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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.

The two were alike in that neither could boast, like Miltiades, a lineage of gods and heroes but, the historian Grote informs us, were of middle-class origin and “politicians of the democratical stamp exercising ascendancy by and through the people, devoting their time to the discharge of public duties and manifesting those combined powers of action, comprehension and persuasive speech which accustomed the citizens to look to them as advisers as well as leaders;" but in other respects there was a marked contrast, "the points which stood most conspicuous in the one being comparatively deficient in the other".

According to Thucydides, who was of the succeeding generation and consequently better informed than later commentators, Themistocles "strikingly exhibited the might of unassisted nature" to a degree unapproached by any predecessor. "He conceived the complications of a present embarrassment, and divined the chances of a mysterious future, with equal sagacity and with equal quickness. The right expedient seemed to flash upon his mind extempore, even in the most perplexing contingencies, without the least necessity for premeditation. He was not less distinguished for daring and resource in action: when engaged on any joint affairs, his superior competence marked him out as the leader for others to follow, and no business, however foreign to his experience, ever took him by surprise, or came wholly amiss to him."

Plutarch supplements the sketch by Thucydides with a more personal estimate. Themistocles, the master biographer declares, had an unbounded passion, not merely for glory, but also for display of every kind. He was eager to vie with others in showy exhibition and not at all scrupulous in methods or procurement of means. "Besides being assiduous in attendance at the Ekklesia and the Dikastery, he knew most of the citizens by name, and was always ready with advice to them in their private affairs. Moreover he possessed all the tactics of an expert party man in conciliating political friends and in defeating political enemies. And though he was in the early part of his life sincerely bent upon the upholding and aggrandisement of his country, and was on some most critical occasions of unspeakable value to it, yet on the whole his morality was as reckless as his intelli

gence was eminent. He was grossly corrupt in the exercise of power, and employing tortuous means, sometimes indeed for ends in themselves honorable and patriotic, but sometimes also merely for personal advantage."

"Of Aristides," Grote proceeds, "we possess unfortunately no description from the hand of Thucydides. Yet his character is so simple and consistent that we may safely accept the brief but unqualified encomium of Herodotus and Plato, expanded as it is in the biography of Plutarch and Cornelius Nepos, however little the details of the latter can be trusted. Aristides was inferior to Themistocles in resource, quickness, flexibility, and power of coping with difficulties; but incomparably superior to him, as well as to other rivals and contemporaries, in integrity public as well as private; inaccessible to pecuniary temptations as well as to other seductive influences, and deserving as well as enjoying the highest measures of personal confidence. He is described as the peculiar friend of Cleisthenes, the first founder of the democracy -as pursuing a straight and a single-handed course in political life, with no solicitude for party ties, and with little care either to conciliate friends or to offend enemies-as unflinching in the exposure of corrupt practices, by whomsoever committed or upheld -as earning for himself the lofty surname of the Just, not less by his judicial decisions in the capacity of Archon, than by his equity in private arbitrations and even his candor in political dispute and as manifesting, throughout a long public life full of tempting opportunities, an uprightness without flaw and beyond all suspicion, recognized equally by his bitter contemporary the poet Timocreon and by the allies of Athens upon whom he first assessed the tribute.

"The abilities of Aristides-though apparently adequate to every occasion on which he was engaged, and only inferior when we compare him with so remarkable a man as Themistocles-were put in the shade by this incorruptible probity; which procured for him, however, along with the general esteem, no inconsiderable amount of private enmity from jobbers whom he exposed, and even some jealousy from persons who heard it proclaimed with offensive ostentation.

"Neither indiscreet friends nor artful enemies, however, could

rob him of the lasting esteem of his countrymen; which he enjoyed, though with intervals of their displeasure, to the end of his life. He was ostracized during a part of the period between the battles of Marathon and Salamis, at a time when the rivalry between him and Themistocles was so violent that both could not remain at Athens without peril; but the dangers of Athens during the invasion of Xerxes brought him back before the ten years of exile were expired. His fortune, originally very moderate, was still further diminished during the course of his life, so that he died very poor, and the State was obliged to lend aid to his children."

However one may view the seeming similarity of Mr. Lloyd George to the brilliant, ambitious and daring Themistocles,-a point upon which there will be a great diversity of opinion,-the resemblance of M. Briand to Aristides is clear and unmistakable. Like his famous prototype, Aristide the Second, as we are pleased to depict him, has never forfeited the confidence of the people which gave him his first Premiership in 1909. He combines to a marked degree the straight minded conception of a Coolidge with the "single handed course" of a Borah, "with no solicitude for party ties and with little care either to conciliate friends or to offend enemies".

After having acquired a local reputation for the florid and fervid eloquence so dear to the French, he was elected a Deputy at thirty-six, technically as a Socialist but really as a Radical, in consequence of an impassioned appeal to the troops at St. Etienne to revolt and join the workingmen of the Republic in a general strike. He was then, in the laconic phrase of Mr. Wilbur Forrest, a studious correspondent of The New York Herald Tribune, "the dangerous type of revolutionary soapbox orator that Secretary Kellogg would bar from the United States today".

But, as almost invariably happens in like instances involving honesty of mind and stirring of conscience, a sense of responsibility brought to Briand's application of his theories a modification of action so distinct that, even while he was demanding complete separation of the Church and State, his associates of the Extreme Left became mistrustful of his tendency, and when finally, having proceeded step by step toward Conservatism, he

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