TWICE within the sesquicentury --- in 1781 and 1918 --- a great achievement has crowned the combined efforts of France and the United States. The memory of these triumphs is so graven in our hearts that we are wont to take 'entente' between the two countries for granted; and to think of it as spontaneous, instinctive, and complete.

Thousands of orators have proclaimed this 'entente,' only to be contradicted by events. After wars waged in common, separate treaties; after battles fought shoulder to shoulder, the isolation of peace; after protestations of loyalty to principles, inability to agree on their application. After visionaries had asserted that 'entente' was a law of nature, exceptions proved innumerable. Seeing this the nations learned to doubt. Because too much had been promised to them, they were perplexed when performance failed. Convinced of their own honesty of purpose, they were vexed by disappointing morrows. Forgetful of results, they remembered only failures. Such is the danger of propitiatory orations which, extolling alleged harmonies of destiny, pay scant heed to stern realities, to fixed national and individual traits, or to basic differences that warp the fate of nations.

I grant that the first fact, clear as day, is the intuitive friendship of our two peoples for one another. Their material, sentimental, and spiritual ties are of long standing. Both love to dwell on them. De Tocqueville in France; Parkman and Finley in America, gave voice to the past. Out of the mists there loomed the mariners of Dieppe and Saint-Malo, of La Rochelle and Rouen; the odyssey of the Griffon discovering waterways which now carry the wealth of a continent; Jacques Cartier, the explorer of the Saint Lawrence and of the Rapids; Champlain, the Recollets, the Jesuits, the trappers, and woodsmen and canoeists of the Great Lakes; Marquette, La Salle, Frontenac; their predecessors or disciples, Joliet, Tonty, Hennepin, Radisson, Groseillier, Iberville, Bienville, La Harpe, Lesueur, the Verendrys, heroes of the Mississippi, that great artery of American life.

Those Frenchmen left their mark! One may trace it in the cities: Detroit, Duluth, Saint Louis, Racine, Eau Claire, Fond du Lac; in the civilization of the West, so different from that of New England. Despite official indifference, despite the disdain of Louis XIV for 'the useless enterprises of the Sieur de la Salle' and the gibes of Voltaire about 'acres of snow,' mutual attraction ripened into the Alliance of 1778. France and the United States knew little of one another ---how little is strikingly shown by Abbé Raynal's book ---but they loved one another. Benjamin Franklin was received in Paris as the type of superman conceived by our philosophers. A mysterious outpouring of affection attracted the two countries. Their political association was not the result of self-interest alone. In its inception the Alliance was one of brotherly love. Franklin and Jefferson were welcomed in Paris as effusively and as triumphantly as Lafayette and Rochambeau in America. France lent her strength to save the new-born American liberty from certain death. Gérard, her first envoy to Philadelphia, was carried to Congress by the enthusiasm of a whole people.

Thus was implanted in thousands of hearts a priceless friendship whose memorable duration deserves more consideration than it usually receives. An acknowledged debt of gratitude for decisive military aid; the moral solidarity of two revolutions whose similarity of occurrence concealed their differences; the pride of having given two Republics to the world within a single decade; the charm of personal relations; the lure of common ideals and aspirations; the attraction of a very young people for a very old civilization --- all these feelings still endure, and this book is written to show how, in the darkest hours, this wealth of friendship, inherited from bygone generations, remained intact even when left fallow. The first year the war proved this. Perhaps even more so, the persistent desire to work together which, in ways all too little known, has survived the comradeship of arms.

This friendship is the first fact which offers itself to our analysis. To acknowledge it, is but right; but to do no more than acknowledge it, is wrong. Because this friendship, although the first, is not the only fact we have to consider, and to be honest we must view it in the light of another fact equally plain. This other fact is that our two countries, bound by such ties of sympathy, have never made a combined effort that was not followed by immediate rupture; indeed in all other circumstances the absence of conflict can only be explained by the lack of contact. May I add that the short periods of political coöperation --- less than ten years in all, out of one hundred and forty --were the result not of sentiment, but of interest; and that as soon as interest lapsed, sentiment did not suffice to maintain coöperation.

