has befallen any French government since 1600.  From the time of Richelieu until 1870, France was stronger than any of her continental neighbors.  Unless they were united against her she had little to fear from them; and her comparative strength tempted her to be aggressive, careless, and experimental in her foreign policy.  That policy was vacillating, purposeless, and frequently wasteful of the national resources.  Eventually, it compromised the international position of France.  After 1871, for the first time in almost three hundred years, the very safety of France in a time of peace became actively and gravely imperiled.  The third Republic reaped the fruit of all the former trifling with the national interest of France and that of its neighbors; and the resulting danger was and is so ominous and so irretrievable that it has made and will make for internal stability.  If the Republic can provide for French national defense and can keep for France the position in Europe to which she is entitled, the Republic will probably endure.  And in that case it will certainly deserve to endure, because it will have faced and overcome the most exacting possible national peril.

Even the most loyal friend of France can, however, hardly claim that the French democracy is even yet thoroughly nationalized.  It has done something to obtain national cohesion at home, and to advance the national interest abroad; but evidences of the traditional dissociation between French democracy and French national efficiency and consistency are still plainly visible.  Both the domestic and the foreign policies of the Republic have of late years been weakened by the persistence of a factious and anti-national spirit among radical French democrats.

The most dangerous symptom of this anti-national democracy is that an apparently increasing number of educated Frenchmen are rebelling against the burdens imposed upon the Republic by its perilous international position.  They are tending to seek security and relief, not by strengthening the national bond and by loyalty to the fabric of their national life, but by personal disloyalty and national dissolution.  The most extreme of democratic socialists do not hesitate to advocate armed rebellion against military service in the interest of international peace.  They would fight their fellow-countrymen in order to promote a union with foreigners.  How far views of this kind have come to prevail, an outsider cannot very well judge; but they are said to be popular among the school teachers, and to have impaired the discipline of the army itself.  Authoritative French journals claim that France cannot afford to run the risk of incurring the ill-will of Germany, even in a good cause, because the country is no longer sure of its military efficiency.  There is no present danger of this anti-nationalist democracy capturing control of the French government, as did the revolutionary democracy at an earlier date; but its existence is a source of weakness to a nation whose perilous international situation requires the most absolute patriotic devotion on the part of her sons.