Alsatians are among the bravest and most loyal of German soldiers, -these Alsatians you wanted to "liberate." You fight to recover provinces which do not want to be recovered-for the final glory of France. La Revanche! Yet after all is not revenge a very human motive?

Yes, revenge is very human, but it can hardly serve as an excuse for dragging the West into a war over the Balkans, and for decimating the whole of Europe. Revenge is supposed to be more the attribute of the Red Indian than of the civilized modern. Why should France alone be incapable of forgetting a past defeat? Why should she cherish the spark of hatred for more than a generation, waiting the hour to blow it into flame? The alignment in this war shows how many hatreds, how many revenges, have been foregone. Russia fights by the side of England and Japan: she forgets Crimea and the Yalu. Germany and Austria, once enemies, are not merely allies, they are a single unit of military administration. Italy was a member of the Triple Alliance (although no one can recall the fact without shame). Bulgaria linked with Turkey,-who would have thought it possible? You, France, you alone, pursued a policy of historic revenge. You alone found a wounded pride too sore for healing. For forty years the black ribbons of mourning fluttered from the statue of Strassburg. You have taken them off now, -to place them on a million graves.

But you did not want war, you are protesting. The mass of the French people were pacific. That must be admitted. But the mass of people in no country wanted war. The Germans did not want it; the English did not want it; the Russians knew nothing about it. Yet they all accepted it after it came; and now they give their lives gladly for their country. Oddly enough the very fact that the present war was made by governments rallies support to those governments, and enlists the loyalty of the peoples. You can see in your own nation how the paradox works. The French, you say, generally scorned war,-C'est trop bête, la guerre. Therefore when the war came they were convinced that it was not of their own making. It must be some one's fault. And whose but the enemy's? It must have been the vile Germans, the contemptible Boche, who brought this about. In war-time we completely forget the Biblical injunction about the beam in our own eye.

Yet after all the French people must be held responsible for the actions of their government. Possibly many of you did not realize where the alliance with Russia and the policy of colonial expansion would ultimately lead you. You may have been hypnotized by the

banner of La Revanche and the call of La Gloire. But you have a republican government; you are a democracy. There has been in France for a generation a strong war party. In the last decade or two, through all the kaleidoscopic changes of your politics, it has been apparent that this party of "aggressive patriotism" was gaining strength, gathering power. This effected the entente with England. It engineered the adventure in Algeria, and later managed the strangulation of Morocco. It maintained a strong financial interest in the blood-stained concessionaire system in the French and Belgian Congo. It constantly worked to embitter Anglo-German relations,—an effort ably abetted by the imperialist party in Britain. It undermined every attempt to achieve a reconciliation between France and Germany, and it brought about the ruin of Caillaux. In other words, the Colonial party, the Chauvinist party, was continuously successful in its designs. Although some of the most patriotic and far-sighted statesmen in France never ceased to combat it and the interests it represented, they were not able to break its grip. You had, indeed, a popular test of its power just previous to the outbreak of the war, in the elections on the Three Year Law. The Three Year Law was sustained. The militarists had won. The "New France," the France of aggressive temper, of nationalistic bombast, had been approved.

There was, I submit, a discernible downward trend in the policies of the successive governments under the Third Republic, and to some extent a decay in French sentiment. There have been times when France stood for liberty, equality and fraternity, and was ready to make great sacrifices for unselfish ends. But the France which battles to recover Alsace-Lorraine and to enthrone the Russian Czar in Constantinople, has drifted a long way from the ideals of the Revolution; just as the England of Grey and Asquith is far different from the England of Cobden, Bright and Palmerston. Indeed this war could not have happened had there not been a distinct deterioration in the tone of European politics. All sentiment was squeezed out of international relations, and along with it most of the principle. One indication was the support given by the Liberal West to the Russian bureaucracy, at a time when that bureaucracy was menaced by Liberal revolt at home. Another proof was the cynical abandonment of the weaker nations and the colored races. Morocco, the Congo, Finland, Persia, the Balkans! These outrages never would have been tolerated by any European! civilization that was not preoccupied with selfish and sinister plots and counterplots. Things are now at such a pass that you are able

to laud in the most fulsome terms an Italy which bargains away its honor, enters upon a career of national piracy, and attacks its own allies in their hour of supreme peril. There has been a debacle in morals.