When we became allies in 1778, it was the last thing one might have expected. To New England colonists, France was the enemy. Against France, Benjamin Franklin had drafted his plan of union in 1754. Against France, which hemmed in the colonies from the Saint Lawrence to the mouths of the Mississippi, George Washington had won his spurs. France was not only, as Boston averred, 'the ally of savages.' In Europe she was the champion of the Papacy, of monarchy, of war, of libertinism, and of all that was hateful to the descendants of the Pilgrims. When Vergennes and Franklin undertook to negotiate, public satisfaction was but a meagre cloak for the contrast of traditions and temperament. On the one side, Catholics and Royalists; on the other, Protestants and Democrats. They managed to sign a treaty which left the world agape, but never could agree upon their war aims: Louisiana, Canada, Newfoundland were left out of the picture, hot-beds of impending conflict.

Five years passed, and the victorious end of the war marked the end of political agreement. Unknown to Vergennes, John Jay in 1782 negotiated a separate peace --- just as, one hundred and thirty-nine years later, the United States was to sign the separate peace of 1921 with Germany. The French chargé d'affaires, Barbé-Marbois, stressed the point: 'A great Power makes no complaint. But it resents insult, and never forgets.' For ten years the cleavage grew: it was impossible to conclude even a treaty of commerce; in 1787 the abrogation of the Alliance, 'a legacy of the past,' as Hamilton coldly declared; in 1790, economic difficulties; in 1793, the proclamation of neutrality; in.1794, the treaty with England. I am well aware that it would have been folly for the United States to have again lent its soil to battle, and that abstention was the part of political wisdom. Nevertheless, George Washington's decision placed Franco-American relations beyond the pale of sentimental affinity and democratic analogy. At the very time when the French Republic was the European counterpart of the American Commonwealth, they came to the parting of the ways.

Already, preconceived ideas were vanishing before the onslaught of facts. Contact was not entirely lost. Factions continued to lend each other mutual support, but of real understanding there was none. The good people of Philadelphia were still thinking in terms of Montesquieu, when the drums of Santerre were beating on the Place de la Concorde at the foot of the guillotine. Men wept here when speaking of Franklin, and there at mention of Lafayette's name. But John Quincy Adams reviled our 'thirty millions of atheists poisoned by philosophy.' Alexander Hamilton rent the 'great beast' to pieces. It was said that 'neither Nero nor Caligula had attained to the horror of the French Revolution.' Noah Webster described France as gone from papist superstition to rationalist superstition and rotten with demoniac mysticism. Jefferson himself on his return to America felt that he was compromised and weakened by Genet, the dangerous meddler who --- like Bernstorff in 1917 ---sought to influence American policy by party intrigue. The loose life of immigrants, such as Talleyrand, shocked the Puritan conscience. If Jay's treaty with England roused the ire of the American people, it was less out of love for France than out of hatred for the old country.

From 1794 to 1799, amid the clamour of the press, neutrality gave way to conflict. Customs on tobacco and cod-liver oil, questions of prizes and contraband, proved more potent than philosophical effusions. The Directorate refused to receive the American Minister, Charles Pinckney. When three other envoys arrived, Talleyrand satisfied his former grudges and his love of money by instigating through his agents, Hottinguer, Bellamy, and Hauteval, the unsavoury intrigue against them known as the 'X.Y.Z. affair' which crystallized public opinion in America against France. At this time Adet, our Minister in Washington, abandoned all hope of the friendship on which his predecessors had relied: 'Mr. Jefferson,' he wrote, 'is an American and as such cannot be a sincere friend of ours, for Americans are the born enemies of all Europeans.' In 1798, war virtually existed. President John Adams called Washington to command the army. Vessels were armed by private subscription. Where were the pledges of 1778?

If calm returned under the Consulate, it was the work of events, not of men. The death of Washington gave Bonaparte, as First Consul, an opportunity for a theatrical manifestation. But his policy, inspired by the extreme views of our representatives in America, Moustier, Genet, Fauchet, tended to nothing less than the creation of a great French empire in the Mississippi Valley and led to the most perilous of crises; for already America was determined to be mistress of her own outlets. Jefferson wrote to Robert Livingston: 'We have ever looked to her [France] as our natural friend .... There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market .... The day that France takes possession of New Orleans, . . . we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.' The Treaty of San Ildefonso, by which Spain ceded her Mississippi possessions to France, brought us within measurable distance of war; but the reverse of San Domingo and the peril in which he stood on the Continent obliged Bonaparte to forego his American ambitions and strengthen his European front. He sold Louisiana to the United States, and the course of history was changed. The vendor thus described the transaction: 'I have given England a rival, who sooner or later will abase her pride.'

