Nations that any longer really mattered was the Commission of Reparations, whose duty it should be to become a relentless Rhadamanthine Areopagus presided over by an argus-eyed Frenchman, bent on applying to the letter those guarantees at all events that France had been suffered to maintain against a potential revanche from beyond the Rhine.

Now, if this was the mood in which the majority of the French Congress confronted the election of a Chief Magistrate to preside over the destinies of France during one of the most critical moments of French history, we have, no doubt, an adequate explanation of its rejection of M. Clemenceau; but the firm resolve to part with M. Clemenceau by no means implies, as a necessary corollary, the preference of the Congress for M. Deschanel among all possible candidates for the Presidency. It remains to explain the choice of M. Deschanel.

It is true that M. Deschanel, although he had never been Prime Minister, had been regarded for more than a quarter of a century as a potential candidate for the Presidency of the Republic. In this connexion I venture to recall a picturesque bit of evidence. In 1891, at the age of 35, M. Deschanel spent four months in the United States. He returned enamoured of the American Constitution. Even eight years later, in the thick of the Dreyfus case, he manifested such satisfaction with the system of government in North America-a system permitting the Head of the State consecutively to carry out the domestic policies for which he had been electedthat he boldly declared, on Jan. 20, 1899, in an interview in the Nationalist organ, the 'Echo de Paris,' that 'nothing could divert him' from his resolve to spend his life in the effort to revise the French Constitution of 1875. Let us change that Constitution,' he said, ' or put our Presidents of the Republic in a position to use the considerable authority with which they are armed.' A certain imprudence in this declaration instantly struck the intelligence of my old chief, M. de Blowitz, correspondent of the Times'; and, on the day of its rash appearance, the wary journalist, who knew and loved Paul Deschanel, telegraphed to the 'Times' a friendly but ironic comment which, to the honour of M. Deschanel's

open mind, the critic never had to repeat. In this telegram M. de Blowitz wrote, among other things, as follows:

M. Deschanel wishes to be Prime Minister in order to convoke a Congress intended to alter the Constitution; that is to say-for M. Deschanel is a great admirer of the Americans-to give the President greater personal power, similar to that possessed by the President of the United States. In a word, M. Deschanel, President of the Chamber, hopes to become Prime Minister; and, once Prime Minister, he will prepare a Congress to bestow very great powers upon the President of the Republic. Then M. Deschanel, as President of the Republic, in the enjoyment of these enlarged prerogatives granted him by his Congress, will become-I really cannot say what, for there, for the moment, his tangible ambition stops and we enter on the field of hypothesis. But it is always agreeable to be able to predict the brilliant career of one of the most sympathetic men now in French public life.'

This was in 1899. Now note how effectively the lesson went home. Four months after M. de Blowitz's prediction M. Deschanel became a member of the French Academy. On Feb. 1, 1900, in his discourse on formally taking his seat, the young President of the Chamber formulated as follows the principles from which he has never varied:

"The democracy in those countries where it is the furthest advanced never ceases to create ne organisms. We must not complain, for everywhere, in Austria and in Italy as well as in France, the Parliamentary regime is passing through a crisis. And it is presumable that, before long, the forms which have hitherto served to govern us, monarchical or republican, will be to the more scientific mechanisms of the future what the diligences, the coaches and the signals of our fathers are to the express trains, the ocean steamships and the telephones. But what will always remain the truth is that no people, whatever its institutions, can infringe without danger the great principles bequeathed us by the experience of the ages. A nation is free and its Government is stable only so long as authority is divided. When, in law or in reality, the public powers are concentrated either in the hands of one man or in an Assembly, there is no longer responsibility or control or lasting authority. Whether the Government crush the Chambers or the Chambers paralyse and absorb the Executive Power, in either case it is despotism and anarchy.'

...

During the years that ensued, in all the great debates of the Palais Bourbon, M. Deschanel reiterated his now confirmed belief in the prudence of not tampering frivolously with the Constitution. Twenty-one years after his ambiguous statement in the Echo de Paris,' M. Deschanel published a brilliant essay on Gambetta. In the intention of M. Deschanel it is a not-too-critical panegyric of the Frenchman who, having incarnated the resistance of the nation in 1870, merited a pious recognition on the part of his grateful compatriots at the grand moment of the realisation of that Immanent Justice he had foreseen and prepared. Now, in this book, published only a few days before the Congress met to choose a successor to M. Poincaré, M. Deschanel says:

'As regards the Presidency of the Republic, the experience of 1848 had taught the Republicans, and Gambetta reminded the country, that, if the President were appointed by the people, he would dominate Parliament. On the contrary, certain minds, considering that a President elected by the two Houses is annihilated by them, turned their eyes towards the United States. Now, if by the American system the President of the United States has a considerable authority, it is because at the outset that authority was susceptible of slight application. . . . Undertake to transfer this system. into our ultra-centralised France; and you would have during four years (for necessarily the length of the Presidential term would be reduced) the domination of the victorious party, while the minority would be oppressed by the majority; therefore less stability and less liberty. The American system implies a federated State, a country strongly decentralised.'

