The Year in France

THE political year in France is marked off, not by the change from President Loubet to President Fallières in February, but by the renewal of the Chamber of Deputies, the predominant house of Parliament, in the May elections. The Constitution of the French Republic provides it with a chief magistrate who follows and must not lead. The internal state of the country, the political temper of the people, the projects of social reform, are counted to the Parliament which has come to an end.

The main interest, both at home and abroad, has been excited by the change in the relations between the republic and the Roman Catholic Church. The inevitable future in the Republic’s dealings with its Socialist workmen is more important. The exterior status of the nation has been settled, for the time being, by diplomacy and alliances under outside pressure such as the Third Republic had not yet undergone; it is the story of the Conference at Algeciras.

Apart from the political situation, the French people has kept to a dead level of unbroken prosperity, without any notably great man or work or deed in science, letters and art, commerce and industry, and society, to distinguish this from other recent years. In international finance alone a state of things peculiar to French property-holders has been made evident, going far to lift France to her old leading place among the nations of the world.

President Loubet ended his seven years’ term of office in comparative popularity, contrasting with the popular odium of the Dreyfus Affair in which he began. He never drew forth the noisy welcome of the Paris crowd, as his predecessor, Félix Faure, had done; but this was perhaps a matter of physical impressiveness, as Lowell noted in the case of Daniel Webster. By the Constitution, and, for the most part, in the popular idea, President Loubet was not “responsible” for the obnoxious measures of ministers whom Parliament kept in power. On the other hand, his unvarying simplicity and good-nature, and his absolute punctuality in all the parade duties of his office, won for him the respect of all classes. He was seated beside the young King of Spain, returning from the Théâtre Francais, on the night of May 31, 1905, when an anarchist bomb fell within a few inches of the carriage. The coolness of King and President excited general enthusiasm; the bomb-thrower escaped and was never discovered. In October the President returned the King’s visit in Madrid, and went on to Lisbon, the King of Portugal making a return visit in Paris in November. This closed the sovereign pomps which gave note to the presidency of a lifelong republican. They began with tremendous popular demonstrations on the occasion of official visits of the Tsar and the Kings of England and Italy. The people took them as the consecration of international alliances, showing that France is not alone in the world. They have also been a sign and an effective agent of a continuous development of France as a cosmopolitan pleasureground,— a factor too often neglected in the estimate of her actual position in the world.

In his exercise of the presidential office M. Loubet followed with admirable scrupulousness that interpretation of the scant constitution of the French Republic for which he had voted in the beginning of his political career. It is contained in the order of the day presented by Gambetta and voted unanimously by the members of Parliament of the Republican left, May 17, 1877, in the heat of their conflict with President MacMahon: “The preponderance of the power of Parliament exercised by ministers responsible to Parliament is the first condition of that government of the country by the country which it is the aim of our constitutional laws to establish.”

This interpretation was said to be at issue in the election of a successor to President Loubet. The election of president of the republic is not left to universal suffrage; it is the result of a majority vote of the two houses of Parliament sitting as one national assembly. The choice, therefore, is limited to parliamentary rivals.

The unsuccessful candidate, M. Doumer, brought with him the reputation of having will and ideas of his own and readiness to use office to enforce them. M. Fallières was taken as a guarantee that there would be no attempt at personal government on the part of the President, and no conflict with a parliamentary majority during his term of office. It should be said that the public career of M. Fallières, in the routine of French politics, made him a peculiarly fit candidate for the presidency of the Republic. Like M. Loubet, he had been a member of Parliament since 1876,— the first year of the adoption of the republican constitution, — he had been in eight ministries, once even for a short time as prime minister, and he succeeded M. Loubet as president of the Senate when the latter was named President of the Republic. On the contrary, the election of M. Doumer to the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies, in January, 1905, was the beginning of the downfall of the Combes administration, and a blow to the extreme Radical Socialists who were in control of the majority; and, as candidate for the presidency of the Republic, M. Doumer was notoriously pushed by “dissidents” from the Radical Socialist Bloc and dissatisfied members of the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet.

