ALL his long career M. Clemenceau has paid little attention to public opinion. It might not have existed for all he seemed to care. But the public was asking for an executioner and the executioner arose with professional pride aglow, trying the edge of his axe and anxious to begin. He has now his chance. France needs bracing, after the exhaustion of three and a half years of war, during which her peasant soldiers have shown the most superb heroism. She needs the knowledge that a strong man is prepared to act. M. Clemenceau possesses most of the qualities that inspire respect in war. He is perfectly fearless; he is absolutely disinterested.

the crowded tribunes. Brave souls came boldly to him and ranged themselves alongside; there was a clarion note in the Press and a shriek from somewhere in a corner of the country: "Strike, strike in the name of France." It was the "Union Sacrée " in a new and militant form. Even the Socialists dare not avow open hostility to such a programme of patriotism; he stood forth, indeed, as the embodiment of "La Patrie." Yet extremists have broken from his prede-. cessors in office because of Stockholm. Such

a decision to refuse passports for a peace palaver was forced upon the veteran Ribot. M. Painlevé, weak in action though elevated in principles, succeeded to office, only to yield to M. Clemenceau because he, too, had failed to satisfy those fierce and insistent demands for judgment on Boloism and for a sufficiency in war. None can question M. Clemenceau's activity or efficiency, any more than his firm-hearted zeal for radical cures in a dangerous crisis. His very mission to save France from the poison of the Germans as well as to rive their ranks with greater force than ever-with the bravery of France-rivets the country to him. His Government is strong because it is fearless. His energy is electrical and leaps from one to the other, stirring up lethargy and giving flame to dying embers. He can rule without the Socialists and is proving it-something of a miracle in modern France. And so sound and true is the cause that none but the boldest would dare to endanger it under pain of being regarded an unworthy son of France. And it is clear, too, that faults in Parliamentary tactics have seriously compromised the

[Columbus, U.S.A.

case, and thus he proclaimed himself to be a champion of that France "sans peur et sans reproche" which should be worthy of her peerless Army. To English admirers, it was an anxious moment as they watched the sword of Justice gleam in the hands of this valorous man, threatening the heads of the big and little Bolos who are sheltering in the folds of the flag.

The very fact that M. Clemenceau stepped down into the arena and cried with commanding voice: "I fight for thee, O France," caused a sympathetic tremor to run through

Socialist position in France-failure to support M. Thomas, the Parliamentary Leader, on the pretext of the past action of the Premier in the interests (or supposed interests) of a capitalist bourgeoisie. The bulk of the party sulked, and sixty odd votes were cast against the Man of the Hour; M. Thomas's faithful fraction were outmano uvred and could not vote at all.

Clemenceau, having spoken with the voice of the country, has rallied all parties to him. Nor has he blenched before the position in Russia with all that it entails, with all the responsibility bound up with a vast French loan to which every peasant who digs his plot of earth is personally committed. The legendary "bas de laine "bas de laine" has been emptied in favour of the nation amie et alliée." For years past Jacques Bonhomme has invested his earnings in Russian securities : railways, industrials, and town development schemes. Something like £700,000,000 has been piled up, counting the four milliards (one hundred and sixty millions sterling) since the war began.

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The Maximalists' threat of repudiation, even if subsequently denied, sent a cold shiver through the mass of humble investors; but, by the very irony of anarchy, M. Clemenceau's position is immensely strengthened because of the disintegration of the old Russian Ally by the destructiveness of the Bolshevists. His policy stands out the more clearly as something solid and coherent, as something that promises a strong and virile France, a France freed from the growing incubus of dark and dangerous forces. The conservative instinct of the land-owning peasantry is in secret sympathy with his stand against the plot occult, when it is not cynically truculent, for the perdition of the doux pays " of France. Thus M. Clemenceau's hands are strong because he has based his appeal upon national needs and risen superior to party expediency.

