t a voice in the crowd; and, if my words exceed
the limits of this hall and lend to him who utters them an authority
which he himself does not possess, it is only because they are filled
with unbounded gratitude.

In this horrible war, whose stakes are the salvation and the future of
mankind, let us first of all salute our wonderful sister, France, who
is supporting the heaviest burden and who, for more than eleven
months, having broken its first and most formidable onslaught, has
been struggling, foot by foot, at closest quarters, without faltering,
without remission, with an heroic smile, against the most formidable
organization of pillage, massacre and devastation that the world or
hell itself has seen since man first learnt the history of the planet
on which he lives. We have here a revelation of qualities and virtues
surpassing all that we expected from a nation which nevertheless had
accustomed us to expect of her all that goes to make the beauty and
the glory of humanity. One must reside in France, as I have done for
many years, to understand and admire as it deserves the incomparable
lesson in courage, abnegation, firmness, determination, coolness,
conscious dignity, self-mastery, good-humour, chivalrous generosity
and utter charity and self-sacrifice which this great and noble
people, which has civilized more than half the globe, is at the
present moment teaching the civilized world.

Let us also salute boundless Russia, with her wonderful soldiers,
innocent and ingenuous as the saints of old, ignorant of fear as
children who do not yet know the meaning of death. Yonder, along a
formidable front running from the Baltic to the Black Sea, with silent
multitudinous heroism, amid defeats which are but victories delayed,
she is beginning the great work of our deliverance, Lastly let us
greet Servia, small but prodigious, whom we must one day place on the
summit of that monument of glory which Europe will raise to-morrow to
the memory of those who have freed her from her chains.

So much for them. They have a right to all our gratitude, to all our
admiration. They are doing magnificently all that had to be done. But
they occupy a place apart in duty's splendid hierarchy. They are the
protagonists of direct, material, tangible, undeniable, inevitable
duty. This war is their war. If they would not accept the worst of
disgraces, if they were not prepared to suffer servitude, massacre,
ruin and famine, they had to und