December 5, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
munists, who demurred to his moderation. And that was 
not the end either of his experience of getting between two 
fires at a period of ferocious internecine controversy. No 
sooner had the Versaillais and their troops, under the leader- 
ship of Thiers and GalHfet, crushed the Commune with 
horrible vindictiveness, than Clemenceau found himself in 
the dock, on the charge of not having saved the murdered 
generals. It would probably have gone very hard with him 
but for the evidence of a reactionary colonel, who, for a 
wonder, thought that even a Radical and a free-thinker was 
entitled to the truth from a witness. So he was acquitted. 
But a duel followed, in which Clemenceau, being the best 
fencer and the best pistol-shot in France, as well as left- 
handed, a teetotaller, and a man of the athletic persuasion, 
was considerate enough to let off his antagonist with merely 
a bullet in his leg. For that performance Clemenceau was 
fined and given a fortnight's imprisonment. 
Here ends Act I. of Clemenceau 's political career. Shortly 
afterwards he was unseated as deputy for Montmartre, and 
devoted the next five years to solid service on the Municipal 
Council of Paris, which he had been largely instrumental in 
establishing. He began as simple councillor for Clignaucourt 
and finished as President of the Mimicipal Chamber. 
Then Clemenceau began his work again in the Chamber 
of Deputies, being returned afresh for Montmartre. It is 
noteworthy that the very first speech he made in the Assembly 
was in favour of a complete amnesty for the Communards 
and political prisoners, some of whom had been so anxious 
to deprive him of any further power to speak at all, .five 
years before. He did not succeed in thus doing good to his 
enemies, but he convinced the Assembly that a new and 
powerful orator had made his appearance in its midst. And 
so he entered upon the next important episode in his political 
life. For the year after was the year of the great reactionary 
combination, of which the President of the Republic, Marshal 
MacMahon, and the Diic de Broglie were the chiefs. The 
Republic — "U Empire Republicanisi," as Clemenceau called 
it later — conservative as it might be, was in danger. The 
President himself, though a well-meaning, honest soldier, 
and true to his salt, carried into political life his motto of the 
Malakoff fortress : "7'v suis et j'y reste." He lived in mortal 
fear of a revival of the Commune. Behind every tree in the 
Champs Elysfe lurked the red spectre by day : the ghostly 
figures of incendiary petroleuses danced nightly round his 
bedroom. So he became little better than a tool in the hands 
of the Legitimists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists, with their 
attendant clericals, who sank their differenc£s in the struggle 
against the common enemy of them all. 
But the Republicans, led by Gambetta, held a powerful 
majority in the Chamber of Deputies, and they, too, for 
once, united in support of their cause. Gambetta bombed 
the domestic enemy relentlessly with his explosive eloquence ; 
Clemenceau let them blood copiously at close quarters, 
with his deadly rapier thrusts. It was a very pretty fight 
indeed. The Republicans won handsomely at the General 
Election, and Gambetta's ultimatum to MacMahon, "Give in 
or get out," ended, in the long run, by the Marshal doing 
both. The 363 Republicans who had virtually compelled 
the President's surrender, on returning from the constitu- 
encies with a majority of 100, cried for vengeance on the 
men who had used every imaginable means to debauch 
the electorate. Clemenceau was the most active of those 
who demanded the impeachment of the reactionary political 
leaders. Thus, the Extreme Left began to play a great part, 
and Clemenceau rapidly became its leader. 
His position was shortly afterwards fortified by Gambetta's 
policy of opportunism, which Clemenceau bitterly attacked. 
From the fall of MacMahon until Gambetta's own as- 
sumption of power, Clemenceau was, in fact, Gambetta's 
most formidable opponent ; and the death of the fiery 
Southerner, who had degenerated into the would-be moderate 
political dictator, put Clemenceau virtually in control of the 
Assembly. It was in the sixteen years from 1877 to 1893 
that this indefatigable and ruthless political warrior earned 
his title of the Tiger. He was a Republican of Republicans, 
a Democrat of Democrats. The Second Chamber stank in 
his nostrils ; the policy of financial colonisation by con- 
quest was accursed in his eyes. France needed- all her 
resources for development at home : that development could 
only be guided to safe issues by reliance upon educated 
universal suffrage, free from the influence of reactionary 
or profiteering cliques. So he toppled over Ministry after 
Ministry. 
