The Pahiatua Herald. with which is incorporated THE PAHIATUA STAR Published Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1898. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Pahiatua Herald, Volume VI, Issue 732, 7 December 1898, Page 2

The Pahiatua Herald. with which is incorporated THE PAHIATUA STAR Published Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1898. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The events of the last few years, the wholesale barter of orders and decorations, the Panama scandals, the revelations of political and judicial corruption, the canker in the heart of her vaunted army—these have shocked and appalled the civilised world, and have shaken the belief of Europe in the greatness of the French nation. And now we are beginning to grasp the threads of this complicated mass of corrupt elements in her social and political constitution. ' Each fresh fact that comes to light shows more clearly the rotten foundation upon which the national existence of Franco rests. The whole system is being more and more plainly revealed as a hideous engine of organised espionage. The President of the Bepublic, the Cabinet Minister, the judge or other officer of State, are mere names the figureheads that symbolise authority. It is the spy who governs France. Foreign relations, national defence, civil and criminal jurisdiction—all are in the hands of the degraded agents whom the French allow to be the dispensers of justice and the stakeholders of their country’s honour. That France, of all the nations in the world, with her noble traditions and the splendid achievements of her great men, should have permitted her institutions to sink into such a slough of base and vulgar intrigue is almost incomprehensible. But it is, perhaps, the greater proof of her virility and genius that she has survived a number of blows any one of which might have laid another power in the dust of humiliation. There is no political crisis through which sheilas not passed. In one century she has overturned four thrones ; her last Bepublic has witnessed more changes of Ministry than it has lasted years. And yet no one can say of France that the lustre of her greatness has suffered more than a transitory dimming. The past has shown of what great things she is capable ; and now that she has, in ordering the revision of the Dreyfus case, once more set her face toward the light, no one can foresee what she may not yet accomplish in the future. But it is indispensable that the first act of enlightened France should be to stamp out the iniquitous system which is mainly responsible for the deplorable condition of her affairs. Let her proceed as remorsely against the spy as she has hitherto upheld him. Then, and then only, will the French Bepublic recover her own self-respect and the confidence of other nations.—Saturday Ileview.