It is not idle to insist on this floating backward and forward among French Radicals, as the problems of the coming Parliament are likely to force them to decide whether they are finally to recede toward the Moderates and French property-holders or to take the plunge toward Collectivism. The strange inversion of political rôles is shown by the fact that M. Fallières, a bourgeois at one remove from the peasantry and a persistent member of ministries “concentrated” from Moderates and Radicals, should represent the exclusive and ostracizing Radical Socialist Bloc ; and that M. Doumer, the self-educated trade-workman and member of the first purely Radical ministry of the republic (with Léon Bourgeois, 1895), and the chief originator of the Income Tax project, so obnoxious to propertyholders, should suffer defeat as a suspected leader of the Radicals back toward the bourgeois Moderates and away from the Socialists.

The decision of the majority of Senate and Deputies has now been ratified (May, 1906) by a majority of the voters in a majority of the electoral districts of France, in their choice of members of the new Parliament; and this is as near as the system of voting adopted in France can come to that which Gambetta recognized as “the decision of the master of us all, — universal suffrage.” It is the adoption by a majority of the French citizens who care to vote (there are abstentions of more than twenty per cent) of another of his formulas as the fundamental constitution of the Republic, — “Parliamentary omnipotence.”

The further acceptance by the French people of its representatives in Parliament as holding proxies in blank for their constituents seems also to have been consecrated by the late elections. In 1902 only 120 of the 591 deputies elected had expressed themselves in their party platforms as favorable to the immediate separation of Church and State, — “the most important, the gravest, the most delicate of all the reforms realized in thirty-five years,” as described by M. Thomson, Minister of Marine. Now the deputies who, at the end of a session of the legislature, took it on themselves to run through so radical a reform have been reëlected.

In the United States questions of this gravity have never been left to the ordinary legislative bodies, but belong evidently to the constitution-making power; that is, they require an appeal to the people itself. This would have been still more necessary, as the new French law withdraws the right of trial by jury from the clergy in certain criminal prosecutions, just as the previous Religious Associations laws, after suppressing Catholic schools and communities, and declaring the reversion of their property to the State, exclude their former members from certain ordinary rights of citizens, such as the keeping of schools and teaching. For us such rights undoubtedly fall among those “retained by the people,” and “not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,” as explicitly stated in the Articles of Amendment adopted immediately after the Constitution itself (I, VI, IX, X); and the same is true of the separate state constitutions. But such is the transmitted prejudice against Roman Catholics whenever there is talk of political liberty, that these considerations have weighed little with the English, and even with a large portion of the American, liberal press in its general approbation of a law professing to “separate” Church and State in France. Some of the principles at stake come up again in connection with the present violent lurch of the Republic toward Collectivism, where their application may not seem so anodyne.

For the present, in fairness to French parliamentary action, it must be remembered that the two republics exist under fundamentally different régimes. The United States may be called a “limited representative government,” whose governmental power, both legislative and executive, is limited by constitutions interposed not only between minorities and the majority of voters, but even between the whole of the citizens and the representatives whom they have themselves elected. The French Republic, developing in accordance with the logical and routine temper of the people from the initial principle enforced by Gambetta, is approximating to absolute government by a majority of members of Parliament, whose power to legislate is practically unlimited by a constitution, save only in matters concerning the form of government. The exercise of the legislative and executive powers is unchecked by any independent judiciary; the executive administration judges without appeal the complaints of citizens concerning its own measures, and it is responsible exclusively to the parliamentary majority that creates it. The possibility of change in the majority of deputies every four years by new elections, or in the meantime by the floating of groups and the incessant criticism of a free and intensely personal press, hardly seems sufficient to bring the French Republic within the American ideal of constitutional government. On the other hand, the American system of leaving whole regions of human activity — religion, the spontaneous association of citizens, education in great part, and family relations almost altogether —without state control seems to Frenchmen a lack of government bordering on anarchy. The inherited use of such words as “State,” “political liberty,” and the like, also differs widely, so that it is not easy for the citizens of the two republics to know when they understand each other. Among our late visitors M. Paul Strauss, a French senator and an authority on Paris municipal philanthropy, is struck with admiring wonder at the “delegation” of its powers made by the city of New York to private associations and institutions of charity. Professor Langlois of the Sorbonne blames the American habit of young men working their way through college, as a piece of “university pauperism,” to be remedied by the “State ” as our civilization becomes completer. In the debates on the Separation Law all parties seemed to confound religious liberty, or the freedom of citizens from interference with their religion on the part of government, with religious toleration, which supposes that the State has the right to tolerate or not to tolerate the religions of its citizens, even when their practices violate no common law. American constitutions simply remove the whole question from the law-making power (Amendment I); and American writers who use the term “religious toleration” in connection with our government cannot be alive to the meaning attached to it in countries of other traditions. It should also be noted that the formula “separation of Church and State” answers to no existing reality in the United States, while its meaning in England, where an “ established ” church exists, must be different from the operation which has been carried out in France, with merely subsidized churches.

