ret alliances and imperial ambitions. The large-hearted
internationalism of Jean Jaures, who with all his limitations was a
great Frenchman, patriot, and idealist, had failed among his own
people and in Germany, and the assassin's bullet was his reward for the
adventure of his soul to lift civilization above the level of the old
jungle law and to save France from the massacre which happened.

In war France was wonderful, most heroic in sacrifice, most splendid
in valor. In her dictated peace, which was ours also, her leaders were
betrayed by the very evil which millions of young Frenchmen had gone out
to kill at the sacrifice of their own lives. Militarism was exalted in
France above the ruins of German militarism. It was a peace of vengeance
which punished the innocent more than the guilty, the babe at the breast
more than the Junker in his Schloss, the poor working-woman more than
the war lord, the peasant who had been driven to the shambles more than
Sixt von Arnim or Rupprecht of Bavaria, or Ludendorff, or Hindenburg. It
is a peace that can only be maintained by the power of artillery and by
the conscription of every French boy who shall be trained for the next
"war of defense" (twenty years hence, thirty years hence), when Germany
is strong again--stronger than France because of her population,
stronger then, enormously, than France, in relative numbers
of able-bodied men than in August, 1914. So if that philosophy
continue--and I do not think it will--the old fear will be
re-established, the old burdens of armament will be piled up anew, the
people of France will be weighed down as before under a military regime
stifling their liberty of thought and action, wasting the best years of
their boyhood in barracks, seeking protective alliances, buying allies
at great cost, establishing the old spy system, the old diplomacy, the
old squalid ways of inter--national politics, based as before on fear
and force. Marshal Foch was a fine soldier. Clemenceau was a strong
Minister of War. There was no man great enough in France to see beyond
the passing triumph of military victory and by supreme generosity of
soul to lift their enemy out of the dirt of their despair, so that
the new German Republic should arise from the ruins of the Empire,
remorseful of their deeds in France and Belgium, with all their rage
directed against their ancient tyranny, and with a new-born spirit of
democratic liberty reaching across the old frontiers.