This "New France" is the worst France since the seventies, since the France of Paul Déroulède. You have revived that old lust for military glory which France, through all her history, has never been able quite to uproot. That is the heart of the matter. It will not do to picture yourselves as the good white knight forced to buckle on armor to meet the "Prussian menace." The obvious historical facts disprove the assertion. There has never been for you a Prussian menace. In the last forty years you, a people with a rapidly falling birth-rate and not essentially commercial, entered on a policy of colonial expansion. Germany, with more right, did the same thing. But you succeeded in acquiring territory while she, relatively, failed. But has she ever balked you in your enterprises? Quite the contrary. The spurs of the French chanticleer proved sharper and more annoying than the beak of the German eagle. Remember Morocco! In all those forty years the Mailed Fist was not once lifted against you. It would not have struck now had you not challenged the very existence of Germany by the alliances with Russia and England. What a masterly stroke of statecraft it was, this placing of Germany in a military vise! Your leaders could not resist that temptation. They saw a France rejuvenated, reborn, triumphant! And the soul of the French rose to the vision.

Well, you have the glory already, though not the victory. No one of the Allies has made so splendid a showing of military prowess and vigor. But at what a cost in lives and human agony! No nation ever bought its laurels more dearly. And who can tell what sacrifices you may yet be called upon to make? How idle it is, after all, to reproach the French! You are intoxicated; the madness is in your blood. It is too late to turn back now; you must see this through to the bitter end. Yet the whole world grieves for you, because the whole world loves you. It loves you not for your ambitions or your bellicose moods, but for the wholesome sanity of your life in times of peace, for your gaiety and wit, because of your intellectual and artistic brilliance, because you are, in a word, the most Greek of modern nations. Americans especially hold you dear, for they have not forgotten those flashes of sympathy you have shown for the ideals which America, in a blundering way, is trying to realize. We see you now as the most pitiable figure in this world

war, because you suffer so much and with the least need. Our sympathy is not less because you have, for the moment, turned your back on the great ideals of human progress. You are like a beautiful woman we have loved and who has betrayed our loyalty, and we look on you and think, how can you prove so false and be so fair. The fact that you suffer for your own sins as well as for the sins of others only makes the heartbreak heavier. Like France herself we bow our heads to mourn your irrevocable dead and unreturning brave.

A MESSAGE FROM ARISTOPHANES.

A

BY FRED. C. CONYBEARE.

VOLUME of Aristophanes lies open on my knees, as I sit perched on a rock well above the clear gliding waters of the river Minho, which here divides Spain from Portugal. I am on the Spanish bank, and all is peace around me. Left and right extend vineyards and plantations of maize, both shining in this season like emeralds under the level rays of the setting sun. Amidst their greenery nestle peasants' cots, of which one can discern only the roofs, picturesque as deeply corrugated brown tiles and upcurling evening smoke can make them; for these humble dwellings are seldom of more than a single story, and the vines encircling them are trailed, not as in the Provence low along the earth, but high up along wires and wooden rafters hung on countless goodly uprights of solid granite. Under such a screen of foliage the land remains cool, for even the midday sun cannot penetrate it, and even the wayfarer is protected as well as the soft-eyed bullocks that draw the rude carts of ancient type, for in order to utilize every yard of the rich soil the careful peasants carry their narrow roads for miles under such pergolas.

Behind me runs at a somewhat higher level where the land becomes steeper and uneven, the margin of a pine wood, dark and mysterious, except where clearings afford space for the white and purple heather to grow. In the background lofty hills clad with such heather close in the fertile valley. These great lineaments of the landscape are more visible from where I sit, if I cast my glance across the stream into the neighboring land of Portugal. There the eye can rove from ridge to ridge dimly interfolding in purple depths, and crowned not seldom with fantastic coronets of rugged rocks. The glens and hollows are beginning to be filled with mist. and smoke, and along the eastern slopes that take the setting sun,