of the "ideologists" of 1790, nor of the Third Republic according to M. Challemel-Lacour, but of the legislators who gave Lower Canada her equitable system of common and of dissident schools. It was the liberalism of those courageous men who, like Montgaillard, Bishop of St.-Pons, had dared, under Louis XIV., and after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, to protest in 1688 against imposing the Catholic communion by force upon the Huguenot ancestors of M. Guizot.
As Minister of Public Instruction under Louis Philippe in 1833, this lover of true liberty simply got enacted into law the principles which had led him as a brilliant and rising young man of letters in 1812 to refuse to adulate the Emperor, and which he had plainly and fearlessly set forth as the necessary conditions of the const.i.tutional government of France in his famous interview with Louis XVIII. three years afterwards.
Under M. Guizot"s law of 1833, the primary schools of France were much more than doubled in number during the reign of Louis Philippe.
In the spirit of that law M. Guizot administered the affairs of France during his long tenure of official authority, and to him, more than to any other man, must be attributed the progress which France made under Louis Philippe in the direction of liberty, as Englishmen and Americans understand that much-abused word. That progress might never have been interrupted had the counsels of M. Guizot prevailed over those of M.
Thiers with the aged monarch who trusted the one but yielded to the other, in February 1848.
Now that a parliamentary oligarchy has deliberately undertaken, in the name of the "moral unity of France," to undo all that was done between 1833 and 1848 for educational liberty in France and to protect the moral independence of Frenchmen, it is in the highest degree interesting to find the principles of M. Guizot energetically maintained by the heirs of his blood and of his name, not only here in the Catholic Calvados which gave the great Protestant statesman so staunch a support through all his years of power, and surrounded him with affection and respect down to the last days of his long and ill.u.s.trious life, but in Southern France also, and in the home of his Protestant ancestors.
Val Richer will be a place of pilgrimage for lovers of liberty in the twentieth century, as La Brede is in the nineteenth.
But the genius of the spot is more purely personal in the home of Guizot than in the birthplace of Montesquieu.
The stately rectangular library at La Brede with its thousands of soberly-clad volumes, standing as he left them on its shelves, annotated by his own hand; the ma.n.u.scripts still unfinished of the "Lettres Persanes; the grave silent cabinet, with his chair beside his study-table, as if he had quitted it a moment before you came--all these are eloquent, indeed, of the great thinker whose "Esprit des Lois," too rich in ripe wisdom to be heeded by the headlong and haphazard political "plungers" of 1789 in his own country, illuminated for Washington the problem of const.i.tuting a new nationality beyond the Atlantic.
But La Brede has also a positive physiognomy of its own which takes you back to ages long before his birth. The frowning donjon of the thirteenth century, the machicolated round tower, the moat with its running water, the drawbridge, the vestibule with its columns of twisted oak, even the grand salon with the stately courtiers and captains, the gracious dames and damsels of the family of Secondat gazing down from the walls, all these distract the eye and the mind. The distraction is agreeable, but still it is a distraction. It leads you from the biographical into the social and historical mood. You are delighted as at Meillant or Chenonceaux with a corner of ancient France, marvellously rescued from the red ruin of the Revolution.
Val Richer, on the contrary, like Abbotsford, is the creation of the master whose spirit haunts the place. Like Abbotsford, it has an earlier history and older a.s.sociations, but of these there are few or no material signs. Here stood the great abbey of which Thomas a-Becket once was abbot, and where he found a refuge during that exile from which, in his own words, he went back to England "to play a game in which the stakes were heads!" From Bures, near Bayeux, in this department, where Henry was then holding his court, the four knights followed the Primate to Canterbury, sternly bent on showing their lord that they were neither "sluggish nor half-hearted." Of the abbatial buildings which stood here then few traces are left. But the handsome modern mansion built here by Guizot rests, I believe, on the ma.s.sive foundations, and certainly incorporates some of the solid masonry above ground of the ancient abbot"s house. The drive to Val Richer from the singularly picturesque old Norman town of Lisieux, within whose cathedral walls Henry of England was married to Eleanor of Guienne, is beautifully shaded all the way with n.o.ble trees, and bordered on either hand with parks and gardens. No English county can show a more strikingly English landscape--for this is the mother-country of Norman England, though now one of the main pillars of the nationality of France. The Lady Chapel of the Cathedral at Lisieux, indeed, was founded in the fifteenth century by Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, in express expiation of the "false judgment on an innocent woman," by which, as he lamentably confessed in his deed of gift, he had sent the deliverer of France to the stake at Rouen.
The park, like the mansion of Val Richer, is the creation of M. Guizot.