Now, although it is doubtful if many members of the French Congress recalled this picturesque and significant episode in M. Deschanel's mental development, the majority at all events remembered to his credit certain aspects of his political career which they held to be of extreme importance. When, in the last decade of the 19th century, the present Prime Minister of France, M. Millerand, accompanied by M. Clemenceau, was throwing sops to the Cerberus of unchained Marxism, M. Deschanel sprang into the arena, and, with foresight and courage, often with an invective that recalled the Catilinian orations, warned Frenchmen of the risks

involved in truckling to the Collectivist philosophers and agitators. With a steady dialectic he reaffirmed in the French Chamber the sacred right to individual property by free association and co-operation. He reminded Frenchmen that the logical fruit of the seductive fustian of 1848 had been the dictatorship of the Second Empire. And I remember well a brilliant speech of his at the Palais Bourbon in 1892 in which he adjured his colleagues to combat the ideas, which were returning among them in German garb, as if Germany meant to subjugate our brains after having conquered our provinces.'

6

Again, it is just over a quarter of a century since M. Deschanel woke the echoes of the Palais Bourbon with such words as these:

No, no! our great and hardworking democracy now perceives the dangerous slopes towards which certain leaders would impel it. No, the clear intelligence of France, the country of Descartes, of Montesquieu and of Voltaire, will never allow itself to be lured on by your masters, the Karl Marxes and the Lassalles, and, wandering astray, lose its road in the fogs of the regions beyond the Rhine. No, never will the spirit of Germany, never will that worst of tyrannies, the Collectivist tyranny, lay its heavy hand on the idealistic soul of France.'

And, in a great speech in 1897 on Agrarian Socialism, a speech placarded throughout France, he ended his courageous exposure of the sophistries and chimæras of the time with the following words:

'If there be anywhere in the world a land where Collectivism can never succeed in taking root, it is our land of France. What our peasant loves in the soil is what he has himself put into it, what his father and forbears have put into it before him, namely, their toil, their patience, their courage, their virtues, all that is best in them and most sacred, all that makes for human dignity and honour. And this is why a halo of idealism surrounds even the humble tiller of the soil. Yet, for these sentiments, the most generous that can move the human heart, certain persons would substitute the vilest instincts of cupidity and envy. They point to the meadow larger than the peasant's own and say to him: "Such equality is necessarily injustice; if you are the stronger take it." Well, such persons mistake their epoch and mistake their country. For the generous-minded

Frenchman feels that human happiness is no Utopian dream of equality in the enjoyment of material values, but that it is placed higher up in the sense of conscious responsibility. Dear Peasant of France, constant creator of wealth, of power, and of liberty, constant saviour of thy country both in peace and in war, thou, who hast, over and over again, repaired our military defeats and the faults of our Governments, thy clear and delicate intelligence will save from barbarian materialism the idealistic soul of France.'

August 2, 1914, saw the realisation of these and similar prophesies of the vigilant deputy of nearly a quarter of a century before, the justification of his unflinching courage in challenging on every occasion those elements of social disorder which he regarded as the negation of the principles of the French Revolution. Yet, while the romantic, even sentimental, spirit of M. Clemenceau was coquetting with Socialism, the sturdy but openminded traditionalism of M. Deschanel seemed to many to be leading him to adopt a method of political tactics which exposed him at times to the suspicion of trimming between parties in order to avoid being compromised. In his book on Gambetta, M. Deschanel cites with approval that statesman's phrase: 'Il faut pour gouverner la France des paroles violentes et des actes modérés. Be always clear to the limit of radicalism, but let your acts be measured and conservative, and France will recognise you as her own.'

A man of great talent whom party limits cannot hold, but who is also ambitious and not afraid of moral responsibility, so only he be sure that he is right; a man in whom education and training have engendered a certain aristocratic aloofness making him something altogether other than the hail-fellow-well-met type of the Republic of Comrades,' can hardly avoid the charge of dilettantism, even of lack of character. M. Paul Imbert, the editor of one of the volumes of M. Deschanel's political speeches, 'L'Organisation de la Démocratie,' was already aware of this in 1910, and he rebuts the charge in language which I can heartily endorse :

'Backed by the Conservatives and consequently called reactionary when he combated the errors of the Collectivists and revolutionary excesses, approved by the Republicans when he pointed out the need for reforms, he has been