Review of Ret>iews. IfGfOG, 



Character Sketch. 



473 



of the Conference. That tripartite informal aUiance 

 of peace — to which America was a cordial adherent 

 — foreshadowed the foreign policy which M. Bour- 

 geois may be expected to pursue. He will 

 strengthen the entente wit;h England, and use his best 

 services as honest broker to bring his Russian ally 

 into equally close and friendly relations with this 

 country. He will not be anti-German. He will, on 

 the contrary, be like what he was at the Hague, a 

 diligent " smoother " away of points of friction, and 

 a promoter of peace and concord all round. When 

 C.-B. uttered his memorable en.* for a League of 

 Peace last December he could not have foreseen 

 that a beneficient Providence would provide him 

 with such a staunch Peace Leaguer as M. Bour- 

 geois at the Ministn- of Foreign Affairs. Certainly 

 as soon as the Morocco trouble is at an end there 

 is no task to which M. Bourgeois and Sir Edward 

 Grey can more profitably address their attention 

 than the arrangement of a general understanding 

 between the Powers as to the preservation of the 

 status quo, the reduction of armaments, and the ap- 

 propriation ever\- vear of a definite percentage of 

 the army and naw vote for the promotion of that 

 international solidarity the absence of which M. 

 Bourgeois long ago declared to be secret to all our 

 woes. 



HL— M. CLEMENCEAU. 

 M. Clemenceau is the only member of the new 

 Ministry- when I have known personally for nearly 

 twenty years. He was and is a personal friend of 

 Mr. John Morley's ; he used to be the most intimate 

 friend of the late Admiral Maxse, who was also a 

 very good friend of mine. M. Clemenceau has lived 

 in America. He married an American. He speaks 

 English excellently. He is one of the most brilliant 

 of journalists, and one of the most witty and intelli- 

 gent of companions. There is also in him. despite 

 a certain cynical flippancy of speech which leads his 

 critics sometimes to declare that he is at heart a 

 mere gamin de Paris, a trace of the strain of a hero. 

 He is as intrepid as he is dexterous. He is the 

 Ulysses rather than the Nestor of the French Re- 

 public. He is only sixty-four, but he has been so 

 long a leading actor in the drama of Republican 

 politics that he seems always to date back to re- 

 mote antiquity. Nevertheless he did not seem to be 

 a day older when I last saw him in Paris in 1905 

 than when I first walked into the office of the 

 Justice in the eighties, and found its editor writing 

 under the serene and inspiring gaze of a replica of 

 the Venus of Milo. 



QEXERAL BOULANGER AS HIS MILNER. 



I have compared M. Clemenceau to Mr. Morley. 

 To make the resemblance more complete you should 

 Sidney Webb element would be missing. I always 

 cross Mr. Morley with John Burns. Even then the 

 feel a warm sympathy with M. Clemenceau, owing 

 to the fact that he has gone through a tribulation 



almost as great as that which I passed through with 

 regard to Milner. M. Qemenceau believed in 

 General Boulanger. But for M. Clemenceau the 

 brave General would never have been Minister of 

 War. M. Clemenceau put him in office as a security 

 against the enemies of the Republic and of peace. 

 He remained there to become the most dangerous 

 enemy of the Republic and of the general peace. 

 I spent some hours on the night of Boulangers elec- 

 tion by popular vote walking up and down the 

 Boulevard with M. Clemenceau. Nobody knew 

 whether if Boulanger were elected by a large 

 majority he would not declare himself Dictator and 

 use the army to trample out all opposition. It was 

 a thrilling moment. Never was I so deeply impress- 

 ed with the worthlessness of all constitutional 

 guarantees in the presence of an army. WTioever 

 can give the word of command at the War Office 

 has the nation at his mercy. Fortunately General 

 Boulanger loved his mistress better than the Dic- 

 tatorship, and France escaped the imminent peril. 

 How often since then I have recalled that midnight 

 on the Boulevards especially since I found my Bou- 

 langer in Lord Milner. Boulanger and Milner have 

 both passed from the scene in which they so cruelly 

 betrayed the confidence of their most ardent sup- 

 porters, but their names remain imperishable re- 

 minders of the danger of relying too absolutely upon 

 the most trusted of friends and allies. 



"1789" INCARNATE. 



M. Clemenceau is to me the most authentic incar- 

 nation of the Revolution of 1789 now extant in 

 Europe. He is the Revolution en bloc. He shares 

 its hatreds, he has lost none of its enthusiasms. He 

 is a Jacobin reincarnated in the skin of an Oppor- 

 tunist. After playing the part of Warwick the King- 

 maker, setting up and pulling down one Ministr)- 

 after another, he is now saddled with the responsibilit)- 

 of office. And as if to salute the new Minister the 

 greatest catastrophe in the annals of mining is fol- 

 lowed by a strike of miners which laid thousands 01 

 men idle. It is very much like the way in which 

 John Burns was confronted at the Local Government 

 Board by the demonstrations of the unemployed. M. 

 Clemenceau has ever been a champion of miners and 

 of strikers. After his defeat at the Var election in 

 1893, he published an article in La Justice entitled 

 "En Avant!" of which an unfriendly critic said: — 



The only thing to be gathered from this article is that he 

 reeards strikes and lawless resistance to constituted autho- 

 rity as the final and legitimate weapons of those who 

 possess nothing. He is nlanifestly ready to offer to lead 

 those bent on subveraion. and his cry in "En Avant'" 

 means " let the discontented and the refractory rally round 

 me.*' 



That article compares with M. Ci^menceau's atti- 

 tude to the present strike as much as John Burns's 

 Tower Hill speeches compare to his address to the 

 unemployed deputation last December. 



CATHOLICISM HIS DEVIL FTSH. 



M. Clemenceau is a Freethinker who is merciless 