In the language used by M. Ferdinand Buisson, one of the deputies who has most influenced the teaching and religious policy of the French Republic, the “liberty” which it is the duty of the State to safeguard for its citizens seems to comprise the “emancipation of the mind” from everything which is not in accordance with science, and primarily from superstition, in which he obviously comprises belief in revealed or supernatural religion: such superstition may be tolerated by the State in adults (religious liberty ?); but emancipating from it is consistent with the neutrality of the State in education, the “State” being an emancipator by rights. Indeed, the right of the parent to control the education of the child is commonly denied by Radicals and Socialists, as being based on “ the confusion of the liberty of professing any doctrine, which is the absolute right of adults, with the office of teaching the young, which is in no wise an individual right, but a delegation of the State’s sovereignty.”¹ The State is also called the natural protector of the child’s right to freedom of thought as against its parents.

To those who are willing to pass over as unimportant such an evolution of the idea of liberty under a democracy on the ground that it constrains chiefly Roman Catholics, who are only getting now as good as they gave in past centuries, it is worth remarking that the idea will also govern the French democracy in its inevitable struggle toward the socialist ideal. After the church debates a first skirmish took place, during the last session of Parliament, in the effort to combine, by force of law, the proposed workmen’s pensions from the State with the existing benefits from spontaneous friendly societies (December 12, 1905). The situation of such societies had already furnished Abbé Lemire, a priest-deputy elected by workmen, with an argument that separation of Church and State except in name is impossible in France. “We have, in fact, in our country a singular idea of the office of the State. It seems that nothing can be done without the State taking part in it; even the mutual aid societies, after demanding and obtaining their liberty, turned back to the State and asked for subsidies.” This idea of the omnipresent State, inherited from centuries of absolute government, is accompanied, in minds which have swallowed en bloc the revolutions of a century, by a deeper principle, openly avowed by Mazzini: liberty, where a social ideal is to be realized, is a means; when it does not work toward the end, it is dispensed with.

Such examples of the French political mind may help to the understanding of a year which has profoundly modified, whatever may be the event, the entire social constitution of the people. The religious troubles, even if they should fulfill the worst predictions of those opposed to the Republic, have for most Americans little more than historical interest. It is not the same with the swift, sure, almost physical onrush of French democracy toward socialism.

The “separation of the churches and the State” (the French formula refers to the four religions hitherto subsidized by the State, — Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed or Calvinist, and Jewish) was taken over by Prime Minister Rouvier from his predecessor, M. Combes; and M. Rouvier remained chief of the executive power long enough to see the project become law and to fall on its first application.² The parliamentary discussion lasted in the Chamber of Deputies from the presenting of the Committee report on the 4th of March to the voting of the bill as amended July 3, at eleven o’clock at night; and in the Senate from November 10 to the 5th of December, the official date of the law as finally promulgated.

From a very average level of debate and oratory, as compared with the historic days of the French Parliament, only one debater of power arose, in the person of a Socialist deputy, M. Aristide Briand, who drew up the committee report; and in the administration which took the place of the Rouvier government he was charged, as Minister of Public Worship, with the application of the law. The project was essentially modified during the debates, but M. Briand as official reporter and defender of the law showed a sincere desire to make it possible for Catholics to accept the situation which was being forced on them without their counsel or consent. At the same time he, and his party still more, disclosed a lack of personal acquaintance with the minds and habits of Catholics who practice their religion, which goes far to explain the unexpected troubles arising in the application of the law.