Here is a great patriot (“a man of 70," as he told us once) and the description will stand. His intrepidity is beyond question. A Prefect of Police who has just died used to tell us how the Premier went in danger of his life in the Pas de Calais, where a great strike of miners followed the explosion of Courrières, with its terrific loss of life. He insisted on visiting an official, who was ill. As he emerged from the house, only accompanied by the Prefect (then the head of the Sûreté Générale, or Home Office police), a large and

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excited mob closed them in. It was led by a woman with a terrible voice, who sang the Carmagnole" and waved and waved a red flag. Clemenceau showed no sign of nervousness; it was probably his intrepidity that won him his immunity. That he has courage is apparent from his articles and speeches; he dares any exposure of inefficiency or wrongdoing. His courage, like his vitality, has its root, perhaps, in his way of life, which is Spartan in its simplicity. He has kept his fitness and his astonishing juvenility by a strict regimen. He takes no stimulant and is in bed before nine and at work at his table long before the winter's sun is up.

M. Clemenceau will tolerate no weakness in the conduct of the war; patriotism is his religion. None knows better than he the dark forces of Boloism, and none is better equipped to grapple with them. He is the embodiment of implacable Justice as he stands in the Chamber, a sword in one hand and the scales in the other.

But,

Lecky praised the intense power of sympathy of the French. This power, he urged, is the foundation of some of their most beautiful intellectual qualities, of their social habits and their unrivalled influence. powerful as their sympathy is, it is not more operative in their politics than their intellectual honesty. The Anglo-Saxons, particularly the British branch, are often accused of deep concealments, when the clear light of day is needed to purify and disinfect. Such charges rely more upon the form than upon the substance. Has not an English statesman declared that our strength is in the courage of our honest men, rivalling that of rogues? Whilst acknowledging the boldness of the French mind, one must admit that the frank thesis is not always supported by the firm action.

Republican institutions, if they encourage liberty, often give greater scope than need be to subversive elements. It must be counteracted, on occasion, by the spirit of concentrated authority and by a ruthless interpretation of the "supremalex," which is the safety of the country. Such a figure, fearless in its energy with a single eye to the prosecution of the war, is M. Clemenceau. A sound Republican, he has the strong soul of a Cromwell, the firm and ardent convictions of a Robespierre, the rugged sincerity of a Lincoln. If Socialism is in earnest to end the war, it can prove it by allowing M. Clemenceau calmly to accom. plish his purpose.

HAVE any amongst my readers ever tried to pick up quicksilver with their fingers, or to break in a wild colt? If so, they will have some idea of the difficulties under which I secure these talks, for my business man is as elusive, physically, as quicksilver, and as shy of all attempts to pin him down to an expression of his thoughts as is the aforesaid young colt of harness and bridle. At last I ran him to earth in one of his various retreats and secured, during an hour's conversation with him the next morning before he started for the city, the substance of our third talk, he being too tired to be at his best that evening.

Amongst the notices posted up at railway stations, you may see a list of the railwaymen who have won honour in the war by deeds of prowess-you may read the names of platelayers, shunters, porters and others who have gained the Military Cross or other distinctions and even the V.C.

Now it is not that the war has picked out, from the common herd, the latent heroes. It has done that, but it has also done something greater and more significant. It has shown how, in almost all men, certainly in all youths, there exists the raw stuff of high endeavours. Mr. Chesterton has well put this in his new history where he says:

"If you look around for the hero of the war you see a crowd."

This selective distinction between War and Industry is, as it were, the difference between a regiment and a trade union. With all due respect to the latter, it is impossible to escape the perception that a regiment is a body of higher moral power than a trade union. Still more is that true of a regiment in action,

and a trade union in a strike. A regiment in action is a thing so remarkable that those without experience of it can hardly realise its power of drawing men on to some great and high endeavour of which otherwise they would have remained incapable. You may explain this in all the ways it can be explained that a regiment is an embodiment of a tradition of honour, of the service of all by each, and so on, but all such explanations leave untouched some inexplicable mystery of collective, human life in action, for corporate purpose.

Industry, so far, has failed to discover and make use of this secret-hence the pull of War over Peace-hence the ready and willing response of youth, wherever and whenever war calls. Our youth did not need the vulgar announcements of the War Office to induce them to join the ranks. Garibaldi, for instance, did not say to the young men of the risorgimento that their "best girl" expected them to join. He knew the mind of youth better than did the bureaucrats of Whitehall and the advertisement experts they engaged to make their, sometimes, tawdry posters. His appeal was the offer of "hardship, wounds and death."

