or

We should be grateful, for instance, to anyone who would give us an equivalent for the German Zeitgeist, Schwâmerei, or for the Blûthenzeit of an artist's career, as it is but rarely that German words can be comfortably naturalized in English.

Equally obvious is the need for simple English words to replace uncouth and outlandish expressions. Some of these have already been found: ear-trumpet for the original acousticon, and lawn-tennis for the first appellation sphairistike; and the Times has recently won our gratitude by making aviators give way to airmen. We still need, however, a simple word for cinematograph, and a better word for anti-cyclone; for it is surely ungracious to describe so benign a phenomenon by so uncouth a name.

Other words that need replacing are those that are not necessarily uncouth, but are inaccurate or misleading descriptions of the things they describe. History, and the experience of each one of us, will provide instances in plenty where the lack of a precise nomenclature has been the cause of barren controversy, and the first need of any policy is a rightly descriptive name. A new word, for instance, is badly needed in politics to replace the antiquated and somewhat ambiguous word Reform, which dates from the time when the change of out-of-date laws, and the abolition of unjust privileges, was the main duty of enlightened legislators; but which inadequately describes what is now the main task of modern politics, the wise application of new knowledge to social conditions. Labor Exchanges and invalidity insurance are not Reform-if they are not Reform, what are they? Reform, moreover, is a dangerous word for progressive politicians; Tariff Reformers and Municipal Reformers must have shown them how it can easily be used to give a popular appearance to reaction. A

word, say, like "construction" or "constructivism," the "constructive" or "constructivist" party, would be a less ambiguous and more correct appellation, and would, moreover, gain no small advantage by the suggestion that the policy of its opponents was "destructive."

Even more important are the cases where there is no word at all for the thing that we are anxious to discuss. It has, for instance, been lately pointed out how much criticism suffers from the lack of a term to distinguish between the æsthetic and the commercial branches of the arts, between writers, painters and musicians who satisfy æsthetic demands and obey æsthetic laws, and those who cater for other natural and legitimate, but nonaesthetic, needs. By calling these, as we must at present, bad "artists," an undeserved stigma is laid upon a deserving and useful class of producers. And, curiously enough, what is one of the most fundamental antagonisms in modern thought is without a namethe conflict, I mean, between the ideals of “qualitative” or “quantitative" civilization, between those who would subordinate everything to the ideal of "intensive" culture, and those who are willing, for the sake of spreading education and enlightenment, to sacrifice, if necessary, their highest manifestations.

The above instances of needed terms will show, I hope, that word-invention is no matter of mere curiosity and dilettantism. It is a matter of direct importance to all of us, and deserves the thought and care of those who have at heart the interests of civilization. Until a name is found, needed distinctions cannot be discussed, nor difficult and pressing problems settled. At the Congress of Berlin in 1885, as Mr. Graham Wallas has pointed out, the invention of a few new terms, "effective occupation," "hinterland," "sphere

of influence," in place of the old and absolute word "sovereignty," did much to prevent a European war. Other difficulties will arise, or have arisen, for the solution of which appropriate terms will be equally necessary; and our civilization is now and then enriched by new thoughts and new ways of feeling, which may, if unnamed or wrongly named, soon fade from human consciousness. Shall the satisfaction of The English Review.

that want be left, as hitherto, to chance; or will our writers give a little attention to the matter, and, following the example of men of science, but with more consideration for linguistic and human needs, supply their age, like their great predecessors, with elegant, perspicuous and expressive words for its new thoughts and experiences, as they arise? Logan Pearsall Smith.

The Third Republic is perhaps at the beginning of a great Revolution; it may be making up its mind to inoculate the idealism of its politics with the realism of its life.-Laurence Jerrold: The Real France, p. 38.

I.

The recent revival in the Eastern provinces of France of the Dionysiac orgies was an impressive spectacle. As the bands of Bacchic and Mænad revellers went reeling through the vineyards of Champagne, burning, pillaging everything in their path, the torch-lit terror of the Thracian nights seemed no longer a poetic dream,

But the scene was not merely an interesting occasion for æsthetic pleasure, not merely even a happy opportunity for the cinematographer. It possessed many another interest. It was a fresh symptom, after so many others, of a certain state of the French bodypolitic, and it was perhaps what, in the jargon of the experimental psychologist, is called a prodrome of a possible change in the French political and social organism. The terrifying events in Champagne occurred under the eye of a Government apparently powerless to arrest them, and of a Parliament incompetent to offer a solution. The Prime Minister of France sat like Belshazzar at the feast, gazing with dis

Al

may at the awful lettering on the midnight sky, while the Chamber wrung its hands like a Greek chorus. though he was educated by the Jesuits, the lettering on the wall was Greek to the Prime Minister. What may have been the reflections of the President of the Republic, who had chosen the stalwart Radical senator, Monsieur Monis, to govern France, is not known: the Head of the State in France is, by the real, if not by the legal, Constitution, a mute idol in a pagoda, without responsibility or initiative. The reflections of the public were not so inarticulate. My own reflection was simply this-and, as the readers of this Review know, I had not waited for the Champagne riots to formulate it-the present form of the Parliamentary régime in France is doomed.

