arouses suspicions to her detriment; even aviation, which all humanity should have greeted with the same enthusiasm, under a sky that has no frontiers, even this magnificent discovery created only the most wretched irritability between Paris and Berlin.

All this cannot last; blindness has its limits, and in default of Governments, it will be necessary that private initiative, here as elsewhere, should undertake the venture and place in the forefront of its investigations the problem of Franco-German reconciliation, the condition of world-peace.

I have said in Berlin and have published what I had on my heart concerning this subject. I have said that between France and Germany revenge was no more to be desired than forgetfulness; revenge not being a solution; forgetfulness being neither possible nor lasting, the plaint of a single conscience sufficing to end it.

Is there no issue between these two absolute limits? Must we resign ourselves on both sides to hope for nothing, to do nothing? This seems to me inadmissible.

Silence was imposed the day following the war. Now the two great nations, hurled against each other by the sole fault of their Governments, cannot continue to live side by side, yet completely separated; they cannot share in the constant progress of the world and both stop, paralyzed by mutual distrust and by the burden of a ruinous defence. Both thus deprive themselves of the start their superior civilization ought to secure for them in the progress of the world; they are reduced to following the movement which they ought to lead. This cannot last.

Each one makes up the balance-sheet of its interests, of the internal and external dangers that threaten it, and, having done so, each inwardly says: "What a pity that we could not come to an understanding! What a pity! What a loss to the two countries and to civilization!" This state of mind is the present state of all thinking people in France and in Germany; these alone count, the others follow or will follow. But meanwhile, this state of mind, even though it may not be noticed, is progress. It is a progress that is very little apparent, upon which Govern

ments cannot take action, and which sceptics must ignore or contest, but it is a great advance, it is the beginning of the mutual self-examination that must precede the final concord. It is the prelude. Each feels that this harmony is necessary; to one as much as to the other; perhaps it is even more necessary to Germany than to France. For when France is peaceful she reassures the world. She contributes efficaciously to the general progress and to the organization of peace; therefore all the nations feel an interest in her conservation, which has become an element and a guarantee of the prosperity of all. Germany, on the contrary, however peaceful the Emperor, his Government, and the majority of the people certainly are, appears none the less the modern hot-bed, the high school of militarism. There is no one who does not say to himself that this militarism is not only an anachronism, but a continual danger; a danger that the policy of the Governments may ward off to-day, but which an impulse, an error, may unchain to-morrow. Therefore a defeat of France would be regarded throughout the entire world as a blow dealt at peace, and consequently at the general security, while the victory of Germany would be the triumph, the consecration of the militarism which all endure and everyone detests.

If all this is correct, we may say in other words, that Germany has a great interest in reassuring the world, in her turn, including her own people, who, like ours, know what war costs, and who also claim security for the future.

Assuming that the German Government disregards this need of security, it will work against itself, for the benefit of socialism and anarchy. No one to-day disputes that socialism may be indirectly one of the results of militarism.

In every civilized country men no longer accept the traditional idea of inevitable and fruitful wars; everywhere people are beginning to understand that the majority of wars have originated in personal or dynastic ambitions, in chance adventures, or simply in ignorance, error, routine, or the mere dread of reform. We are commencing to realize that Governments formerly administered war to the nations as a purge, a good bleeding, to calm them and create a diversion of their troublesome requirements. But that period, happily, is over, and I am very

proud of having been able, so far as my powers would permit, to contribute in denouncing it. This period is over, for permanent reasons, which, henceforth, will be daily affirmed with everincreasing force and clearness. It is not sentiment that demands a change, it is the common interest, understood by all. And this is why you see everywhere the desire to discriminate sharply between wars of conquest, which are no longer wanted, and resistance to wars of conquest, a resistance which everyone prepares, in spite of the inevitable polemics, a resistance which is organized and which it is necessary to organize, even in the schools, in the interest of fatherland, liberty, and right.

I affirm, with the certainty of a witness who believes much more in the scrupulous examination of the feelings and interests of a people than in governmental reports, I affirm that aside from a very small number of Frenchmen, who nevertheless are disinterested and estimable, like Paul Déroulède, the policy of revenge and war has no one in its favor among our laboring population and even among those who would be the first to expose their lives, as I should do myself and as all my family would do, if the German army, on any pretext, should attack France. I affirm that no Government will be able to induce France to attack Germany. The people have understood that in the last analysis conquest, active or passive, is always against them.