The question of the Concordat was considered settled before the Separation Law came up. It had been supposed to be a bilateral contract between the French State and the Pope, but the Combes government had broken off all communication or possibility of negotiation with the other party. The French clergy were consulted neither on the breaking off of the Concordat nor on the proposed new status of their Church; and the few Catholic members of the parliamentary committee were in a hopeless minority, besides being of doubtful competence. In the parliamentary majority which finally voted the law there was, of course, not one Catholic member. All this has to be taken into account in any appreciation of the working of the Separation Law. On the 28th of March the five French cardinals, who were without official competence before Parliament, presented the complaints of Catholics in a platonic letter addressed to the President of the Republic, whom the Constitution left equally incompetent in the matter.

The first complaint against the proposed law expresses what has now become the chief grievance in its application. “Not only liberty is not granted to Catholics, but there is imposed on them a new organization which is in formal contradiction with the principles of the Catholic religion.”

The denial of liberty refers to the restriction of church work to a minimum of public worship and to the minute police supervision of the utterances and actions of the clergy, without defense before a jury, and of the parish accounts, extending to a yearly auditing of the books by state officials. To this first complaint M. Camille Pelletan of the Combes Ministry has replied with a summary definition of religious liberty like a lapidary inscription. “What do the Catholics want, anyway ? Are they not. free to perform all the ceremonies of their religion?”

The “new organization” of churches refers to the associations cultuelles (public worship associations) in the hands of lay trustees, which are to take the place of the old parochial organization within the year, under penalty of loss of church buildings and property to the State. These associations are to be without power to receive legacies or to amass property, nor can they occupy themselves with schools or charities or other religious works or propaganda of any kind outside of church and cemetery. Associations for such particular purposes may indeed be formed under the Associations Laws, but these also exclude the convents and religious orders which form so essential a part of the Catholic Church, where it exists freely, as in the United States. In their literal application it should seem that these laws would present obstacles to the free propaganda even of the McAll, Salvation Army, and other Protestant missions in France. With Catholics the troubles feared are like those which occurred in certain of our states on the application of the trustee system, when parishes sided with an insubordinate priest against the bishop. M. Briand protested against any intention of trying to weaken the Catholic Church by favoring such local schisms, and even modified the text of the law to meet the objection. He has not succeeded in satisfying Catholics; and the Pope, in his Encyclical Letter published after the promulgation of the law, formally condemns the theory of lay associations, while reserving a decision as to whether French Catholics, to avoid greater evils, may admit them in practice. The disputes between trustees and priest or priest and bishop are to be decided by the State and not by the Church; and there is already at least one example where members of a parish have reorganized it under the new law and retained an excommunicated priest in defiance of their bishop (Lot-et-Garonne).

M. Briand very frankly declared the reasons for this new organization of parishes by force of state law: “It will henceforth be impossible for the resources of the Church to be used in electioneering business or political work without priests and associations exposing themselves to grave and disagreeable consequences. Our bill takes very precise measures in this matter, — the association will be dissolved if it goes in for politics.” The thirty-first article of the law muzzles the clergy still more closely: offenses against public functionaries, committed in a place of public worship by a minister of worship, are withdrawn from trial by jury, which the common law prescribes, and subjected to the police tribunal; and another article extends this to speech or writing against the execution of laws or legal acts of public authority; the penalties are heavyfines and imprisonment. M. de Castelnau remarked that priests would be punished more severely under the régime of Separation than under the Concordat, and that just when they were reduced to the status of simple citizens they were refused the benefit of the common law. M. Briand, while expressing his regret, declared that the article seemed necessary, and “necessary it will remain so long as we are not assured that the priest will not abuse that exceptional moral authority which gives particular force to his words; the interest of public order demands special procedure and penalties.”

These additional articles were voted by a majority of 330 deputies against 259; the entire law was voted by 341 against 233,— numbers fairly representing the majority of the Radical Socialist Bloc. The Opposition was made up of Moderate Republicans, who did not think the time ripe for Separation; and of members of the various groups of the Right, all swearing by the name of Catholic, although with the exception of perhaps twenty, all were politicians at the service of causes — Monarchist, Imperialist, Nationalist — which have no necessary connection with religion or the Church. The general elections of May have shown to the point of demonstration that a Catholic or clerical political party presenting the slightest danger to the Republic does not and did not exist.

The debates in the Senate, where the majority was 181 against 102, brought out a single noteworthy speech,— that of ex-Prime-Minister Méline, who is responsible for the economic policy of France, and is not a Catholic. He ventured on a prophecy which should be realized under the present Parliament:

“You are the dupes of many illusions. The public worship associations (new parish organizations) inspire you with little distrust on account of the precautions you have taken. As for me, I believe that they will become a general staff for a Catholic party. We shall not see such a party spring up all at once. But wait four years longer, — then you will see.”

