extemporaneous speech at Versailles in which M. Deschanel, thanking the Congress, had inaugurated his septennate with the ominous remark: "Our hopes of 1918 have not been fully realised.'

That utterance was the echo of the sub-conscious anguish that, as I have pointed out, is now being stoically stifled in all French hearts. It was the deep undertone of the courageous and patriotic resolve dictating the painful choice between a Clemenceau and a Deschanel. In the same firm spirit of sacred union' in which they rallied to the flag when the Germans ran amuck on Aug. 2, 1914, they are again to-day looking the facts in the face. It was in order to keep untarnished the glory and the honour of their 'Père la Victoire,' as well as to begin the methodic mending of a ruined world, that they have turned to one of the most respected public men of our time, to a Republican politically speaking of aristocratic lineage but a great bourgeois of France, to a statesman whose ideas are clear, national and sane, a man of incomparable political experience and of wide and cultivated intellectual curiosity-the safest arbiter, in a word, whom at the present moment France had to offer.

Now, it was to this man, in spite of his reproachful cry, Our hopes of 1918 have not been fully realised,' that Mr Wilson addressed his cordial telegram of congratulation. M. Deschanel replied with a message containing these suggestive words: 'Despite the deep wounds and the immense sacrifices which Victory has cost, France remains in Peace, as she was in War, attached to that Right which she willed to see restored and to that Justice which calls for reparation!' This exchange of telegrams took place in the last week of February. Some ten days later, Mr Wilson made the singular charge to which I have referred. Throughout the sessions of the Peace Conference in Paris,' said he, 'it was evident that the militarist party was vanquished, but it is to-day in control.' It is M. Millerand who is 'in control' now-M. Millerand, a forward-looking radical of socialist tradition. M. Deschanel is indeed President of the Republic, and M. Deschanel's predecessor, M. Poincaré, is President of the Commission of Reparations; and both M. Poincaré and M. Deschanel are resolved on

defending the interests of France-which are to-day the interests of the world-in the spirit of the words and of the act of the speech delivered by M. Deschanel on March 1 in the historic theatre of Bordeaux at the meeting to commemorate the protest of March 1, 1871, against the seizure by Germany of Alsace and Lorraine. It is important that his words should be kept in view.

The other day (he said), at the French Academy, my illustrious predecessor and friend, M. Raymond Poincaré, received Marshal Foch in the following terms, "It was your business to make war; it was no longer your business to make peace. You had, nevertheless, the right to say what in your opinion peace ought to be, the better to prevent a renewal of the war. The notes which you drew up from the very beginning of November, in order to explain your conception of the military guarantees which you considered indispensable, bear the stamp of your patriotism and of your experience. Let us hope that the world may never have to repent having so inadequately listened to your counsel." Gentlemen, whatever doubt there may be as regards the past which is still under discussion, the question henceforth for us is security for the future, and our duty is certain. To this tribune which has echoed down the ages the protest of 1871 we bring to-day the oath of 1920:

'By our one million five-hundred thousand dead, by our ten departments in ruins, face to face with Alsace and Lorraine, in presence of our ancestors and in presence of our children, we swear not to die without having given France that full security which her heroism and her genius deserve.'

The Serment de 1920, the Oath of Bordeaux,' so solemnly sworn before the world, as the first public act of the President of the French Republic, is an event which will find its place in the chronicles of Europe. If this be militarism,' it is not only the militarism of Gambetta and of Clemenceau, but it is also the militarism of Washington and Lincoln. If M. Deschanel felt it useful and perhaps necessary to inaugurate his term of office with so vivid a gesture, it was because, as he had said, 'French hopes of 1918 have not been fully realised.' Not a Frenchman but knew the reason why. And the point is this: though the Anglo-Saxon world may have been somewhat surprised by these and similar initiatives, discretion lies in realising that they are the profoundly

conscious acts of a statesman, and exactly of the sort that had been expected of him. They were involved in the mandate that raised M. Deschanel to the Presidency. 'For Germany every treaty is a mere truce, a simple halt; every boundary only a provisional frontier; every annexation a preliminary to others.' Who says this? It is M. Paul Deschanel in his book, 'Gambetta,' written during the War, and published in the late autumn of 1919. It is the same Deschanel who, inheriting a violent hatred of the Second Empire, inherited as well a profound distrust of the nationalistic policy of Napoleon III.

Above all, the French Congress knew that M. Deschanel had learned, with its members, the healing virtue of the verity so perfectly formulated, for instance, by Mr Hyndman in his 'Clemenceau and His Times': 'to anticipate fraternity in a world of conflict is to help the aggressor and to court disaster.' They recalled that in March 1915, M. Deschanel, then President of the Chamber of Deputies, delivered an address before the Teachers' League on France and the Public Schools during the War and after the War,' in which he said:

'We must destroy in the mind of the French democracy— and we must begin to do it at an early age-certain deadly sophistries, for instance: that to anticipate war is to want war or to provoke it; and that, because war is detestable, one should destroy the army.'

The 'militarist party,' says Mr Wilson, 'is in control now in the counsels of France.' In the language of Pacifism, commonsense axioms such as those of Mr Hyndman and M. Deschanel are technically known as 'imperialistic' or 'militarist.' In 1920, in a world reeking with the miasmatic gases rising from rotting illusions, a world to which Germany is still an obvious menace, these axioms are merely, and idiomatically, French. The world will not be safe for democracy,' nor for much else, until they become, as well, idiomatically English and American.

WM. MORTON FULLERTON.

INDEX

TO THE

TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THIRD VOLUME OF THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

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