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NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

MARCH-APRIL-MAY, 1926

ARISTIDES THE SECOND

BRIAND AS PEACEMAKER OF EUROPE

BY THE EDITOR

THE members of the ill-omened Supreme Council assembled at the Quai d'Orsay on the left bank of the River Seine on the morning of a hot day in August, 1921. Immediately following the conventional greetings, promptly on the hour designated, at the instigation of the punctilious Curzon of Kedleston, the Rt. Hon. David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of England, chatting, laughing and twiddling his eyeglasses, led the way into the beautiful historic chamber of the palace, and the representatives took their places.

At the right of the President's chair sat Mr. Lloyd George himself, clad in a new morning suit, his abundant hair freshly trimmed and slightly tousled for the occasion; next to him the massive noble Lord, last of the small band of aristocrats who for so many years constituted the "ruling class" of England, stiff in his concealed steel braces, in a splendid frock coat of former days; and on his right the impressively gigantic Ambassador Harding, scion of the same stock as our own beloved President as of the time. At the left were M. Loucheur, ablest and richest of French financiers, immaculately attired; the great Marshal Foch in a glittering new uniform, and an alert, keen-visaged little General, also in blue and gold, whose name we must apologize for having forgotten.

* BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES I.

Copyright, 1926, by North American Review Corporation. All rights reserved. VOL. CCXXIII.-NO. 830 1

Flanking the British on the right were the ponderous Signor Bonomi, Prime Minister of Italy, his slightly bowed and very spare Foreign Secretary, the Marquess della Farretta, indubitably aristocratic and consciously superior, looking for all the world like the lamented Wayne Mac Veagh, and beyond them the Japanese-Viscount Ishii, who tied up our former Secretary Lansing in a knotty treaty while Ambassador in Washington, and Baron Hayashi, accomplished and trustworthy, brought over from London; at the left, the American representative and the Belgians-M. Jasper, agile in mind and body, and M. Theunis, taciturn and capable, as was recently noted in Washington, in matters pertaining to what Mr. George F. Baker, the Elder, calls "interest money". All were in raiment spick and span.

Suddenly the buzz of conversation ceased at the sound of a lithe, yet shambling, step across the dais, and Aristide Briand, for the seventh time Premier of France, in a wrinkled sack coat and baggy trousers, bowing easily and pleasantly, sank somewhat heavily into the President's chair. Many curious eyes rested and lingered upon his mobile countenance while, for several long seconds, he scanned meditatively the interesting diversity of faces confronting him. He looked like a brigand, but when presently he spoke it was with the voice of an angel. Simply and melodiously, in astonishingly few words, he set forth the purposes of the meeting; then, turning his head to the right, he nodded with friendly graciousness to the Prime Minister of England, leaned indolently back in his chair and half closed the lids of his eyes.

Not so much as a flicker relieved the impassiveness of M. Briand's countenance while Mr. Lloyd George was voicing ardent appreciation of the Premier's welcoming words, but the instant the great little Welshman, after pausing obviously for effect, declared with impressive solemnity that the occasion was one of the gravest, if not indeed actually the most momentous, in the history of the Council, the lids rose and an odd ray of light flashed from the expressive dark eyes. It was hardly a gleam, but rather the merest glint, of amusement, passing almost too quickly to be caught and quite unverified by lips hidden behind a carefully stroked moustache. And yet to at least one painstaking

observer it seemed to reveal humorous appraisal of something, though of what could not be divined until later when cautious inquiry educed the interesting information that "invariably Lloyd George makes every conference in which he participates the most important ever held and has done it so many times that Briand now fully comprehends the only English he clearly understands."

But the trifling episode really indicated more than that; it evidenced that M. Briand's understanding of Lloyd George himself was no less exact than his comprehension of Lloyd George's phrases. And that was interesting, important, too, in the light of Clemenceau's shrewd observation to the effect that—

"Poincaré knows everything and understands nothing; Briand knows nothing, nothing, but understands everything, everything." Following the Prime Minister of England came the Prime Minister of Italy, and his was a tedious performance, partly because of the length of his oration but chiefly owing to the necessity of labored translation first into French and then into English. Fortunately the procedure afforded an opportunity to scrutinize the outer being of the man who now holds the center of the stage that is called the world.

A massive head covered by curly black hair that straggled over his collar; a long drooping moustache incessantly stroked, not nervously but caressingly, by a hand so small and soft and white that it would befit better a petted lady; a wide, full forehead signifying phrenologically exceptional causative power; eyes, as indicated, sleepy as a cat's and quick as a cat's to flash fire; a flat, large-nostrilled nose; good ears; a hidden mouth; a round, firm chin, upheld by a short thick neck, rising between two broad and distressingly bowed shoulders from a big, square trunk encasing an incongruously narrow chest expanding below into the globulous corpulence of physical indolence.

So appeared at first full glance Aristide Briand, foremost statesman today of France and balancer for the time, whether in or out of technical authority, of the scales of Europe.

We recall wondering idly, while the pattering of Signor Bonomi's decorative periods in three languages continued, why they named him Aristide. Latins are not accustomed to cross racial

lines in search of distinguishing marks for perpetuation in family records. And the bourgeois Briands of Nantes were humble folk, so simple and unstudied, indeed, that it is far more likely that they could not write their own language than that they could read the Greek; else why should they have corrupted the resonant and splendid "Aristides", an appellation truly so sufficing as well to merit the highest praise, as a "mouthful", from an American Lady Mayoress?

No, neither Monsieur nor Madame could have based their choice of a name for their bulbous product upon either hope or prescience of emulation. And yet, if one cares, as one often does, to go far afield in speculative fancy, a certain similarity of Aristide and Aristides calls for no great stretch of the imagination. Both were banished from their native lands, the Greek once because his contemporaries wearied of hearing him called "the Just" and the Frenchman many times as a consequence of combinations against him of rivals who could not match his fairness of mind and sweetness of disposition; and both were recalled, Aristides once and Aristide seven times for the single, selfsame reason that each possessed to a degree unsurpassed even by our own President of today the complete confidence of the people whom he served.

At the time to which reference has been made it was the common practice of political diagnosticians to draw comparisons of "les deux Bretons" who had become Prime Ministers, Mr. Lloyd George and M. Briand, an undertaking hazardous, to our mind, even to contemplate,—but oddly enough none to our knowledge has hit upon the apposite historical parallel plainly suggested by the intuitive naming by his parents of the one who thus far has survived the tempestuous politics which still constitute the bane of national existence of both England and France.

Aristides the First, signally honored, as already noted, by the café-keeping Briands, was one of the two most notable of the younger contemporaries of the illustrious Miltiades at the time of the Persian invasion. The other, of course, was Themistocles, whose personality was, in a restricted sense, following the battle of Marathon, hardly less vivid than that of Mr. Lloyd George in the years succeeding the armistice.

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