Then after the War of 1812 against England --- an economic conflict, as devoid of pro-French sentiment as the Louisiana sale of pro-American feeling --- a dumb and empty century began, a century during which we pledged our friendship time and again, with never a deed to prove it; a century during which our traditional friendship was preserved in many noble hearts; but a century during which French civilization was without the faintest influence on the prodigious fermentation of American life, during which we never met without the risk of conflict. So it was with French intervention in Spain under the Restoration; and with French intervention in Mexico under Napoleon III. The abortion of the Second Republic, the advent of the third Bonaparte, alarmed the American people. Prussia, having subscribed liberally to Northern loans during the Civil War, became an object of sympathy. In Berlin, the Minister of the United States, Bancroft, was on terms of intimacy with Bismarck, and when, in 1871, the unity of Germany was proclaimed at Versailles on the ruins of dismembered France, President Grant hailed the new nation in an enthusiastic message to the Congress.

Was Franco-American friendship dead? No! Forty-three years later, France, again invaded, found that friendship as ardent as ever. But, as in 1914, it was of no political worth. Neither the Government nor the people took any real interest in France. Besides, the prodigious prosperity of Germany under the Hohenzollerns had made a deep impression. German science was supreme in the Universities and colleges. In 1908, Professor Münsterberg thought himself influential enough to challenge the writer's access to the Chair of French at Harvard University, and President Eliot's resistance surprised the German more than it angered him. France still had devoted friends, but they were on the defensive. James H. Hyde endowed classes to make France known, so it must be she was ignored. Barrett Wendell wrote books to defend her, so it must be she was attacked.

Much more could be said, but the meaning is clear. It is certain that, however great the potentiality of friendship between France and the United States, the difficulty of collaboration is equally great. Whosoever says to the contrary misleads our people, and paves the way through bitter disappointment to even worse misunderstanding. Let us paint the things as they are: that is our first duty. But is it enough to worship at the shrine of truth? No! Not if by explanation, things may be changed. Not if, by analyzing the origin and growth of nations, the causes of disease affecting their relations may be made clear --- and perchance even a remedy found.

By the light of facts, old as well as new, public as well as private, this is the work to which I have set my hand. I am well aware that both Frenchmen and Americans are taught --- and have been taught for a hundred and fifty years --- that they were born to understand one another, and I see that very often they do not. I am well aware they are taught that their 'entente' is in the very nature of things, and I see that the fruits thereof are scant and puny. Let us reverse this policy, and look before we talk.

If, from birth to maturity, we see conditions in France and the United States not only dissimilar, but opposite; if it appears that their past makes understanding not easy, but difficult; if, geographically, historically, politically, nationally, socially, intellectually, contrasts are more frequent than affinities --- then, less concerned about mistakes, we shall be better able to devise a constructive policy along new and different lines.

'Entente,' people say, is natural. That, I say, is untrue; and, if untrue, it is better to know it than to pillow our sloth upon a belief contradicted by facts. It fell to my lot to represent my country in the second of the two great Franco-American achievements. More than any, I suffered from the long train of disagreement echoing down from 1796. That is why, to the illusion of haphazard collaboration and ready-made success, I oppose the necessity for constructive effort and tenacity of purpose. Franco-American friendship? None can be more fruitful if properly directed; none more barren if left to itself. This friendship must be ordered or it will be wasted. It must be organized or it will cease to be. That is the problem of to-morrow.

THE national formation of a people is governed by its distinctive characteristics. Physical composition, moral trend, rhythm of growth, volume of production, all mould a nation. In these things the world offers no analogy to the United States. But if antithesis be sought, France provides it.

A thousand years and more after the material and moral birth of our country, America was founded by an arrival of immigrants. The French come of hereditary homes. The founders of New England tore themselves from theirs. In a spirit of moral revolt or commercial adventure they decided to create a new home for themselves. They landed on inhospitable soil. In the wake of three explorations, Spanish, French, and English, which searching for ancient Asia had placed the door of America ajar, they pushed on ---forced westward by unrelenting fate --- the Sons of Movement, its very incarnation! Beyond the wooded shores, virgin forests and boundless plains --- whose appeal Daniel Webster was to voice --- stretched before them. The West called them. The West was to take them for its own, though they tarried awhile in the east, a mere halt in an eternal exodus.

