There is more reason in the objection that has of recent years been brought against the French people for an apparent want of internal harmony and evenness in its treatment of political and social aims. In the ardent struggles of French thought during the last two decades, it has, indeed, been sometimes difficult to trace that continuity of purpose which should be the aim of public life. The constant disturbances, the angry wranglings, the battles royal between Labour and the Army, the Church and the Republic-these have often, we admit, been depressing to those of us who have loved France best. It is very difficult for eyes that watch, however benevolently, another nation from a distance, to avoid misapprehension of developments which are unfamiliar in their kind. But reflection will persuade us that even the social agitations which have so often bewildered us in recent French politics were founded on generous instincts. They were conducted in the interest, often no doubt in the mistaken and even the perverted interest, of equity and justice. They were exasperating in their form, and they led to deplorable episodes, but in their essence they were not ignoble. At the basis even of their irregularities, it was always possible to trace a zeal for first principles and the universal rights of man, no less than for the emancipation of intelligence and for the progress of civilisation. Even the crisis of Dreyfusism, which saddened and bewildered the rest of the world, and in some of its features presented an aspect of unrelieved distress, even this melancholy affair revealed marvellous examples of high civic courage. It is not too much to say that after all these years it is the intrepidity of the combatants, far more than their confused and squalid struggle, which remains vivid to us when we look back on the dismal swamp of Dreyfusism.

We do well, therefore, to protest against this talk of a New France, risen, like a phoenix out of the funeral pyre of the old, for the instant purpose of combating the arrogance of Prussia. The France of to-day is splendid, but her effort is not miraculous; it has long been prepared for by the elements of her ancient and continuous civilisation. Those who watched the nation closely before the outbreak of this war have no cause for surprise, though much for gratulation and thankfulness, in the evolution of national character; it is welcome, but it is no more than we expected. For fifteen years past,

it has been impossible for an unprejudiced and perspicacious observer to fail to see that France has been gathering her moral forces together, simplifying her political attitude, preparing without haste for concerted action. The superficial agitations in the social life of the country have been vastly exaggerated and seriously misunderstood by foreign observers. It is evident that in Germany, with the brutal superficiality of a race equally hostile and unimaginative, they were seized upon with alacrity and grotesquely overestimated. It seems important to meet the calumnies of foes and the bewilderment of friends by a statement of the unbroken essential tradition of France.

The importance of cultivating an intellectual and moral unity in the thought of France was insisted upon by Renan on his entrance into the French Academy so long ago as thirty-six years. In his beautiful Discours de Réception (April 3, 1879) Renan said to the Academicians Où est 'donc votre unité, Messieurs? Elle est dans l'amour de 'la vérité.' He dwelt, in language which has singularly the accent of to-day, upon the radical error of Teutonism. His words deserve to be recalled to memory, so strikingly do they foreshadow the moral stigma which events have fastened upon Germany. Renan said, while entreating the Academicians to support and to unify the ancient and beautiful culture of their own race:

'Vous vous inquiétez peu d'entendre annoncer pompeusement l'avènement de ce qu'on appelle une autre Kultur, qui sera pauvre du talent. Vous vous défiez d'une Kultur qui ne rend l'homme ni plus aimable ni meilleur. Je crains fort que des races, bien sérieuses sans doute, puisqu'elles nous reprochent notre légèreté, n'éprouvent quelque mécompte dans l'espérance qu'elles ont de gagner la faveur du monde par de tout autres procédés que ceux qui ont réussi jusqu'ici. Une science pédantesque en sa solitude, une haute société sans éclat, une noblesse sans esprit, des gentilhommes sans politesse, ne détrôneront pas, je crois, de sitôt, le souvenir de cette vieille société française, si brillante, si polie, si jalouse de plaire.'

Nothing could be more pointed, while the reproach is pressed in the great writer's best style of prelatical irony, and the only objection to it is that the arrow is too delicate to pierce the thick hide of the Boches. But here we have a Frenchman of genius, so long ago as 1879, coming forward

as what M. Paul Margueritte, in a fine phrase, calls' le champion ' de l'Esprit contre la Bestialité armée.' It was a reminder to France that she had not lost the attention of the world, and could only lose it if, by frittering away her genius in internal dissensions, she forgot to preserve the tradition of her intellectual and moral greatness. Renan urged the France of his day, the France of thirty-six years ago, not to be intimidated by the truculence of her eastern rival, not to endeavour to compete with her mechanical and material culture, but to cling to all that was refined, sympathetic, and inspiring in the unbroken tradition of the ancient genius of France.