Not a prominent politician in France but lx)re about his 
person scars inflicted by the Tiger's claws. When in the late 
'eighties I had a long chat with him in the Rue Clement 
Marot, he had already the scalps of some eighteen Minis- 
tries hanging at his girdle. Time to "range himself" and 
take office ! I thought so myself, as a mere English Social- 
Democrat. But office for Clemenceau ? Not he. His object 
was to republicanise the Republic, and, till that was achieved, 
not|iing was done. There was no vestfge of compromise 
in him. An example of his methods ? Could there be any- 
thing more telling than this ? Clemenceau had vehemently 
and consistently resisted the policy of financial and military 
interpenetration in Tunis. All to no purpose. The Philis- 
tines had the better of him. It became necessary to "settle 
the matter "-^those old familiar words — and M. Jules Ferry 
had the overwhelming majority of the Assembly in his 
favour. But a division wjs taken. Result ? 430 to i. 
The I was Clemenceau. The Tiger was crushed. Not a bit 
of it. Within six months that formidable creature had sent 
M. Ferry and his whole Ministry -packing. And so on, and 
so on. 
These manceuvres did not tend to political popularity. 
Perhaps no man ever massed up against himself such a 
portentous array of incongruous enemies as Clemenceau had 
succeeded in bringing together by the year 1893. Scarce 
a single political faction or financial coterie in France but 
furnished its quota to this motley host. "What about 
Panama?" "Who is against Russia?" "Down with the 
opponent of the brav' General (Boulanger) !" "Away with 
the Free-Thinker!" "A has l' Anglais I" Such were a few 
of the cries shouted at him in Paris and re-echoed in his 
constituency of Draguignan. His friendship for England 
was the most serious offence of all. At any rate, these 
charges together did the work. Out of Parliamentary 
life he went at 52, and seemed likely to stay out. 
But to-morrow he appears, quite undiscouraged, as the 
most telling publicist and journalist in France. In five years he 
made for himself a very considerable literary and philosophic 
reputation. Then another few years of desperate fighting as 
writer and orator in the Dreyfus case. A most dangerous 
business that. At the time of the Zola trial Clemenceau's 
life was in danger at any moment. This affected him not 
at all. Having in conjunction with Zola, Scheurer-Kestner, 
Jaurfes and others obtained partial justice for this persecuted 
Jew officer, he was again stranded in a backwater, from which 
friends and enemies alike thought he might never float him- 
self out. Within six months of this most apparently hopeless 
failure he was Prime Minister and master of France. 
His Administration of 1907-1909 achieved much more 
in the way of consolidating the Republic than is generally 
put to Clemenceau's credit. That but for a sudden and still 
almost inexplicable outburst of temper he might have 
remained Premier for a much longer period no one now doubts. 
But having flounced himself out of office in a moment of 
petulance — " I went in with an umbrella and came out with 
a stick" — he was once more a vigorous critic in journalism, 
and a political Ishmael at large in the Senate. So he remained 
until the war. Then, even before he was forced into power, 
his love of France, his disregard of all personal considerations, 
his hatred of intrigue, of weakness, of treachery, made 
Clemenceau the spokesman of all that was bravest and 
noblest in his country. 
Accepting the Premiership unwillingly at the age of 76, 
if we wish to understand what Clemenceau has done wo 
have only to look round. Compare the France of a year 
ago with the France which, with the help of Great Britain, 
and the later assistance of the United States, met, countered 
and swept back for ever the flood-tide of German barbaric 
invasion and devastation. The Army soon knew, from the 
last-joined poilus to the Marshals of France, that what was 
won by heroic courage and determination at the front would 
not be lost by deliberate pro-Germanism and treachery 
in its rear. The traitors themselves were imprisoned or 
executed. 
More than that, Clemenceau embodied in himself and- 
inspired in his courftrymen the spirit of France, the France 
of the great revolution, at whose shrine alone he worshipped. 
His old and unbroken friendship with England, his know- 
ledge of the United States, his unswerving exposure of Ger- 
many's aggressive designs for full forty years before the 
war, all told in his favour. Those who doubted were con- 
vinced : those who were hopeful saw their aspirations 
realised : those wlio had never wavered cheered for victory 
right ahead. And now that he and we have won — our aid, 
as none knows better, having been indispensable to the French 
triumph —Clemenceau feels so deeply that France as a 
whole has shared in the great awakening tliat he, of all men, 
joins with his devout Catholic countrymen in the Te Deum 
ftf Thanksgiving in the Cathedral of Lille. The work he has 
done, the risks he has run, the unshakable determination 
."he has displayed have raised him high above all petty 
considerations of politics, creeds, classes, or conditions. 
Therefore he is the hero of France to-day. 