It was not three months ago that, commenting upon the formation of the Monis Ministry, consequent upon the fall of Monsieur Briand, I remarked:

It is obvious that the defection of M. Briand's followers, resulting in his quitting office and of the appointment to succeed him of the leaders in the conspiracy against him, will have greatly increased the dissatisfaction of the French electorate with the disorganization of French political life, and will have considerably furthered the reform of the electoral system, which

is now the necessary condition of the organization of the French democracy -and perhaps of the durability of French Republican institutions.

The "leaders in the conspiracy" against Monsieur Briand have now themselves been driven from office by a hostile vote of the Chamber. The immediate cause of their fall matters little. The real reason for it was the clamor of the country for a Government willing and able to govern. Monsieur Monis had become the shuttlecock of the Parliamentary groups. He had manifested the most singular and the most dangerous incapacity to maintain the dignity of the Executive office. In the grave affair of the Champagne riots he shifted his responsibility upon the Conseil d'Etat, as in the no less grave questions of public order and Administrative discipline, in connection with the railways and the reckless sabotage of public property, he allowed the anarchist element of the Chamber to dictate his conduct. Such incompetence had become so manifestly absurd that no Prime Minister would have been tolerated as his successor who did not reassure his compatriots first and foremost as to the essential questions of public order. The declaration of Monsieur Caillaux on taking office (June 30) responded to this demand:

We mean to be a Government in the loftiest and most precise sense of the word. We intend to apply the law, the whole law, with impartial firmness. . . . We also hold that the action of the Government should make itself felt

in every form of our public life.

French citizens must be made to believe that public business is not being conducted in a happy-go-lucky fashion, but that it is under the firm and constant guidance of a Government. The attitude of the Government must convince French citizens that a free people has more duties than any other people, and that since such a people is the master of its own fortunes, it is LIVING AGE. VOL. LII. 2743

bound to aid its representatives by its own wise prudence. It is necessary, above all, to prevent the growth of the idea that aught can be gained by transgression of the law. And finally the two Chambers of Parliament must be put in a position to see that at their heads there is a normal body of advisers ready to offer an opinion on all questions which are under discussion, advisers who do not fear to take the lead in order to introduce a sure method in public debates.

II.

Michelet remarked that the whole of English history could be summed up in the single sentence: "England is an island." When, in her characteristically brutal fashion, Germany sought, by the despatch of a gunboat to the ideally strategic point of Agadir, on one of the world-routes of the Atlantic to separate England and France, and to compromise the efficacy of their entente, while tearing up two diplomatic conventions, the Algeciras agreement and her own agreement with France concerning Morocco, the immediate consequences of her action merely illustrated once again how beautifully Michelet was right.

But if the formula of Michelet, intelligently interpreted, is the sum and substance of British history, it is no less easy, no less pertinent and suggestive, to sum up French history by a parallel formula, based on considerations drawn from the geographical position of France in relation to other continental European powers. Continental Europe is in reality the western promontory of Asia, and France is merely an isthmus, all but converting that promontory into a peninsula, an isthmus linking the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the North Sea. French soil is the central historic road of civilization during at least the last three thousand years. All the Pisgah heights look down upon her. A great

nation has been evolved in so exposed and coveted a corner of the Continent solely by the adoption of relentlessly centralizing methods, which have determined the maurs, the temperament, the character and the lack of characterof its members. It is because Frenchmen have had to live and move and have their secular being at this particular spot of the planet that their ideals and their problems, their history, in a word, have differed from those of any other national community.

