Vol. XXVI. No. 3 



WASHINGTON 



September, 1914 



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THE FRANCE OF TODAY 



By Major General A. W. Greely, U. S. Army 



MY YOUTHFUL impressions as 

 to France and to Frenchmen 

 were scarcely favorable. They 

 began 48 years ago, when a soldier's 

 orders carried me to the valley of the 

 Rio Grande, where 40,000 of the veterans 

 of the Grand Army of the Republic with 

 impatience waited watchfully, while look- 

 ing loweringly across the turbid river at 

 the imperial French contingent, which 

 under Maximilian then harassed Mexico. 

 These impressions were not bettered in 

 later years by that woeful story of rack 

 and ruin, of despair and heroism, of in- 

 capacity and intrigue, which attended the 

 decadence and downfall of the French 

 Empire. And then the almost incredible 

 tales of disloyalty to country by extreme 

 factions — of the imperialistic surrender 

 at Metz and of the communistic outrages 

 at Paris. Was France a nation or merely 

 an aggregation of fanatics? But these 

 were visions from afar, seen as through 

 a glass darkly, which assumed fairer as- 

 pects and nobler forms when France be- 

 came for months my habitat. 



Although then in the age when one's 

 mind is "wax to receive and marble to 

 retain," yet these changed views were 

 disassociated from pleasant personal ex- 

 periences. They were indeed events not 

 to be forgotten: The chat in the Latin 

 quarter with grandiloquent Gambetta, 

 "the madcap fool of Tours" ; the salute 

 to soldierly MacMahon in the Bois de 

 Boulogne ; as the guest of Renan in the 

 College de France; to listen spellbound 



to magnetic Thiers in the streets of Mar- 

 seilles ; to join in the not-too-frantic ap- 

 plause of the budding genius of the divine 

 Sarah in ihe first freshness of her eternal 

 3'outh ; to furtively watch the self-satis- 

 fied pluming in public of great \4ctor 

 Hugo ; to wonder at Brown-Sequard's 

 experiments on reflex action ; and, above 

 all, to have gained the friendship and 

 shared the hospitality of the great physi- 

 cist, Mascart, 



THE WAYS OF THE PEOPLE 



As one cannot indict a nation for the 

 crimes of the few. so one cannot exalt 

 its virtues or assert its preeminence on 

 the qualities of its nobler souls or of its 

 gifted intellects. A nation is learned in 

 one way only, through contact with its 

 people — at their work and play, in office 

 and in street, in business and at charity, 

 by their rantings and through their 

 prayers. 



Yes, the heart of a nation is in its 

 people, in France as in America. One 

 must listen, if one would know, to its 

 ceaseless, ever-changing voices — proclaim- 

 ing beliefs, demanding justice, bemoaning 

 disasters, advocating reforms, scarifying 

 abuses, asking sympathy, and even be- 

 seeching protection against itself. The 

 chosen representatives vote its laws, found 

 its institutions, formulate its reforms, and 

 dictate the policies which spell progress 

 or mean an earlier coming of that deca- 

 dence which in the ages past has been 

 the ultimate fate of every historic nation. 



