whose feelings towards him differed little from those of Bismarck. Gambetta, with his congenital brightness and good humour, was amused at the jealousy of the older man; but the crafty campaigner nevertheless managed to balk the efforts of his junior in every direction. This underhand opposition was an invisible thorn in Gambetta's side; but there were more immediate and formidable enemies. M. Hanotaux-probably taught by thirty years' experience—says that a politique blanche (that is to say, not anti-clerical) was possible. But it is no less true that Gambetta had against him the then tremendous coalition of the Catholics and the Monarchists; that more than a decade was still to elapse before Pope Leo XIII advised the ralliement; and that, when Gambetta said, 'le cléricalisme, voilà l'ennemi,' he uttered a dangerous war-cry, but he also made an indisputable statement of fact. It cannot be doubted that he thought his Catholic countrymen more dangerous than Protestant Germany; and, if one were to ask one of his surviving friendsM. Hébrard, for instance-what his decision would have been if he had had the alternative of getting back AlsaceLorraine or of being beaten in the domestic conflict, an answer would be difficult to obtain, but what the answer might be is hardly doubtful. At any rate, Gambetta lent his authority to a movement whose force he must have known could not be calculated, and which he was, before his death, to see degenerating into mere persecution. It does not lighten his responsibility that he thought he was joining a European coalition. History shows him more the dupe than the ally of Crispi and Bismarck.

Madame Adam thinks that the time for fighting Germany and undoing what had been done in 1871 ought to have been 1880. Bismarck seems to have thought so too. Gambetta hesitated; and his hesitations appear in his speeches. After a time, he made up his mind, and, for all that M. Galli may say to the contrary, followed Ferry in his colonial plans to the extent of quarrelling with all his Italian friends and throwing Italy almost inevitably into a German alliance. The departure meant more than we can realise now; and, if it elicited mistrust in some quarters, it also caused a feeling bordering on intoxication in others. New horizons were opening on all sides; new hopes were rising everywhere. Madame Adam is

also in the right when she says that Gambetta is responsible for the efforts of France to find alliances, and that his policy, in that respect, was far from consistent. He thought of Russia but gave her up, and gradually came to speak of her almost insultingly. The Prince of Wales was evidently the chief influence he felt. Waddington and Barrère reconciled him by degrees to the possibility of a modus vivendi with Germany; and he looked for the greatness of France in peace, expansion, wealth, and the uprooting of the last prejudices.

6

Meanwhile his own career seems to have satisfied his ambition; and he never perceived that Grévy was getting rid of him, so to say, piecemeal. He wilfully put off the moment of actually taking the reins; he accepted that mirage of power which the Presidency of the Chamber has been with so many; he does not seem to have regretted his failure as a Premier very much; he made money out of his newspaper, the République Française,' and spent it; he indulged his inclination towards gallantry and luxury, and set an unfortunate example to the numberless politicians thanks to whom materialism in its crudest shapes has been the real creed of the Third Republic. Flaubert saw that, while these inferior men were only the satellites of Gambetta, they could not but influence his course very considerably; and he anticipated history when he said in his deliberately popular language, ‘Gambetta sera mangé.'

Such is the background which one must bear in mind while endeavouring to judge Gambetta's relations with Bismarck; and a few words may suffice to see their real significance in the transitional phase to which they belong. It is clear that only political antagonism can see collusion and treason in the Donnersmarck documents and the dealings recorded by Madame Adam. Gambetta had nothing of the traitor in him. But is it enough, on the other hand, to say that-in a phrase used by Gambetta himself-he only ventured on Prussian territory to reconnoitre? M. Galli seems to think so. According to him, Alsace-Lorraine was Gambetta's constant preoccupation; and whatever he did should be explained by his longing for the revanche. This again is too simple a theory. Madame Adam has the mundane tendency to belittle people and things. It is making a

cruel but just criticism of her book to say that hardly anybody in it except herself seems very intelligent. But M. Galli has the contrary fault; his Gambetta is too remote from real life, almost idealised and evidently magnified. If Gambetta only wanted to play the part of the diplomatic scout, why do we see his private secretary and intimate friend Spuller, throughout Madame Adam's diary, in an agony of anxiety at the Dictator's intercourse with Bismarck? M. Galli does not offer the least explanation. Above all, why did Gambetta promise to Donnersmarck to remove an ambassador? why did he insist on France taking part in the Berlin congress? why did he send Waddington to Berlin? why did he throw out hints about Germany encouraging the Exhibition, if it was only to reconnoitre? Nay more, why did he consciously and definitely join Bismarck in his anti-Roman campaign? Why do we see him in a letter to his friend Madame Léonie Léon exult over the famous speech delivered by Bismarck on February 19, 1878, and make a list of the happy consequences he foresees, but completely forget in that list any prospect of recovering the lost provinces? Surely all this means more than a desire to ascertain German intentions.