The monks of old had prepared the ground--for here, as everywhere, they kept alive the traditions of Roman landscape art. The parks which the Norman n.o.bles made on both sides of the Channel were mainly devoted to the chase, like the "paradises" of the Persians; but the monasteries possessed pleasure-grounds and gardens of all sorts. The beautifully broken and undulating surface of the park of Val Richer attests, I think, the fashioning hand of human art at more than one point; and M.
Guizot, by whom most of the fine trees which now adorn the place were planted, took advantage, with the skill of a professional landscapist, of all the opportunities it offered him.
I can well believe, with the most accomplished and appreciative of his English biographers, that the years which he pa.s.sed here after his return from the exile into which he was driven by the unhappy interference of M. Thiers at the most critical moment of the disturbances of February 1848, were the happiest of his long and well-filled life.
The halls and corridors of the mansion are tapestried with books. The green secluded alleys, the gentle knolls, the glades, the s.p.a.cious meadows of the park, recall at every step the younger Pliny"s incomparable picture of his Tuscan villa. "_Placida omnia et quiescentia._" "A spirit of pensive peace broods over the whole place, making it not lovelier only, but more salubrious, making the sky more pure, the atmosphere more clear."
People who imagine convulsions and cataclysms to be a necessity of political life in France, will find it hard to explain the relations which existed throughout his whole career from the time when he took part in forming the first government of Louis Philippe to the day of his death between this great Protestant statesman and the Catholics of the Calvados. These relations still exist between his representatives at Val Richer and the Catholics of the Calvados.
When the great Chancellor de l"Hopital was using all his influence with Catherine de" Medici to prevent the outbreak of the religious wars of the sixteenth century, the Parisian rabble were set on by the satellites of the House of Guise to attack the house of the Sieur de Longjumeau in the Pre aux Clercs, as being a place of meeting for the Huguenots. The Sieur de Longjumeau had no respect for the "sacred right of insurrection," and, getting some of his friends into his house, gave the people risen in their majesty such a thrashing that they speedily disbanded. Upon this the "moral unity" men of that time induced the Court to banish the Sieur de Longjumeau to his estates, on the ground that "the most incompatible thing in a State is the existence of two forms of religion." This is the doctrine of the Third Republic to-day.
France cannot live with a mixed population of believers and of unbelievers. All Frenchmen must be Atheists. The political history of the Calvados for the last half-century, and especially of this region about Lisieux and Val Richer, meets this "moral unity" theory with a practical demonstration of its absurdity. The great Protestant statesman and his Catholic const.i.tuents at Lisieux lived and worked together for liberty and for law, not in "moral unity," but in moral harmony. In moral harmony his Protestant son-in-law, M. Conrad de Witt, through a quarter of a century past has lived and worked for liberty and for law with his Catholic const.i.tuents of Pont-l"Eveque.
The Catholics of the Calvados are not such intense Catholics as the Catholics of Brittany and Poitou. After the Norman rising of 1793 against the tyranny at Paris had collapsed so dismally in the ridiculous "battle" of Pacy--a battle which began with the flight in a panic from the field of the vanquished Normans, and ended with the flight in a panic from the field of their victorious enemies the Parisians--the indignant Bretons and the Poitevins marched away to wage that contest for their homes and their altars which has immortalized the name of La Vendee. The less impa.s.sioned Normans made terms and took things as they were. To this day what is called the "little Church" exists in Brittany, made up of peasants who regard the Concordat as an unworthy compact made with the persecutors and the plunderers of the Church of their fathers.