An outsider can only note a fundamental fact which is deeper than all politics. Roman Catholics in France, that is, those who practice their religion and are not merely Catholics in name, by family descent and social conventionality, must be a minority of the population, and, among men, very few in number. One of the year’s books — Anti-Clericalism, by M. Emile Faguet of the French Academy — presents this crude fact in a rather more favorable light; but fact it is. Whatever may have been the reason, clergy and laymen under the Concordat have gone steadily down in religious efficiency ever since the force of the Catholic Revival after the Revolution was spent. This can hardly be the fault of the Republic; but the republican breaking up of the mould in which the Church had become fossilized may easily prove the first step in a resurrection to new life, all the more so because of the accompaniment of seeming persecution.

In this anti-clerical legislation the deputies elected in 1902 had taken up the greater part of their four years; it was absolutely necessary to do something, before the end, for the social reforms which the members of the majority had promised their constituents.

Here was, is, and will be, the really important issue before the French Parliament, if only from the growth of the Socialist vote in number and in determination with each successive election. One leader of genuine Socialists, the first to organize them as a political party, the veteran and unvarying Jules Guesde, who now returns to Parliament and leadership, has had the courage to explain at many times and in many ways that real crisis which is in French society itself and not in merely political differences. Compared with it, he has consistently asserted, the struggle against the Church and even the effort to save the Republic, if indeed it has ever needed saving, are insignificant and unessential. This crisis no mere political régime can avert; it has not even an economic origin. It is purely social, indwelling in French society as a collectivity of individuals spontaneously living together quite apart from the political community organized into a state. It is the vital conflict — the struggle for life — between the “working classes,” by which is meant all human beings of whatever kind whose daily life depends on wages or salaries earned by their labor, and the bourgeois, who are all those living on property which they hold.

It is not a question of revolution against reaction; the factory system and other organizations of capital, which have resulted in the segregation of the labor class, had no existence at the time of the French Revolution. Whatever may be the cause, the agitations which the French Republic has now to face have not political liberty for their object, but the regulation of private property by the State, and eventually Collectivism against property-holding as it now exists. To come down to round numbers, which are not farther out of the way than round numbers usually are, one quarter of the French people may be considered passively ripe for the socialist gospel, more, apparently, than the number of those ready to interest themselves in the Roman Catholic religion; 4,000,000 individuals are already more or less actively turned toward the new light; and, apart from politics and voting, at least a half million of genuine “workmen” have come to full consciousness of socialism, have united themselves in working groups, and, as in all real religions which sweep the world progressively, have the terrible activity of first believers. Some of these we shall find, before our year’s review is over, inconveniencing so extreme a Radical Socialist minister as M. Clemenceau.

It has been the puzzle of late elections how the property-holding bourgeois, who after all assure the Radical success, have not yet taken fright at the Socialist advance which comes from it. It was such a fright that smashed the Second French Republic of 1848, and turned the country toward the Second Empire. Doubtless there is a general feeling that Gambetta’s plan will avert a catastrophe: “There is no Social Question, — there are social questions which have to be dealt with one by one, as they come up.” This is the policy which the Radical Socialists, who are by no means Collectivists, have hitherto imposed on Radicals on one side and Socialists on the other, — those who under their lead have made up the majority Bloc. The result has been what seems to impatient Socialists an intolerable deal of anti-clericalism, — which was the particular reason of existence of the Radical party, — and one half-pennyworth of anti-capitalism. M. Jaurès, the Socialist leader who held the balance of votes in constituting the majority of Prime Minister Combes during three years of the late Parliament, delivered his ultimatum as soon as the new elections sent up seventy-five simon-pure Collectivists to the Chamber of Deputies (in his journal, L’Humanité, May 20, 1906): —

“ There is no more time to be lost. This time we must give the finishing blow to the Reaction, to all parties of the past, to Clericalism and Cæsarism. After clearing the battleground of all its litter, the Proletariat must be able to say to the face of the Republican Democracy, the Radical Democracy which at last is master of public power: ‘What are you going to do for workmen ? What reforms, what guarantees, are you going to give them ? How are you going to help French society out of the deep crisis in which it struggles ? How, by what organization of Property and Labor, will you put an end to the exploiting of men, to the war of classes let loose by the Capitalist form of property?”

