On Sunday last, M. Thiers explained his views to the
Assembly in language which all but said that he must get peace at any price. The conventional reservation that the peace would be rejected " if it be not honourable " clearly meant nothing, in the context, except that the Assembly were to consider any peace M. Thiers made an honourable one. He described the state of the country, and then asked :—" In the face of such a state of things, are there, can there be, two policies ? On the contrary, is there not one only, forced, necessary, urgent, that of making the woes that crush us cease in the shortest time possible ? Can any one con- tend that it is not necessary to make an end in the shortest possible time to the occupation of the stranger, by means of a peace courageously discussed, and which will be rejected if it be not honourable ? To rid our fields of the enemy who tramples and ravages them ; to recall our soldiers, our officers, and our generale, —prisoners abroad ; to reconstitute with them an army well-dis- ciplined and brave ; to re-establish order, now so troubled ; to replace at once the administration dismissed as unworthy ; to reform by election our councils-general, our municipal councils, all dissolved; to reconstruct thus our disorganized administration ; to put a stop to ruinous expenditure ; to raise, if not our finances, which cannot be done in a day, but at least our credit, our sole means of facing our engagements; to send back to their fields, their work- shops, our Mobiles and Mobilisees ; to re-open our closed roads, to rebuild our broken bridges, and thus to renew our interrupted work,—our work which alone can procure the means of life to our artizans and peasants 1—is there any one who can tell us that there is any work more pressing than this?" One sees that M. Thiers had made up his mind pretty completely to take his medi- cine like a man. Unless he could count on neutral support, he. would venture nothing.