Yet it remains true that the Donnersmarcks had to exert themselves to attract Gambetta, and that he refused to see Bismarck if Alsace-Lorraine was to be tabooed. How much of Gambetta was loyal to, how much was becoming estranged from, the old abiding thought? Probably the impatient speeches entered in Madame Adam's diary, on any too pressing allusion to AlsaceLorraine, denote some polarisation of feeling. Gambetta had lived on one thought for several years; other pre. occupations were just forcing themselves upon him and rousing his pent-up activities. He did not like to be fettered just when he wanted all his freedom and initiative. It is difficult to think, also, that his vanity was not flattered by the attention of Bismarck, and that the prospect of negotiating with him, man to man, did not more or less turn his head. Finally, there is every likelihood that he imagined he could outwit the 'monster,' as he called the Chancellor. He had the short-sightedness to ignore social questions, firmly believing, as he put it, that there are only political and religious issues. So

he cannot have anticipated M. Jaurès' messianic hope that the gradual rise of the proletariate will bring the solution of the Alsatian as well as of the Polish question. In his heart of hearts he was even probably sure that Alsace-Lorraine would be returned to France on a battlefield, and not in the clauses of a commercial agreement. But the 'when' of such an event was an idle query, which had better be left alone; and, the last years of Gambetta's life coinciding exactly with the anti-clerical and the colonial development of France, he was less likely to fret over the lapse of ineffectual years than he might have been a decade later. His intentions were pure; the knowledge of this is no doubt at the root of the unshaken loyalty of such a man as Paul Déroulède.

and

But it is not much to say of a man that he did not in his soul give up an ideal which involved no immediate danger, nor even a duty of any sort. And it is certainly unfortunate for the memory of Gambetta that, while trying to deceive Bismarck, he did all the time unsuspectingly what the Chancellor wanted him to do. Gambetta contributed to establish the colonial, anti-clerical, ultra-pacific but internally divided Republic which Bismarck longed to see strike roots in France; and he did so with the happy light-heartedness of perfect innocence. This contrast between the two men helps us to realise the difference between a statesman and a politician, no matter how eloquent. The achievements of Bismarck are so great that they almost blind us to the means he employed; the policy tolerated rather than initiated by Gambetta has turned out so poorly that we have to extenuate his responsibilities by defending his intentions. He was no statesman; he was, as he himself said shortly before his death, above all a partisan. But he was a partisan as he had been a warlike agitator in 1870, from undoubtedly patriotic motives. It is something in his favour that M. de Mun defended him publicly a few months ago as the man who, in a terrible crisis, saved the dignity of France.

ERNEST DIMNET.

Art. 4.-TERRACINA.

1. Terracina.

Essai d'histoire locale. Par R. De La

Blanchère. Paris: Thorin, 1884.

2. Del Tempio di Giove Anxure scoperto sur Monte S. Angelo. Da L. Borsari. Estratte dalle Notizie degli Scavi del mese di Marzo 1894. Roma: Tipografia della R. Accademia dei Lincei, 1894. 3. Passeggiate per Italia. Carboni, 1906.

Da F. Gregorovius. Roma:

4. Monte Circeo. By Dr Thos Ashby. Mélange d'Archéologie et d'Histoire. Vol. xxv. Rome: Spithöver, 1905. And other works.

IF in the early spring, after a couple of months of the tramontana, you desire an easy escape from Rome to a warmer shelter, you are likely to be recommended to try Fiumicino or Anzio. You will hardly hear of Terracina unless your informant happens to know that you are fairly hardy and have some taste for antiquities. It is a place, you will gather, which is occasionally visited by motorists. To reach it by rail, though it is only 76 miles from the capital, one must give up the larger part of a day. If you venture on the journey, you run the risk of becoming an object of commiseration to your chance fellow-traveller-a young officer perhaps-who, on hearing of your destination, will exclaim with the southern warmth of protestation, 'Ma è una città morta!' And, should you urge the compensation for slow travelling, 'chi va piano va sano,' you are not unlikely to get as a retort the roguish tag, 'e va lontano e non arriva mai.' Yet slow travelling has its consolations when the Italian sun shines and one's route runs across the Roman Campagna and under the Alban Hills. The hours of enforced delay at Velletri, too, will fill themselves pleasantly, not merely with the good cheer of the hospitable inn, but with a stroll through the old town and a climb on the steep hill behind it, from which one surveys, to the left, the long sweep of the Volscians, swooning away in the haze as they approach the sea at Terracina, and in front, beyond the many-tinted levels of the Pontine Marshes, Monte Circeo rearing itself like an island above a glimmer of sea. Beyond Velletri the railway follows the winding contour of the Volscians just above the Marshes. It is