Such words are not the mere rhetoric of a Parliamentary dictator who has just suffered a year’s eclipse in the retrograde combinations given to the Radical majority by Prime Minister Rouvier. Almost physiologically, certainly socially, the millions of French workmen stand over against property-holders in a way to which there is nothing comparable in the Northern and Western United States, with all their labor difficulties. They form a separate class in society, because French property-holders form an exclusive caste. It was the middle classes, the propertyholding bourgeois and the peasant proprietors bound up with them, who profited by the great Revolution, against the privileged classes of that day, — royalty, clergy, and nobles. During the century which has elapsed the triumphant bourgeois have steadily persisted in throwing around themselves a practically impenetrable wall of legal and social privilege in their turn. And now there is a spontaneous upheaval of the excluded, unprivileged, inferior class.

The workmen have caught up from the life around them aspirations to social conditions which circumstances forbid them to hope to attain. The legal difficulties of marriage protect parents and children in the transmission of property, which the workmen have not. The minute, endless expenses and complicated forms of justice between man and man are also for those who have, and not for those who have not. The freedom of higher education, of which the Republic has been so lavish, reaches this lower multitude only to aggravate a discontent which the universal spread of primary education would of itself be sufficient to stir up. The monopoly of university degrees extends to all professions beyond trade, and all demand property in the one who would enter them. One of the events of the year has been the disclosure of the progress of explicit, active, anti-Militarist Collectivism among the primary school teachers of the French State.

It would be a sad blunder to imagine that all this is the result of skillful political agitation. To use a metaphor which is ungracious, but exact and in the scientific mood of the day, the French labor class is made up of abnormal cells of the body politic as it is now constituted, — that is, of cells for which the body makes no adequate provision, — and they are coalescing in a growth of their own. They are, however, not pathological phenomena. In our day it is impossible to keep a permanent mudsill in society, or to reconstitute it as in our Southern states.

It is curious that seventy years ago De Tocqueville should have compared a like social division of the French people with the prejudice of whites against negroes in the United States. Since then the dividing line has changed, with the result that certain members of the collectivity called France are set permanently in their habitual thoughts and feelings over against the others. All chance independence of money, all social rising of petty tradesmen and educated peasantry, the unyielding bourgeoisie steadily assimilates to itself. But the entrance within its walls is by a painfully narrow gate; and rarely indeed is it passed by the Frenchman born to labor, — l’ouvrier ne s’embourgeoise pas. The American social experiment has so far aimed at bringing every citizen, high or low, within a ceaseless circulation of classes. The workman of to-day, or at least his son, is the millionaire or professional man or prosperous business man or ward politician of to-morrow; and our workmen, in the immense majority, are proud of America and feel that they have their place in the sun.

The increasing propaganda of the Universitarian Hervé’s anti-patriotism among Socialists has been one of the sore disappointments of the Radical bourgeois, who thought to settle the question of labor against property by throwing legislative sops to Socialists in return for votes. Now that universal suffrage has taught the workman the meaning of equality in politics, he is not likely to stop in his efforts to obtain social equality and break down the walls which herd him off from property-holders. Whether this can be done by other means than Collectivism is the gravest question of the coming years; but this is the only solution which seems to present itself to French Socialists. The past year has been taken up with urging through the Chamber of Deputies palliative measures for the day laborers who from childhood know naught but uncertainty for the morrow, with a certain prospect of want for their old age.

Like M. Briand in the Separation Law, M. Millerand has been the chief agent in putting through the Chamber of Deputies the acts for workmens’ and old-age pensions. Elected to Parliament as a Socialist, and the first Socialist to sit as minister (with Waldeck-Rousseau), he has been read out of his party for joining hands with bourgeois governments; but he is none the less the most accredited advocate of Socialist reforms among members of Parliament who are driven by force rather than drawn by conviction. His struggle has been long, against the ill-will of ministers who promise,and refuse to fulfill once they are secure of their majority, against rhetorical Socialists who demand the moon, and against the stubborn resistance of the old order. His success in putting the measures through the Chamber of Deputies, his patience, and the moderation of his manner and policy at least point him out as a proper chief of the executive power; and it would not be surprising, in case the religious troubles become aggravated, if he should be charged with the work of pacification.

