SEVENTH SERIES No. 3492 June 10, 1911 CONTENTS FROM BEGINNING 1. "When England Awakes." By William Morton Fullerton NATIONAL REVIEW 643 II. Fairies-From Shakespeare to Mr. Yeats. By H. Grierson . DUBLIN REVIEW 651 III. Fancy Farm. Chapters III. and IV. By Neil Munro. (To be con- IV. Proposals for the Reform of the Calendar. VI. Primavera. By Lieut. Col. D. C. Pedder. CONtemporary REVIEW 672 VII. About “Marie-Claire." By Moira O'Neill. BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE 678 PUNCH 688 SPECTATOR 691 XII. The International Spy: An Extraordinary Development. A PAGE OF VERSE XIII. Music and the Woman-Soul. By Stephen Phillips WESTMINSTER GAZETTE 642 642 XIV. Beyond the Walls of Peace, By Dollie Radford PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY THE LIVING AGE COMPANY, 6 BEACON STREET, BOSTON TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION FOR SIX DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, THE LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage, to any part of the United States. To Canada the postage is 50 cents per annum. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office or express money order if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, express and money orders should be made payable to the order of THE LIVING AGE Co. Single Copies of THE LIVING AGE, 15 cents. "WHEN ENGLAND AWAKES." It is important not to misconstrue the European situation in so far as it affects French interests; it is important to see it, for instruction's sake, as it is viewed through French spectacles. These are the words of warning which I ventured to use several weeks ago in commenting upon the recent Cabinet crisis in France. It is the object of the present article to justify this language. I. Frenchmen cherished for a decade and more the illusion that the Alliance with Russia was an earnest of the ultimate recovery of Alsace-Lorraine. It took that length of time for them to comprehend that the armies of the Dual Alliance were the armies of the Hague; that neither the Tsar nor their own rulers had contemplated by the Alliance any other aim than that of defence; that the sole positive good which the Alliance was intended to secure was the maintenance of European equilibrium, and that they who had looked to it as a potential instrument of revanche had been tragically duped. When France realized that the Russian Alliance meant not only that things must be as they had been, but that all hope of better days was gone, the plight of the nation was one that might have given rise to a certain sullen resentment. Such resentment did, in fact, exist to a certain degree among the generations that remembered the war of 1870. Upon the younger generation, on the contrary, the consequence of their slow perception of the real significance, in its European bearings, of the pact with Russia was strangely different. Little by little the notion of révanche faded from the forefront of the French consciousness and gave way to a kind of supine satisfaction with the idea of security implied in the existence of the Alliance. If the Alliance was to be no longer interpreted as a means of realizing French dreams, it meant, at all events, the inexpressible boon of peace. The French soul tended to become relaxed. Humanitarianism, pacifism, anti-militarism, began to flourish rankly all over French soil. France had been cocardier up to 1890. The Russian Alliance gradually calmed her nerves, dissipated her fears, lulled her to sleep. Strong in her faith in the loyalty of Russia to keep strict watch over the German dogs of war in case they seemed to be preparing to leap across her eastern frontier, France, the Republic, was free to respond, without loss of dignity, or dread of the consequences, to the cajoleries and flatteries of the German Kaiser. If he had continued to cajole instead of blunderingly beginning to menace, humanitarianism might have gangrened the whole of France. One public man of eminence in France, and one public man alone, President Grévy, had a foreign policy which might have saved his country from some of the psychological consequences and from the positive sequence of events that ensued. President Grévy never tired of preaching the utility of isolation, the danger of entangling alliances. But he was overruled, and successive Ministers in France who extolled the Russian Alliance hoped not merely to assure European equilibrium, but to maintain European peace by holding Germany in check. They were also aiming indirectly at the great secular rival of their country, Great Britain. Notwithstanding Bismarck's efforts to thwart the inception of the FrancoRussian Alliance, the heirs of his policy found in the Franco-Russian Alliance, one of their most magnificent op portunities. What the Germans rap- France and England came into dangerous collision everywhere. Italy and France glared at each other in Tunis and over the Dauphiné passes, while the Triple Alliance was being slowly consolidated. Successive German Chancellors rubbed their hands in glee, and German hegemony assumed the aspect of a pillar of cloud by day and almost of fire by night. There But the German plan succeeded too admirably. The Greeks, who were practical psychologists, noted that a Nemesis dogs the steps of a man or nation addicted to the unpardonable sin of ẞpis insolent pride. came a time, amid the multiple shocks which harassed the nerves of British and French Foreign Ministers, as the lines of British and French Colonial expansion dovetailed throughout the world, when the chances of peace or war between France and England Both seemed to hang by a thread. Powers, after Fashoda, awoke to the idea that they had been playing the II. For some months Germany lay stunned and prone. The incredible had happened. There had been long years in the nineties when the Wilhelmstrasse must have known as well as every Parisian that England was even more hated in France than the Power which had dismembered that country in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles. The possibility that England and France could ever come to terms was not taken in Germany as even a remote contingency. It was regarded as a political absurdity. Yet the incredible had happened. irony of ironies, it had occurred simply as a consequence of the over-weening success of the Bismarckian plan. And, After the first discountenancing blow it was not surprising that the German Chancellerie was a long time pulling itself together. Germany's uncouth movements and gestures in seeking to have established the balance of power in Europe. If it had not been for the issue of the Russo-Japanese War, a result utterly unforeseen by the Quai d'Orsay, and the perilous consequences of which from the point of view of French interests had never been taken into account in France, the French nation might have continued, like the English, to remain, as a whole, blandly ignorant of the strategic conditions and of the international relations on the Continent of Europe. To be sure the Algeciras Conference and the Casablanca incident were yet to intervene as objectlessons for the most indifferent; but the defeat of the Russian ally, Russian paralysis as a military power for some years to come, was an event which, at the time, opened the eyes of even the least discerning of French observers. While it enabled them to divine the causes, perhaps better than they otherwise might have done, of the audacity of Germany in her Moroccan policy, it also enhanced for them the value of the Entente with England, and made them all the more vigilant as to the preservation of that Entente, according to the conception of it cherished by its promoters. British politics, both domestic and foreign, were bound to be watched by Frenchmen with as jealous an eye as their own, and even more carefully and jealously than they watched those of Russia. England had taken the place of Russia in French affections. In the same breath in which Frenchmen repudiated, and sincerely repudiated, the notion that the reason why the Entente was dear to them was because it meant to them a possible revanche, and insisted, and sincerely insisted, on the fact that they longed above all for European peace, they acknowledged that the Entente was possible only because it satisfied the common interest of France and England in thwarting |