The feeling of the Norman Catholics after Pacy and the miserable failure of the Girondist resistance to the Mountain took the form of silent disgust with the Republic and all its works. The Norman heroine in whose heart this silent disgust named up till it made her the avenger of innocent blood upon the most noisome reptile of the Revolution, had ceased to be a Catholic before the shame of her country moved her to her glorious and dreadful deed. But if the Catholics of the Calvados are less intense, they are not less sincere, than the Catholics of Brittany or Poitou. It is no indifference in matters of religion which makes them co-operate so cordially with their Protestant friends and representatives. It is because they value their religion, and mean that it shall be respected, that they honour the memory of the great minister who held sacred and inviolable the right of the parent to be heard and obeyed in the matter of the religious education of his children. The two daughters of M. Guizot married two brothers, the heirs of one of the most ill.u.s.trious names in the annals of European liberty. One of these brothers, M. Conrad de Witt, now lives at Val Richer, and administers his large agricultural property lying there in the commune of St.-Ouen-le-Pin. Many years ago he won the gold medal of the French Society of Agriculture, and for twenty years past he has been President of the Agricultural Society of Pont-l"Eveque. In 1861, under the Empire, his fellow-citizens made him a Councillor-General for the Canton of Cambremer, in the Department of the Calvados, and he has kept his seat in that body ever since, until he last year declined a re-election, and made way for the candidacy of his nephew, M. Pierre de Witt. It was my good fortune to be at Val Richer when the election came off. The canva.s.s had been carefully pushed; for, although the Republicans ostentatiously announced their intention not to make a contest in which they were sure to be beaten, M. Conrad de Witt and his nephew are not men to take anything for granted where serious interests are concerned. There were symptoms, too, that the Prefect of the Calvados, the Comte de Brancion, a newcomer (as all prefects now are in France, the average tenure of a prefect"s official life since 1879 rarely exceeding eighteen months in one place), had been advised from Paris to show his zeal by contriving in some way to thwart, or at least to dampen, the victory of the nephew in July, as a preliminary to prevent the victory of the uncle in September. For M. Conrad de Witt was not only a Councillor-General of the Calvados, and Mayor of his own commune of St.-Ouen-le-Pin, he was sent to the Chamber of Deputies in 1885 as a Monarchist by the voters of the Calvados by a majority of 13,722 on a total poll of 89,064, and when he declined a re-nomination for the Council-General, he accepted a re-nomination for the Chamber.
It was delightful to see the zealous interest taken in these contests, not only by the family at Val Richer, but by all the countryside. The elections for the Councils-General were held on Sunday, July 28, 1889.
All through the preceding Sat.u.r.day scouts kept coming in to Val Richer with the latest reports as to the state of things in the various communes of the canton.
The tenor of these was uniform: "There would be no contest; the only possible Republican candidate, a respectable physician who had some local strength in the commune in which he lived, founded upon his habit of gratuitously attending the poor of that commune, had positively declined to enter the field." "All the same," said one energetic volunteer from this very commune, "we don"t mean to let a single honest voter stay at home. We understand this game. They want to make out that we are lukewarm about the battle that is to come off in September. That won"t go!"
"Furthermore," said another stalwart, keen-eyed, fresh-faced young farmer, who might have pa.s.sed as a Yorkshire yeoman, "furthermore, I don"t trust this Republican c.o.c.k till he"s dead! I believe he"s shamming, but he shan"t catch us asleep. This Prefect at Caen is as busy as the Evil One. He means to play us a trick."
The shrewd young farmer was right. Early, very early, on Sunday morning, long before daybreak, indeed, there came hastening over to Val Richer from the commume of Bonnebosq, some miles away, a spirited young fellow, heart and soul in the fight, with the news that a story was putting about all over the canton that M. Pierre de Witt had decided, at the last moment, not to stand, and that, on the strength of this invention, the nomination of Dr. ---- would be urged.
The polling had been fixed by the Prefect to begin in all the communes at 7 A.M., and to close at 6 P.M. No time was, therefore, to be lost in getting out a formal contradiction of this invention of the enemy, and the vigorous young volunteer from Bonnebosq had lost no time. He roused the candidate, got his instructions, and, before the polls were opened, his men were all over the canton at work. In the course of the day I drove over with M. Pierre de Witt to Bonnebosq, where we found the mother of this energetic young politician, a typical Norman mother, full of sense and fire, quietly proud of the activity and intelligence of her son, and quite as much in the day"s work as he. "Not a pretty trick,"
she said, "to play with Dr.----. He ought to be ashamed of it--and I am sure he is," she added, with a droll twinkle in her eye, "for it has turned out very badly! He will just be beaten like plaster. It would have been cleverer to behave like a decent man!" Bonnebosq had a very lively, cheery aspect on that Sunday afternoon. It is a busy prosperous little place, with about a thousand inhabitants. The village church, a new and very handsome French ogival building, most creditable to the architect, has just been built at an expense of several hundred thousand francs by a Catholic lady of the canton, and the people are very proud of it. It struck me that at Bonnebosq the outlook for a moral harmony between Frenchmen of divers religious communions contending together for equal rights and well-ordered liberty was decidedly better than the outlook for a "moral unity" of France to be promoted by the authoritative suppression of all private initiative in the education of the French people. The traditions of the Norman race do not tend kindly towards a system under which the individual is to wither that the State may be more and more!
