fect, ideas, policies, theories in harmony with our
surroundings.

This is a great country filled with intelligent, industrious,
restless, ambitious people. Millions came here because they were
dissatisfied with the laws, the institutions, the tyrannies, the
absurdities, the poverty, the wretchedness and the infamous spirit
of caste found in the Old World. Millions of these people are
thinking for themselves, and only the people who can teach, who
can give new facts, who can illuminate, should be regarded as
political benefactors. This country is, in my judgment, in all
that constitutes true greatness, the nearest civilized of any
country. Only yesterday the German Empire robbed a woman of her
child; this was done as a political necessity. Nothing is taken
into consideration except some move on the political chess-board.
The feelings of a mother are utterly disregarded; they are left
out of the question; they are not even passed upon. They are
naturally ignored, because in these governments only the unnatural
is natural.

In our political life we have substantially outgrown the duel.
There are some small, insignificant people who still think it
important to defend a worthless reputation on the field of "honor,"
but for respectable members of the Senate, of the House, of the
Cabinet, to settle a political argument with pistols would render
them utterly contemptible in this country; that is to say, the
opinion that governs, that dominates in this country, holds the
duel in abhorrence and in contempt. What could be more idiotic,
absurd, childish, than the duel between Boulanger and Floquet?
What was settled? It needed no duel to convince the world that
Floquet is a man of courage. The same may be said of Boulanger.
He has faced death upon many fields. Why, then, resort to the
duel? If Boulanger's wound proves fatal, that certainly does not
tend to prove that Floquet told the truth, and if Boulanger recovers,
it does not tend to prove that he did not tell the truth.

Nothing is settled. Two men controlled by vanity, that individual
vanity born of national vanity, try to kill each other; the public
ready to reward the victor; the cause of the quarrel utterly ignored;
the hands of the public ready to applaud the successful swordsman
--and yet France is called a civilized nation. No matter how
serious the political situation may be, no matter if everything
depends upon one man, that man is at the mercy of any