Littell's Living Age

TALK OF EUROPE

M. CAMILLE SAINT-SAENS, the distinguished musician, has addressed to the Society of Literary Men, a protest against the anglicizing of the French language. He writes, "The French language, in its construction, follows the natural and logical order; the noun precedes the adjective, and if this order is changed, the sense of the phrase is equally changed. When giving an address, one should first give the name of the street and then the number. Only in the annual of the Institute do I find the French ruling observed. Thus, if you to-day say to a coachman, "Rue Royale 10," he will not fail to correct you by saying, "10 Rue Royale." Another step on will lead us to "10 Royale Rue" which is English once and for all.

'On every hand, all persist in manipulating the unhappy adjective; they force it to precede the noun; we never see "Hotel Moderne" but "Modern Hotel."

'A good press campaign should be able to dispel the danger, and only just in time. Heaven grant that it is not too late!'

PHILIP DE LASZLO, the distinguished painter, who, though Hungarian-born, has been for some years a naturalized Englishman, has been tried for certain breaches of neutrality and been found not guilty. A contrary verdict would have stripped Mr. de Laszlo of his English citizenship. Many people of distinction, among them the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Austin Chamberlain, testified in the painter's behalf. The offenses, which were purely technical, were the forwarding of sums of money to some relatives in Hungary, and the giving of a sovereign to an escaped Hungarian prisoner. Mr. de Laszlo would have been in evil case had judgment been found against him. Rightly considering him legally a Briton, the Austrians long ago confiscated all his property in the boundaries of the Empire; he would thus have been a man without a country. Mr. de Laszlo is married to an Englishwoman, and is edu

cating his English-born children in the English manner.

STUDENTS of French politics are beginning to realize that something like a veritable duel is in progress between the 'Tiger' and his only serious rival, M. Briand, the issue at stake being the succession to the present headship of the French Government. The latest developments, when one reads between the lines, tend to foster the belief that M. Clemenceau, despite all the rumors of his pending retirement from political life, intends to be his Own

successor.

Some time before the war, M. Briand abruptly separated himself from his old friends of the Socialist party, and declared himself in favor of the policy of burying the hatchet, with the result that he was hailed as the future leader of the great solid party represented by moderate-thinking France. His support of electoral reform proposals has since then strengthened his prospects in this respect. Meanwhile the 'Tiger,' who has consistently declared himself thoroughly opposed to all change in the present electoral system, has won, by his magnificently energetic conduct of the war, an immensely strong position among practically all the classes of Frenchmen except the extreme Socialists, who would probably be very much inclined to forgive him for his enmity to electoral reform which has, by the way, just been approved in the form of a legislative enactment by both Chambers of Legislature. It did not surprise many people that this fine old Parliamentary hand, in his declaration on the Treaty of Peace, borrowed a leaf from M. Briand's book of six or seven years ago, and declared himself in turn as in favor of a policy of appeasement. "The peace,' he said, 'will be only the mirage of a day if we are not first capable of living in peace with ourselves, that is to say, to make peace at home the foundation of peace abroad'distinctly another point to add to the

'Tiger's' score in his Iduel with M. Briand.

At the same time that furiously patriotic journal, the l'Action Française, discovered on M. Briand's desk in the Chamber a piece of blotting paper which shows that in a recent fight on the question whether M. Jean Longuet and his brother revolutionist M. Mayeras should sit on the Parliamentary Committee on the Peace Treaty as representatives of the Socialist group, M. Briand filled up his secret balloting paper with the names of Longuet and Mayeras. Longuet, it will be remembered, was lately refused admission into England to attend the Southport Conference. The Echo de Paris quotes extracts from M. Longuet's Milan speech on June 3 in which he is reported by the Italian Socialist paper Avanti to have said, among other things, that the Peace Treaty, from the Socialist point of view, was merely a scrap of paper, and that the 'duty of the nations is to revise it in order to institute a just, true, and durable peace that will mean the triumph of Lenine in Russia, of Bela Kun in Hungary, and of Haase and Ledebour in Germany.' L'Action Française promises to publish a reproduction of the blotting paper and its revelations.