Until the workmen’s pensions become practical, it is unnecessary to go into the complicated details of the bills which have been voted. A great part of the opposition is from the side of national finance, the cost to the country being variously estimated at from 150,000,000 francs in additional taxes to ten times that amount. A few sentences were pronounced in debate that merit remembrance.

M. Aynard, a Conservative Republican and Catholic representing the old order, spoke against the essential principle of the law which “obliges” the workman, his employer, and the State to put aside, as the years go by, the money for the workman’s pension when old age or invalidity overtakes him. “You should encourage the provident habit; you cannot impose it;” and “There is no doubt all Frenchmen desire a pension.” M. Charles Benoist, a Catholic Conservative and eminent professor at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques, went with the tide: “Liberty may be the ideal, but you cannot teach men to be provident; it is necessary to oblige them to be so.” “ Liberty as it is understood by the old political economy is immobility, lethargy, death.” “The orthodox political economy is bankrupt; charity and patronage are insufficient; profit-sharing, coöperation, mutual aid, stop half way: there is no escape from the intervention of the State. Only universal effort can vanquish universal want, and therefore I vote the law” (December 5, 1905). Vote after vote followed, with practical unanimity of the Chamber, showing how far all classes are persuaded of the irrepressible nature of the conflict between capital and labor and the impossibility of their doing nothing to pacify it.

While Parliament was engaged in discontenting Catholics on the one hand, and attempting to content workmen on the other, the main attention of both government and people was preoccupied with the doings and demands of the German Emperor concerning Morocco. From the tedious conference at Algeciras, which ended the imbroglio, France issued with honor safe, with her essential interests protected for the time being, and with an imposing array of alliances which had been proved by severe strain. Germany came out having doubtfully gained what she professed to seek, with allies failing her or looking askance, and with a wellearned unpopularity among the nations, — but having secured an international position to which she had no known title a year before. The French people for months had been trained to think of another war with Germany as a near possibility; and it is still persuaded that to its government alone is due the escape from actual war. The Radical Socialist Bloc, which Prime Minister Rouvier nominally represented, has in consequence profited at the parliamentary elections by the popular gratitude.

The situation from first to last is not difficult to explain in its great outlines. Agreements between England and France (April 8, 1904), and between Spain and France (October 3, 1904), recognized that “ it belongs to France, as a frontier power of Morocco along a great stretch of territory, to watch over the tranquillity of that country and to aid it in all the administrative, economic, and military reforms of which it may stand in need.” A French government mission, headed by M. Saint-René Taillandier, was accordingly despatched to Fez to treat with the Sultan, when, on the 31st of March, without official notice to the French government, Emperor William of Germany landed at Tangier. In a public speech to the representatives of the Sultan sent to meet him, he said that he was come expressly to declare that he would maintain the absolute equality of the economic and commercial rights of Germany, and that he would permit no power to obtain preferential rights; that the Sultan was the sole sovereign and the free sovereign of a free country; that Germany would insist on treating always her affairs with him directly, and would never permit any other power to act as an intermediary; that the present time is unseasonable for the introduction of reforms according to European ideas, and that all reforms should be grounded on the traditions and laws of Islam; that the only need of Morocco is peace and quiet;— and that he had just clearly expressed all these views in a conversation with the chargé d’affaires of France.

This was a public schoolmastering of three such nations as England, France, and Spain, and, at the same time, it cut short the operation of the agreements they had made with one another. The direct attack was on France, and the German “officious” press soon made known to the whole world the points where their emperor’s diplomacy was to strike home. The first victim was to be M. Delcassé, French foreign minister for seven years, who had been guilty of strengthening the position of his country by a patient securing of allies, and, by the same, of “isolating” Germany.