The French, perhaps better than the Germans, know that they have everything to lose and nothing to gain from war, even if victorious. France would thereby lose the benefit of the active policy of appeasement, of which she has set the impressive and contagious example for forty years. The Germans would be wrong to deceive themselves on their side; I repeat it, speaking without passion, in their interest as well as in the interest of all: willing or unwilling, the whole world would oppose to their ambition a coalition more imposing than that which Prince Bismarck himself headed in 1878 at Berlin to stop the Russian conquerors at San Stefano. That is not all; this useless war, with no other effect than the ruin of each and the embarrassment of all, would cause in both countries-more enlightened now than forty years ago-internal rebellions and incalculable disorders.

The Republic in France would be menaced by a return of

Cæsarian reaction; would the German monarchy escape in its turn a revolt in the opposite direction?

The man who would dare to kindle war between France and Germany could be only a fool or a madman.

It will be objected that France may be swept away. That is

an error.

The foreign policy of France to-day is not the policy of a Government, it is the policy of the country, it is our national policy. This is the great change accomplished; moreover, our Government is the first to declare it openly. This policy has found its expression, its future, in the conventions at The Hague for the peaceful settlement of international conflicts. It does not imply, it does not permit any forfeiture of right, but neither does it permit the solutions of violence; it favors alliances, agreements, cordial understandings; but even in spite of the most Machiavellian and most secret treaties that Governments could conclude, it requires that its agreements should not be directed against anyone; and no one can lead it into unfair preferences.

By, the aid of this national foreign policy, which is assuming form after forty years of efforts and sacrifices succeeding repeated tests of the contrary policy, France is now beginning to conceive and define her national internal policy. Here our best foreign friends cease to comprehend us; they are deafened by the polemics of our newspapers, by the heat of our parliamentary discussions, and they imagine that all this uproar prevents us from working, when most frequently it stimulates us. The proof is in our ever-increasing wealth; a wealth which is the fruit of unceasing labor. This labor is beginning to organize itself with a view to improve the resources of our soil, our climate, our inhabitants, who, though not numerous, are all the more active and industrious; our programme of economical, agricultural, industrial, commercial, intellectual and even moral work, whatever may be said of it, is being outlined and maintained; it is summed up in these words: to develop national prosperity under the protection of our amicable international relations: " pro patria per orbis concordiam."

We hear only of our strikes, our social and other crises, and our own journals cry every morning: Finis Gallia! But Ger

many, too, has her strikes, and as for France, we do not continue the less to progress by peace; this policy has yielded such results that we can regard the future without more uneasiness than our neighbors; perhaps we can await events better than they. A good third of Frenchmen are landowners, the other two aspire to be. This is a guarantee of order and progress that many countries, apparently less turbulent, but really more disturbed than ours, may envy us.

While working we reason, instruct ourselves, exchange ideas with our neighbors, add our experiences and observations to the common stock, and the policy of peace being gradually acclimated in the country regarded as one of the most warlike in the world, this policy having endured, having proved its advantages, is overflowing into the other nations, and important questions now take their proper places naturally in the preoccupations of public opinion.

It is useless to say in Germany: "There is no Alsace-Lorraine question," as we said in France: "There is no Dreyfus affair." Free minds do not conceal from themselves the truth; they establish the fact that Alsace-Lorraine has remained the insurmountable wall separating the two countries, when it could, should, and would fain be the bond of union between them. This fact is stronger than all the official statements; it reduces them to the rôle of ineffectual scarecrows; and therefore no one in the world can prevent individual thought, energy, and good will from substituting themselves for governmental obstinacy and error. In the day when French thought and German thought join to seek together the solution of the problem, it will be of little importance that it should once have been declared insoluble; the mere fact that it is placed in the forefront, not of the official, but of the moral cares of the two countries, the mere fact that it is rightly presented, will be already a great advance. And there is not a power in the world which could prevent it from thus presenting and obtruding itself, precisely as the problem of a Court of Arbitration presented itself, though people laughed at the idea; and as the problem of the limitation of armaments now presents itself, though people pretend to be exasperated by it. It is a matter simply of the irresistible force of circumstances.