r continental
neighbors. Unless they were united against her she had little to fear
from them; and her comparative strength tempted her to be aggressive,
careless, and experimental in her foreign policy. That policy was
vacillating, purposeless, and frequently wasteful of the national
resources. Eventually, it compromised the international position of
France. After 1871, for the first time in almost three hundred years,
the very safety of France in a time of peace became actively and gravely
imperiled. The third Republic reaped the fruit of all the former
trifling with the national interest of France and that of its neighbors;
and the resulting danger was and is so ominous and so irretrievable that
it has made and will make for internal stability. If the Republic can
provide for French national defense and can keep for France the position
in Europe to which she is entitled, the Republic will probably endure.
And in that case it will certainly deserve to endure, because it will
have faced and overcome the most exacting possible national peril.

Even the most loyal friend of France can, however, hardly claim that the
French democracy is even yet thoroughly nationalized. It has done
something to obtain national cohesion at home, and to advance the
national interest abroad; but evidences of the traditional dissociation
between French democracy and French national efficiency and consistency
are still plainly visible. Both the domestic and the foreign policies of
the Republic have of late years been weakened by the persistence of a
factious and anti-national spirit among radical French democrats.

The most dangerous symptom of this anti-national democracy is that an
apparently increasing number of educated Frenchmen are rebelling against
the burdens imposed upon the Republic by its perilous international
position. They are tending to seek security and relief, not by
strengthening the national bond and by loyalty to the fabric of their
national life, but by personal disloyalty and national dissolution. The
most extreme of democratic socialists do not hesitate to advocate armed
rebellion against military service in the interest of international
peace. They would fight their fellow-countrymen in order to promote a
union with foreigners. How far views of this kind have come to prevail,
an outsider cannot very well judge; but they are said to be popular
among the school teachers, and to have impaired the discipline of the
army it