tradition in an Englishman and idealism in a Frenchman will be as rare as either of those qualities are in a citizen of the United States. The French and the English temperaments will probably remain as different and as mutually unsympathetic as they ever have been; but the ways of thought of the two nations will approximate under the influence of the material consequences of modern civilisation. The psychological change which is operating in the French character seems to have taken its decided course from the artificial starting point of the beginning of a new century. The Dreyfus affair, which filled the latter years of the nineteenth century, was the last explosion of idealism in France. The extravagances of extreme partisans in that conflict, which took the form of pseudo-patriotism on the one side and of anti-militarism on the other, had each for its basis an idea. But when the storm had passed away, the nation seemed to have left behind in the old century all its idealistic heritage of the Revolution.

Although the Dreyfus affair was the chief contributory cause of the anti-clerical legislation which the French Parliament has enacted since 1900, the debates in the Chamber and the Senate on the Separation Bill bear out my belief that the age of ideas is past in France. I am probably the only person in the world who has read every word uttered in those debates. Even the industrious stenographers of the two French Chambers, who in their admirable daily work put to shame the perfunctory reports of Hansard, peruse only those fragments of oratory which they in turn take down. But the long hours of a tedious convalescence gave me an extended leisure for such light reading; and in the copious eloquence of Senators and Deputies I found little trace of one of its marked characteristics in the quite recent days when I frequented the tribunes of the Luxembourg and the Palais Bourbon.

No subject would, in the past, have given such occasion for the development of doctrine. Yet even when the Revolu

tion was appealed to by Deputies, it was most often in a discussion of the financial aspect of disestablishment-as to whether or not the Budget of Public Worship was founded by the First Consul as a perpetual indemnity for the property of the Church nationalised in 1789. There was no struggle on either side to propagate, to maintain, or to confute an idea, such as that of “a Free Church in a Free State" which was heard of in every ecclesiastical colloquy under the Monarchy of July. After the first debates the Separation Bill was often discussed in an empty and languid house. But the benches became crowded and passions were roused whenever the material interests of the electorate were in question: when, for example, the privilege was at stake of the bouilleurs de crû, the untaxed rural distillers, whose ardent products prejudice the licensed industry of the towns, at the expense of the excise. Then it was that the Chamber was filled with angry tumult and abyssus abyssum invocabat, while clericals and anti-clericals of the

vine-country banded together to encounter the alliance of reactionaries and socialists from the cities of the north. Their fury recalled that of the bygone days when Frenchmen used to engage in mortal combat for an idea; but the strife of conflicting doctrine was assuaged under the more animating influence of material interest. This changed mental attitude of the French was reflected in the literature and oratory of the general election now proceeding. The anti-clerical candidates rarely appealed to abstract principles to justify the Separation Law. But they published statistics of the cost of pensions under that Act, to show that the Budget of Public Worship still remained a burden to the tax-paying elector, though gradually to disappear owing to their efforts.

The change was even more noticeable in the speeches in the Senate. For there, until ten years ago, the aged members who had taken part in the Revolution of 1848, and who in their youth had heard the cannon. of " July," or had talked with survivors of

the Convention, delivered discourses which proclaimed France to be the land of the idea, and the example of the elders pervaded the whole assembly. In the debates of 1905 there was none of this on either side of the house. The speeches, in upper as well as in lower Chamber, violent or argumentative, might have been made in the House of Commons but for their literary form and their abundant historical allusion. Similarly, in other questions which now agitate France and which one day may lead to a revolution, the idealistic causes which were at work in 1830, in 1848 and in 1871 are never heard of now. The theory of the autonomy of the Commune is dead, though no reform has been made in that direction since the insurrection of the 18th of March. The influences, which are now active, to rouse the revolutionary elements in the nation, are the living wage, the working day of eight hours, and the regulation of strikes.

"Pourvu que Dieu me prête vie," I hope, in my forthcoming work, to examine