PARIS took the signing of the peace much more joyously than did London. The ink on the famous paper was hardly dry before whistles, sirens, and cannons shrieked and boomed the news all over Paris. On the esplanade of the Invalides, where a battery of '75's' was fired, our Clemenceau appeared and shouted to the captain in command: "This is my last shot at the enemy.' Throughout the city a tremendous enthusiasm echoed the reports of the guns, and a symphony of exultation arose from the capital: 'On les a' ('We've got them'), and 'Le jour de gloire est arrivé' (the ringing words of the first lines of the 'Marseillaise.') Such is the best way to express the general frenzy of joy which betook the Parisians, while the scenes repeated themselves all down the boulevards the whole night long, as on the day of the armistice.

THE opposition to the League of Nations is not confined to the United States Senate.

Mr. Ian D. Colvin has just written a book which serves as a striking example of the opposition that has to be faced in Great Britain. He calls his book The Safety of the Nation. It would be better named The Doctrine of Despair. His keynote is national security. A national policy of the greatest happiness of the greatest number,' he argues, is folly. Security is the one paramount aim upon which we must concentrate. Perhaps. But is not the provision of security the one great comprehensive aim of the League of Nations? 'Let us suppose,' writes Mr. Colvin, ‘a nation of which every man and woman had their fill of liberty, of happiness, and of content. Such a nation would be the ideal of our utilitarian philosophers. Yet it might be robbed and enslaved, or utterly destroyed, at a stroke by some poor and savage race well-disciplined in arms, and skillfully led to war.' Mr. Colvin's national policy is devised for a perpetually warring world, and he falls back, as do all his school, upon an elaboration of the Darwinian theory to justify this desperate vision of perpetual and inevitable strife. Although he writes not of armaments, but of economic strength, Mr. Colvin's policy of national safety amounts to no more or less than the hoary motto, Si vis pacem, para bellum. He shows no glimmering of recognition that before 1914 that motto was the basis of Continental policy, and led the world into unparalleled disaster; and his argument assumes - for he recognizes that the only alternative to his policy is the League the impossibility of a successful League of Nations. A nation and an empire, self-sufficing, armed to the teeth economically, and presumably militarily as well, in a world of international enmity, strife, and hatred that is the limit of vision of Mr. Colvin and his school. It is the doctrine of despair.

But Mr. Colvin is not only a skeptic of the possibilities of the League. He would regard even a successful League with horror. The League is a 'degrading proposal.' 'It is, in fact, to place our interests, our affairs, our life itself under the control of other nations. Such in plain English is the ideal of policy now being plausibly offered to a nation of free men, which once claimed and achieved the mastery of the world. If

they are to survive they will reject that degrading proposal, and turn to the old and true national ideals of independence and security.' There speaks not only the despairer, but the stark militarist, the incorrigible believer in selfish nationalism and obsolete diplomacy. The word 'mastery' might have been penned in Potsdam in August, 1914. As anti-League propaganda Mr. Colvin's book itself is not formidable. For little weight is likely to be attached to an author so ludicrously biased as to attribute (page 29) Anglo-Irish hostility to Free Trade, and the failure of Joseph Chamberlain's tariff campaign (page 175) to the intervention of the German Emperor. Nor does a writer, who fails to see

in the financial crisis at the outbreak of war, anything but a lesson of our dependence upon Germany, impress his reader with his qualifications. That crisis showed in a flash the tremendous world-wide power of financial London. But of all this Mr. Colvin can only write 'This dependence (i.e., on Germany) reduced our finance to such a condition that the government was forced to intervene, and pledge the resources of the nation to meet the liabilities incurred by the banks. Those banks, which should have been a source of strength to the state, became a source of weakness.' But if Mr. Colvin's arrows are blunted by such faults, yet his school of thought must be recognized and countered.