e oppressor himself. His blundering generosity sometimes
made him ridiculous, but he was always liked. He did not object to the
ridicule, nor did he dread a little unpopularity, as long as he was
surrounded by his own group, whose approbation was necessary to him.
As a member of a group which was independent when they all held
together, he thought that he was an independent person, but this was
not the case. Union is strength they say, but it accustoms us to lean
upon it, as Alexandre Mignon found to his cost.

The death of Jaures had broken up the group; and lacking one
voice--the first to speak--all the others failed. They waited for the
password that no one dared to give. When the torrent broke over them
these generous but weak men were uncertain, and were carried away by
the first rush. They did not understand nor approve of it, but they
could make no resistance. From the beginning desertions began in
their ranks, produced largely by the terrible speech-makers who
then governed the country--demagogue lawyers, practised in all the
sophistries of republican idealogy: "War for Peace, Lasting Peace at
the End ..." (_Requiescat_) ... In these artifices the poor pacifists
saw a way to get out of their dilemma; it was not a very brilliant
way and they were not proud of it, but it was their only chance. They
hoped to reconcile their pacific principles with the fact of violence
by means of "big talk" which did not sound to them as outrageous as
it really was. To refuse would have been to give themselves up to the
war-like pack, which would have devoured them.

Alexandre Mignon would have had courage to face the bloody jaws if he
had had his little community at his back, but alone it was beyond his
strength. He let things go at first, without committing himself,
but he suffered, passing through agonies something like those of
Clerambault, but with a different result. He was less impulsive and
more intellectual. In order to efface his last scruples he hid
them under close reasoning, and with the aid of his colleagues he
laboriously proved by a + b that war was the duty of consistent
pacifism. His League had every advantage in dwelling on the criminal
acts of the enemy; but did not dwell on those in its own camp.
Alexandre Mignon had occasional glimpses of the universal injustice;
an intolerable vision, on which he closed his shutters....

In proportion as he was swaddled in his war arguments, it became more
difficult for hi