There are, of course, occasions in industrial affairs when, as it were, a war situation arises and men respond heroically. An explosion in a mine, a railway accident, a fire, a shipwreck-in all such situations heroism is evoked from the common, or average man. It would be foolish to expect every factory worker to live the heroic every day in the week. The practical issue is this-that when people are called upon for honorific service they take more out of themselves than when they are working for a wage.

Here then is a great fact in human nature, War, one may say, is built upon that fact. Industry ignores it. Mr. Wells is the one of our contemporaries who perhaps sees this most vividly, and asks why no adequate use

is made of this miracle-working aspect of human nature in Business and Industry. That was a pre-war question raised by Mr. Wells. It is one of the great social inventions or discoveries of the war that a beginning has been made towards utilising the higher human qualities in the New War Economy.

Let us imagine the new system as, at the moment, at work. The public has not been told much about it by the Government, but one picks up impressions and facts. Putting these together one gets a picture something as follows.

First there are the huge Government establishments amongst which it is dispersed. There are new ones like Gretna, out-distancing Woolwich many times. What is to be done with these after the war, and their equipment of automatic machinery, imported from America, or made here at a cost of millions, is one of the big problems ahead, which we must leave out of account for the moment. Then there are thought to be five thousand of what are called controlled factories, but these are only a part of the new system.

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There are, for instance, entirely new types, called, I believe," instructional" factories, a significant, new kind of institution-a sort of compound of technical college and factory. These are intermediate between the scores of new technical schools, established by the Government, with the aid of the pre-existing technical schools and colleges, of which, indeed, they are just an extension, and are officially termed Training Centres.

Everyone should pay a visit to one of these Training Centres, if only to get an impression of what "The New Industry" looks like. Visit, for example, one of the training schools for girl munition workers. These girls are proud of their uniform, as you can see by their smiling faces and dignified bearing. It is precisely the opposite effect that one gets from any of the institutions of the Old Industry-e.g., a factory with its row upon row of slatternly "hands," or or a board school, with its bear-garden of pushing, shoving, yelling little hooligans, confined within high walls, to a small, cemented court, in which animal spirits necessarily vent themselves in hooligan-like ways. Of the same type clearly as the factory and the board school is the gaol, with its inmates dressed as much alike as automatons, and correspondingly regimented. Nothing could be in sharper contrast to all these types of

Old Industrial Institutions than the new Training Centres.

To see these workers during their leisure hours is rather like going to a garden party. Each girl is an individual, because each is at her best, instinct with life and vivacity. True, they wear a uniform, but this uniform is worn, not as a badge of servility, but as a blazon of honourable service-their uniform, though not the King's, is yet worn for the nation's work.

This is The Spirit of the New Industry at its best. How far it is carried into the succeeding institutions, namely the Instructional Factories and the ordinary Controlled Factories, I cannot say, not having visited them. But the point is, that under the conditions assumed, it is possible for that spirit of proud and dignified national service to get into and to dominate the system from top to bottom.

As we saw above, the two systems come sharply to a contrast as typified in the persons of the engineer and the profiteer. The former is the natural director of the new system, and the latter of the old. In saying this one must, of course, take the engineer at his best, and not in the perverted form in which you so often find him when seduced from his natural ways by a prolonged association with the profiteer.

In his natural ways the engineer is like the doctor or the nurse, the cook or the carpenter. All these, from long, natural habit, and from innate human intention, concentrate their efforts on the job in hand, whether it be curing a sick man, cooking a dinner, or making a chair. They want, of course, to receive a proper remuneration, but that is secondary and incidental to getting the thing done and doing it in a workmanlike way.

That the Spirit of the New Industry has not only invaded the economic system, generated by the war, but has quite formally and definitely established itself therein, is testified to by the new kind of Honours List promulgated last summer. Amongst those then awarded distinction were both men and women, selected from munition workers and the ranks of those serving in factories, engaged in war-work.

Thus must the Spirit of the New Industry, when it is given full, free play, inevitably transform what non-labouring writers and politicians term "The Dignity of Labour" from an empty, lifeless phrase into a fullblooded, vital reality.