It would be easy and fascinating to elucidate this truth by testing its application to French historical facts and events-to the Champagne riots, for instance, as well as to the Dreyfus case

were

and to the whole series of French traits. Thus, Casablanca and Agadir, which showed once again that if Germany did not exist it would be worth while to invent her in the interests of French national integrity and of French patriotism, are two trifling events, among many hundreds, which it would be amusing to adduce, if one challenged to defend the validity of this induction. But we are talking for the moment not of world-politics but of the domestic situation in France. Our business is to obtain the right perspective for the proper appreciation of those scenes of civil war in Champagne which have once more flattered the ineradicable superficial conviction of foreigners that France is going to those legendary dogs who are always barking vociferously at the approach of their prey; that the tricolor is already flying from the stern of Charon's bark; and that the Republic is shortly to be judged and found wanting. The civil war in the eastern departments was but one of a rapidly accumulating series of untoward events, signs of an apparent national disintegration, which have again led the Royalist and Imperialist pretenders-the saviours of society who are always ready to start

up in their absurd jack-in-the box fashion on any and every pretext—to sign manifestoes and to galvanize their apathetic followers into active opposition. Even certain leaders of the Republic have caught the contagion, and talked openly, in pessimistic accents, of the possibility of a real revolution, while more than one French journal has raised the question: "Whither are we going? To the king? To the emperor? Or towards the Fourth Republic?"

The

The unrest which is now pervading French society, the outspoken disgust against the present political and social régime, is a new phase of French life -a new phase, that is, under the Third Republic, for nothing like it has been witnessed in France during the last forty years. Not Boulangism, nor the Panama and Dreyfus scandals, can be cited to confound this verdict. This unrest has, however, a contemporary parallel, and this fact-for those of us who, given to general ideas, yet detesting nothing so heartily as clearly superficial views, love to see things as they are helps to define its character. pessimism and unrest of France is, as a social and political phenomenon, if not exactly of the same nature as, yet of potential comparison with, the unrest and pessimism of the United States. In both countries at this hour there is this same moral hypochondria, which is engendering the same malarial visions. When a senator from Iowa, ex-Governor of his State, says in an address to the students of the Washington College of Law: "We are living in a period of revolution; our institutions at this day are in the balance," his voice is pitched in the same key as are those of a Millevoye, a Drumont, a Henri Béranger, a Poincaré, a Maurras, and a Jaurès. Yet all these utterances (since they are not isolated. nor confined to any political party, but characteristic of the feeling of the sev

eral audiences to which they appeal) are, in my opinion, the most welcome ground for optimism.

In France, at this moment, there is, for the first time in my recollection, a wide spread craving for positive reform; a growing insistence that something must be done to purify French political and administrative life; a resolve to effect certain radical changes, however drastic, and at whatever sacrifice of persons, in the relations of the several parts of the great political and administrative machine; a repudiation of French ideology and a revival of idealism in the English sense of the word; a spirit of relentless and vigilant criticism, and a moral purpose which may legitimately be described as the harbinger of a French Renaissance. But in seeking to comprehend this new state of things, the foreign observer might easily go wrong. Let it be understood once for all that the "pretenders," who would fain utilize the dissatisfaction of France with many of her existing institutions in order to substitute for the Republic a Monarchy or an Empire, are following in their familiar way evanescent willso'-the-wisp. The reforms which are to take place are to be of the nature of a readjustment of the Republican Constitution to modern conditions, not of the upsetting of the Republic. The dried fruit of the old régime is no longer succulent to the French palate. In spite of its occasional mephitic iridescence it is the deadest of the dead fruits of the Dead Sea.

Yet things are not going well. In fact, they are going very badly; and it is the intention of this article to suggest some of the reasons why. Happily it is impossible to exaggerate the admirable and useful rôle of the anti-Republican opposition in helping to create discontent in France and to transmute that discontent into a force capable of destroying grave abuses.

III.

Government in France is the tyrannical monopoly of a minority. During a great many years one of the classical methods of the Republican system of government was to maintain a state of war in France. The Republicans found ready to their hands an incomparably compact and centralized Administration, and their main object was to hold the citadel of that Administration, and to man all its bastions and outworks by sworn members of their party. They treated the rank and file of the nation as enemies who could not be trusted. In order to consolidate their troops the Republican leaders invented the useful bug-a-boo of an antiRepublican and anti-Constitutional opposition. Not that the nucleus of such opposition did not really exist, but the utility of preserving it, the advisability of exasperating it by methods of persecution, in order to cultivate the illusion in the country that Republican order was being chronically menaced, was the accepted device for the conservation of Republican power. The disinterested sporadic efforts of this or that leader to dismantle the Republican donjon-Gambetta, Spuller, Méline, Briand-to substitute Republican for Feudal rule, to make the Republic a real Republic in which all France should have the same rights, as the compact little garrison defending the citadel, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, have been systematically misunderstood, not to say regarded as treason, by the professional politicians; and, meanwhile, behind the scenes, the privileged troops manning the state battlements, have battened off the assiette au beurre, corrupted French character by the multiple distribution of "places" for idle functionaries, bought thus indirectly the votes of their clients, and made the Republic no longer worthy of the name.

There is no such thing in France as