to deny that they had inspired the articles in the press, whereupon I laughed and told him not to bother about denying it because I had not minded in the least. He then laughed too, and said that he had become sorry that the articles were ever published, and had not personally approved of their being published. The Austrian Ambassador in Berlin was very anxious to see me and was wholly unable to resist asking whether I had spoken to the Emperor and the Foreign Office about peace and disarmament; so I replied by asking him whether the publication in question had been made by him prior to communicating the matters to the German Foreign Office, or by the German Foreign Office after he had communicated my conversation with his chief; and I added that I did not mind in the least, that while I thought the publication in the papers unnecessary, it had given me the chance to say what I had to say, a chance which otherwise I probably would not have had. He nearly choked in trying to invent some appropriate remark in response; but failed.

From Vienna I went to Paris, where I joined Mrs. Roosevelt at the Bacons'. Bacon, old college friend of mine, was then, and is now, Ambassador to Paris. He and his wife are dear people, and staying with them was an oasis in a desert of hurry and confusion. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Paris, but by the end I began to feel jaded. Jusserand had come across the ocean to meet me. We are very fond of him. Frenchmen, thank heavens! do understand a liking for the things in life that are most interesting, and though official deputations accompanied me round to the three or four museums or picture galleries which I insisted on visiting, the officials differed markedly from the corresponding type in most other countries and were pleasant companions. The Royalist press, being Catholic, was inclined to receive me coldly because of the Vatican incident, but my Sorbonne speech delighted them; and, curiously enough, it also delighted the Republicans who were getting very uneasy over the Socialist propaganda, or at least over the mob work and general sinister destruction in which Socialist propa

ganda was beginning to take practical form. Accordingly, all the Republican leaders hailed what I said because it came from a radical republican, whose utterances they could applaud and hold up as an excuse for strong action on their part, without its being possible for their foes to taunt them with being royalists and reactionaries in disguise.

Besides various formal functions such as dinner and receptions by the municipal government and by the Institute (of which I had been made a member and where, by the way, I genuinely enjoyed myself), I was also given two or three private breakfasts and dinners at which I met Briand, and various other members of the Government and the Opposition, in intimate and informal fashion. These I especially liked. Neither the President nor the ex-President was interesting; they were good honest respectable figureheads; but the members of the various ministries were thoroughly competent men, of much ability. It shows my own complacent Anglo-Saxon ignorance that I had hitherto rather looked down upon French public men, and have thought of them as people of marked levity. When I met them I found that they had just as solid characters as English and American public men, although with the attractiveness which to my mind makes the able and cultivated Frenchman really unique. I speedily realized that it was not they who were guilty of levity, it was the French nation, or rather the combination of the French national character with the English parliamentary system; a system admirable for England, taking into account the English national character, the customs and ways of looking at things inherited generation after generation by both the English people and their public men, and especially the fact that there are in England two parties; but a system which has not worked well in a government by groups, where the people do not mind changing their leaders continually, and are so afraid of themselves that, unlike the English and Americans, they do not dare trust any one man with a temporary exercise of large power for fear they will be weak enough to let him assume it permanently.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1910 In Paris on his return from Africa

Of course in talking with these French republicans, who are absorbed in the questions that affect all of us under popular government, I had a sense of kinship that it was impossible to feel with men, however high-minded and wellmeaning, whose whole attitude of mind towards these problems was different from mine. With the French republicans I could on the whole, and in spite of certain points on which we radically differed, feel a sympathy somewhat akin to that which I felt in talking with English Liberals. Of course there are plenty of French republicans, just as there are plenty of English radicals and American progressives, with whom I am as completely out of sympathy as with any ecclesiastic or royalist reactionary. But fundamentally it is the radical liberal in all three countries with whom I sympathize. He is at least working toward the end for which I think we should all of us strive; and when he adds sanity and moderation to courage and enthusiasm for high ideals he develops into the kind of statesman whom alone I can whole-heartedly support. In France I also met a number of men of letters whom I had really wished to see, men like Victor Berard and De la Gorce and Boutroux. What a charming man a charming Frenchman is!

There was one incident which interested me. The French were bound that I should see some of their troops. I had at first refused to accept a review, simply because I did not have the time; but Jusserand finally told me that they understood that the German Emperor would have a big review in my honor, and that the French people would take it amiss if I so acted as to give the impression that while I believed France had charm and refinement, so that it was worth while seeing her museums and picture galleries, her salons, her doctors of the Sorbonne and the Institute, yet I did not take her military power seriously, nor deem her soldiers worth seeing; for, said Jusserand, the French pride themselves upon being a military nation, and admit no military inferiority to any people, no matter how much they may also pride themselves upon proficiency in all that tells for the grace and refinement of life. Of course I