Nov. 25.
M. Cuemenceav's tour in America will be watched with some curiosity in other countries. Unstinted admiration will be felt for his cottage and energy in undertaking so arduous a task at the age of over eighty-one. But as regards his chances of success opinions may be divided.
do not ask you for money," he said at his first public appearance in New York. I only ask you.to consider that France, without money, with the flower of her manhood dead or crippled, with her territories devastated and her finances heavily involved, cannot justly or reasonably be supposed to want any more fighting. You have signed, with others, an agreement to help us recover reparations. I only ask you to honour that signature."' To the overwhelming mass of Americans the position so simply and convincingly put cannot fail to appeal, and the comment of the New York papers is not unsympathetic. But between politicians and the public there appears a wide gulf. Senator Borah replies to M. Clemenceau's speech with a bitter and unworthy taunt, while Senator Norris's reply would have been effective if America had never entered the war, but is deprived of all ground of reason by the simple fact that she did.
The New York Times" probably voices the feelings of a large number of Americans when it suggests that France should make clear what could be done practically to relieve her. The difficulty, perhaps, which France feels in this respect is that any request from her to Washington would undoubtedly be met by conditions which she could not possibly accept. For instance, if she were to ask for a cancellation of debts—those incurred between America's actual declaration of war and the time of her armies coming over—the probabilities are that the United States Government would ask for a corresponding cancellation of German debts to France. Why France cannot agree to that would be better realized by the Borahs and Norrises if they spent a few months in France. The money that she asks for from Germany, with the approval and signature of a President of the United States, she needs simply for internal reconstruction, certainly not for chauvinistic ambitions abroad, and there is no legal or moral reason why she should not ask for it and get it. With the passage of years and as the cutest recollections of the war grow blunted, an insidious tendency is visible in many directions to assume that though Germany was more to blame, perhaps, than other countries for the war, they must all bear their responsibility and pay their shot. We are not in the least anxious to keep alive old animosity, but we do say that the tendency to think in this way should be protested against, wherever it is met, as strongly as possible. France, of all countries, neither desired nor was prepared for war. She was militarily inferior to Germany in 1914, her population was smaller by several millions and a new generation had arisen since 1870 with whom the notion of re-vance was not even an alluring dream. No stronger testimony to the fact that Germany prepared for and launched the war at the moment she deemed most advantageous can be found than that set down in The Secrets of the Bosphorus by Mr. Morgenthau, a German by ancestry but American by nationality. It was a buccaneering expedition at the expense of France. It failed because France's neigh-hours, including America, would not permit it to succeed; and all France asks is that the damage done to her by the German armies shall be repaired—not indemnity but reparations.
But there is a wider appeal in M. Clemenceau's tour in America than that of justice and restoration for France. It is one which we know well that all the best feeling in America deeply realizes. In our world of to-day no country can possibly live to itself alone, nor does it. Capital calls to capital across all frontiers and labour to labour, and on the nobler planes of philanthropy and social advancement neither creed nor colour sets up any barrier. At this moment American people, through their own unofficial organizations like the Red Cross, are feeding millions of the destitute in Russia and the Near East. But the Borahs of the political world will not permit their Government to give its help in cutting at the root of the evils from which that destitution springs. It is perfectly plain, as M. Clemenceau said, that the Turceo-Russian rap-brochement raises an ominous war cloud in the Near East; and while it is, perhaps, open to question whether Germany. is indeed preparing for another war, her alliance with Moscow can-hot be left out of account. The danger is one that can only be countered by united action on the part of all the civilized world: and yet at Lausanne America's official representative is only an observer. We are sure that the United States Government's aloofness from that work of reorganization, which is indeed as much a part of war's operation as the movement of armies, is keenly regretted by all the best elements in America. Nothing is more likely to strengthen their hands than M. Clemenceau's visit and appeal.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.