As Mayor of the commune of St.-Ouen-le-Pin, M. Conrad de Witt had a busy day of it on Sunday, July 28. The holding of elections on Sunday is a tradition in France. Two elections were to be made--one of a Councillor-General and the other of a District Councillor. Under the laws of 1871 and 1874, these elections must be held in separate though adjoining buildings wherever this is practicable. Where the commune is too small to furnish these facilities, the two elections may be held in one place; but the votes for the two officers must be deposited in two different urns. These urns are placed upon a table, at which the Mayor of the commune presides with four a.s.sessors and a secretary, chosen by them from among the electors. As the electors have the day before them, the Mayor and the a.s.sessors are kept close prisoners at their posts till the polls are closed. Nor is their work over then. As soon as the clock strikes 6 P.M. the doors of the bureau close. But the Mayor and the a.s.sessors must then proceed "immediately" to examine and establish the results of the voting. They choose from among the electors present a certain number of "scrutineers" knowing how to read and write. These scrutineers take their seats at tables prepared for the purpose. At each table there must be at least four scrutineers. The Mayor and the a.s.sessors then empty the urns and count the votes, the secretary drawing up a _proces-verbal_ the while. If there are more or fewer votes than there were voters registered during the day as voting, this fact is stated and affirmed. Blank or illegible votes, votes which do not accurately give the name of the candidate voted for, or on which the voters have put their own names, are not counted as valid, but they are annexed to the _proces-verbal_. Votes not written on white paper, or which bear any external indication of their tenor, are included in the account as votes affecting the majority necessary to a choice, but they are not put to the credit of the candidate whose name they bear; so that, as a matter of fact, they tell against him. Moreover, if there are more votes found in the urns than voters registered as voting, the excess may be deducted from the number of votes given to the candidate who has a majority.
I asked a very bright ruddy farmer in a spotless blue blouse, who was watching the elections with great interest in one of the communes, what he thought of this provision. "It is a very good reason for watching the mayors," he said; "_dame_! a clever mayor who knows his commune, and has good loose sleeves to his coat, can slip in a good many votes in this way against the candidate who he knows is likely to win!"
I told him that in my own country we guarded the palladium of our liberties (a queer palladium that needs to be guarded) against this peril by using gla.s.s globes instead of the "urns" employed in France, which are in fact wooden boxes. The idea delighted him. He rubbed his hands together with a chuckle, and said "That would be capital! That would bother them! But for that reason we shall not have your gla.s.s urns!"
When the votes have all been emptied out of the urns and verified and counted by the Mayor and the a.s.sessors, the Mayor distributes them among the scrutineers. At each table a scrutineer takes the votes up one by one, reads out in a clear voice the name of the candidate inscribed on each vote, and pa.s.ses it to another scrutineer, who sees it duly registered, the Mayor and a.s.sessors the while supervising all the proceeding. In communes containing less than 300 inhabitants the Mayor and a.s.sessors themselves may scrutinise and declare the results.
As St.-Ouen-le-Pin falls just two short of this number, M. Conrad de Witt not only lost his luncheon but his dinner. He never got back to the chateau till ten o"clock at night.
The polling place in this commune was a small house opposite the village church. I walked over to it after breakfast through the fields and by lovely green lanes as deep as the lanes of Devonshire, with M. Pierre de Witt and one of his kinsmen. The ma.s.s was going on in the village church, and the singing of the choir seemed to me at least as fitting an accompaniment to the expression by the sovereign people of their sovereign will through bits of white paper--Mr. Whittier"s "noiseless snowflakes"--as the braying of a bra.s.s band, or the hoa.r.s.e shouts of a more or less tipsy mult.i.tude.
In the Protestant corner of this Catholic churchyard, under some fine trees, M. Guizot sleeps his last sleep in the simple tomb of his family.
Here, again, I thought, was a moral harmony better than any "moral unity"!
We had a merry and an animated dinner that night at Val Richer. Message after message was brought in from the nearest communes, all of one tenor. The Republican "trick" had evidently exasperated the worthy Norman voters, and brought them up to the polls most effectually! By ten o"clock it was clear that M. Pierre de Witt was elected by a majority too large to be "whittled" away, and that the surrept.i.tious appearance of the Republicans in the field had served only to emphasize their political weakness. In the canton, Cambremer itself, lying at a distance of eight or ten kilometres, and Beuvron only remained to be heard from.
It was possible harm might have been done there. For a law pa.s.sed under the Empire in 1852, and undisturbed for obvious reasons by the Third Republic, allows the prefect of a department to determine into what sections he will divide a large commune for the purpose, according to the law, of "bringing the electors nearer to the electoral urn." This opens the way, of course, to a good deal of what in America would be known as official "gerrymandering." The thing may be of any country. The name we owe to Mr. Elbridge Gerry, once Vice-President of the United States; who, when his party controlled Ma.s.sachusetts, devised a scheme for so framing the electoral districts of that State as to get his scattered party minorities together, and convert them thus into majorities. An outline map of the State thus districted was declared by one of his opponents to "look like a salamander." "No! not like a salamander," said another; "it is a gerrymander."