The immediate dispute turned on a question of fact. Germany denied that she had ever been “ officially ” notified of the international agreements concerning Morocco; M. Delcassé proved that the proper ambassadors at Paris and Berlin had been in full touch with the foreign offices during the negotiations, and asserted that nothing further was necessary. French opinion, both in and out of Parliament, under the lead of M. Jaurés, who appeared as the spokesman of Germany and peace, took sides against M. Delcassé, who at last gave his resignation (June 6, 1905). His place was taken by M. Rouvier in person, while remaining at the head of the government. The German Emperor had sent no congratulatory despatch to President Loubet after the escape from the bomb destined for the King of Spain (May 31); on the 10th of June Prince Radolin closed an interview with Foreign Minister Rouvier, in which he had insisted on an international conference, with the words: “If the conference does not take place all remains in statu quo, and you must know that we are behind Morocco.” War or the conference was thus the alternative offered to France.

During the wearisome previous negotiations, and during the long session of the conference itself, Germany consistently maintained that the particular interests of France in Morocco did not extend beyond the common frontier. This is evidently false. The mere fact of Germany, for example, obtaining a naval foothold on the Morocco coast would compel France to garrison Algiers with 200,000 men in case of another war, unless she were to leave her colony defenseless from the start. The possibility of this case Germany naturally denied, but she has against her contentions another fact, verified for more than twenty-five years. In that Islam which Emperor William has taken under his protection all religious and political life centres more and more in the religious orders and communities, which flourish exceedingly through the entire north of Africa. It is impossible that the influence of the Moroccan zaouïas, or mother-houses, should not be felt decisively throughout Algiers and Tunis and into Tripoli. Again, Morocco has long proved a borderland into which the disorderly elements of the French colony escape, only to harry the Algerian territory at the next opportunity. Finally, the natural outlets of commerce of both countries extend further than a mere frontier region, and it is difficult to understand how Germany has the right to pronounce between France and her neighbor, the Sultan, “sole and free sovereign of a free country.”

In fact, it is impossible to see how the international position of Germany, before the conference, differed by right from that of the United States. Neither of these countries is a Mediterranean power; both have moderate commercial interests already existing in Morocco, and both naturally seek to keep existing outlets open for the surplus of their industry. Each has equal reason to guard against the Protectionist policy of France; in fact, Germany in Tunis, of which she made so much, has suffered little in comparison with American trade in Madagascar since that island came under French domination. It is therefore easily understood by Americans that Germany should demand sure guarantees for an “open door” to her commerce and industry in Morocco, no matter whether France or England or Spain should have the predominating influence.

In the Conference of Algeciras the nations have implicitly recognized, over and above this, the right of Germany to speak in Mediterranean affairs, — a distinct gain for her peculiar diplomacy. It will next be Italy’s turn to hear from this diplomacy, in reference to her natural advance into Tripoli. Meanwhile it is hard to find what the practical use of the conference has been to France in Morocco itself.

In the world at large, however, France has also come to a consciousness of her real power. An English financier had already said that if the French people continue to live on the principle, “Where you have four sous spend only two,” they will end by having in their possession all the coined gold in the world. The great portion of it which they already possess, and the distress caused to German finance and industry by the patriotic refusal of the united French banks to allow their gold to be drawn until peace was secure, had a great and probably decisive influence in the happy termination of this entangled affair of Morocco. The floating of the latest Russian loan has since come to show yet further the riches of France, to which tourists alone, it is estimated. add two billion francs in gold each year, This money power and money need should tend to the keeping of European peace more than all the theories of the pacifists who clamor for a disarmament impossible to obtain. In favor of France should also be added the unwieldiness of parliamentary government in case of sudden war.

On the 14th of March, 1906, the Rouvier government fell on a question of church inventories which had caused riots in various parts of the country; and a new Sarrien Cabinet was formed, in which the picturesque and leading part was taken by M. Clemenceau, who had hitherto been known only as a “ministrysmasher.” The terrific mining disaster at Courrières, with its thousand victims, brought up the labor trouble in an aggravated form. The mining shares had gone from one hundred to three thousand francs, without any corresponding advance in the daily life — housing, schools, care for safety and old age — of the miners. It was just in time to aid the Confederation of Labor, which controls four hundred thousand workmen, in its general strike of May 1. To meet this the inventor of Radical Socialism, Minister Clemenceau, was obliged to place Paris under the protection of fifty thousand troops, —a practical necessity overriding all theory as to the proper use of the army in a republic. The elections which took place a week later have given the Radical Socialist Bloc over four hundred seats in the Chamber of Deputies, as against fewer than one hundred and eighty for the Opposition. The coming year will show how so tremendous a majority will deal with church and social questions.