Those who have watched a little closely the movement of affairs in France cannot but have observed the increasing tendency towards energy of action among young men. There has been a steady development in this direction. The French, whose life had tended to run in very conventional channels of practical movement, have enlarged their borders in every direction that leads to individual activity. The cultivation of games, which took a strong upward line from the year 1900 onwards, has proceeded so rapidly and so uniformly that when the war broke out last year there was scarcely a country village which did not possess its clubs of football and tennis. Cricket has continued to be a mystery not to be penetrated by the Gallic mind, but the other physical exercises-and with the addition of much more horse-riding and fencing than are customary at present in this country-have extended their influence over the mind as well as the body of young France to a degree which must not be underrated. Games played with energy and spirit extend the sentiment of responsibility, and it is obvious that in this sphere they have had a directly beneficial effect upon French character, the defect of young France at the close of the nineteenth century having evidently been its inability, or lack of opportunity, to assert initiative in conduct. One of the earliest advocates of football remarked, with a pleasing naiveté, Les fautes commises se paient directe'ment, soit par une chute, soit par la perte de la partie ou de 'l'assaut engagé. Il en va de même dans la pratique des affaires : 'une erreur d'exécution entraîne pour son auteur un préjudice 'direct.' It is not too much to say that the liberty of action which young Frenchmen have insisted upon since the opening

of the present century has had an extraordinary effect on their ability to form a rapid and firm decision.

In our opinion it was the crisis of 1911 which enabled the French to take advantage of all the reviving energy of their race and tradition. The country had arrived at a point when all depended upon a shock to its nervous system. Agadir came, and it pulled the whole youth of France together in a sudden splendid unity of purpose. The writer of these lines asks to be forgiven if he refreshes his memory by turning to notes which he made at that moment. From a Paris, somnolent in the gloom of August, and inhabited apparently only by a population of Germans and Americans, from Paris slumbering in a haze of cosmopolitan indifference and representative of nothing at all, he came to a beautiful house in the heart of Burgundy, a hospitable house of great antiquity, shadowed, as by a rock in Palestine, by the bulk of a famous basilica. Here was France indeed, without the least admixture of the tourist or the restaurant, the brasserie transferred from Berlin or the bar that pretended to be in New York. Here were gathered, in various generations, a group of people representing, in contrast and in harmony, the sentiments of French intelligence. If I may complete my indiscretion, I will name, as those who led the delightful revels, two men whose influence on younger minds has asserted itself through the length and breadth of France, my admirable friends, M. Paul Desjardins and the resuscitator of the medieval 'Tristram and Iseult,' M. Joseph Bédier.

There was something theatrical in the suddenness with which, in the midst of our enchanted talks under the spreading branches of another 'Tree of Taine,' there fell upon the studious company there assembled news of the German aggression in Morocco. Suddenly the unfamiliar name of Agadir appeared before us, a sinister inscription written right across the north-eastern sky. For a little while, it will be remembered, war seemed imminent, at all events it seemed so to us in that burning silence. And now, it was of the deepest interest to me to feel the pulse, as it were, of the Frenchmen round me, elderly, middle-aged and young, and so to judge of their temper. With held breath, questioning and listening, I seemed privileged to apply my ear to the actual auscultation of a fragment of the heart of France. In the echoes of talk which I took down

at that moment, I find the key-note of calmness' prominent. A certain idealism which lies a little below the surface of every thinking Frenchman was brought up to light by the shock, and lay there ready to meet without undue agitation whatever the next weeks or days might bring forth. There was no boasting; that was particularly notable to one who could remember the shouts of A Berlin!' in 1870. There was anxious but not undignified inquiry put to the solitary Englishman, 'Will England be with us?' to which in his ignorance he could only reply 'I hope so and I think so.'

Very vivid in my memory is a walk on one afternoon of that week of suspense, a walk taken in the Cuyp-like golden atmosphere of the illimitable stubble-fields of the Yonne, in going, without an aim, in returning, with the vast church, like a ship at sea, towering on the horizon for a goal. My companion, one of the wisest of men, spoke gravely, almost fatalistically, of the immediate future. He mourned the nonchalance and negligence of the official class, the bureaucracy of France, so little alive to the great movements of the age. He lamented the passion for cities, the polimania, which drained the country districts of their richest blood. But his own faith was staunch and well-grounded; he was persuaded that the crisis would awaken a universality of patriotism, a flood in which all the social scum would disappear, as before a stream of wholesome waters. And he said, with a stoic reserve, 'If we are doomed 'to disappear before the barbarian, we can at least die with 'dignity, fighting to the last, and surely, surely !—without 'the disgrace of internal dissension and private reproach.' As we came near to our home, and the western light flashed in the windows of our great abbey-church, which might have been the symbol of the unshaken State, the diapason of our talk closed full on the notion of Union,-France drawn together in the battle for existence along a serried line of consistent defence.

That particular cloud, as everyone knows, evaporated and left the sky of Europe comparatively clear. But the lesson of Agadir was not forgotten. It made itself felt in many ways throughout the year 1912, when a change in the general tone of the press could scarcely fail to be observed. One very curious phenomenon was the reaction against the excess of intellectualism, which, it is now easy to see, had been a main