As water glides over marble, the human mass moved on. Instead of secular abiding, which within their narrow limits has crystallized the peculiar traits of our French provinces, there was continual change. Men of the Carolinas and Georgia moved onward to Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas; from Virginia and Kentucky they went towards Idaho, Illinois, and Missouri; from Boston and New York towards Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Minnesota. Every decade, for more than a century, they opened up territories the size of Switzerland, England, Italy, France. In 1787, thirteen States; in 1926, thirty-five more, the youngest of which is not twenty years old; whereas in France there is not a province whose historic origin does not hark back to Gallo-Roman times. In France villages which, unchanged, have seen twenty-five generations handing down the torch; a nation built up by the slow agglomeration of sedentary cells, close-huddled together. Across the ocean, the Covered Wagon trekking West; a land unretentive of man which but witnessed his passing. In place of an instinct to root, a will to uproot.

In the nineteenth century, these nomads, passed through three successive phases of development, no equivalent for which can be found in France. First the squatter, whose sole wealth was his courage, who hewed down forests, tilled the virgin soil, sold his holding, and moved on. Then the farmer of some substance, who built and planted and reaped till the day came when, grown rich, he sought something better. Finally the capitalist who organized, exploited, and formed trusts when the law allowed. In vain one might seek the peasants of Millet's 'Angelus,' their feet rooted to the soil. The American farmer was migratory, and the enormous development of means of communication throughout the three million square miles which lay before him only increased his mobility. His problem was not to win a limited harvest from the measured earth, but to find richer loam for increased production to meet ever-recurring demands. The idea was not, as in France, to endure; but to progress.

Houses rising from the ground were lived in before finished, sold before lived in. Cities? Ah, in vain one might seek the slow stratification of our French towns, growing on their old foundations, the superimposed layers of whose architecture reveal the variety of successive ages which contributed to their construction. The Western cities of America were mushroom growths of necessity; when necessity ceased, they disappeared. First, a railway station, then a bank, a tramway, and a store; their birth dictated by a man or by the location of a railroad. The rails, which merely served to link our French towns, actually created cities in America. The initial population renewed itself within a few months. Men changed as rapidly as the tools; changed their calling as readily as their residence. Space attracted them; its call never went unheeded. There was no near perspective to stabilize; only a distant perspective to mobilize.

This new life created a new race. Two initial characteristics of which France knows nothing: extreme insecurity of conditions, and extreme equality of opportunity. A fair chance is the essence of this life, and may the best man win. Men who make good under these conditions have nothing in common with street-bred villagers who live and die in the shadow of belfries ten centuries older than themselves. Ignorant of localization, they are ignorant of specialization; that dominant characteristic of France, as Henry James saw it. The son does not wait, as with us, for the death of his father to carry on his work in the same place. Every one makes his own way in life, and then proceeds to change it. Every day the book of life records a new picture. At a time when France produced M. Guizot and M. Royer Collard, what was the American type? Andrew Jackson, lawyer, judge, planter, party leader, merchant, general, Congressman, President; neither cultivated nor classified; a Jack of all trades and all times.

A new race as compared to Europe, but also as compared to New England. The coast in the eighteenth century was but the frontier of Europe. The Middle West and the West were to be a new world. Colonial families, which from Mayflower days had been anchored to the Atlantic, looked with suspicion on the colossus growing up at their back door. Josiah Quincy waxed indignant at 'the preponderance of these Westerners in councils to which they ought never to have been admitted.' What gibes were hurled against 'the savages of Missouri' and the 'mixed population of the Mississippi.' If the East felt itself so utterly different from the coming race, what shall be said of Europe? If Boston could not understand Detroit, shall Paris understand Denver?

Yet the West --- as Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and F. J. Turner were to make clear---fashioned America. Listen to Emerson: 'Happily for us, since steam has made a mere pond of the ocean, our vigorous Rocky West is introducing a new continental spirit into our nation. Thus shall we attain to an American genius.' Just as the Mediterranean fashioned Greece, so the West fashioned America. From the immense reservoir of 200,000,000 acres formed by the Ordinance of 1787, there issued a national type as different from the Puritans of New England as from the Cavaliers of Virginia, which emancipated itself from European influences as it moved westward. It was the West that made the United States democratic by its insistence on universal suffrage. It was the West that furnished the melting-pot for immigration. When the West reached maturity, the United States became a great Power.

This people marching towards the promised land did not look backward, as ours, to seek whys and wherefores; but forward to discover hopes. 'Who went farthest? I would go farther.' To this cry of Walt Whitman, Longfellow answered, 'Let the dead past bury its dead.' And all Emerson's philosophy: 'The respect for the doings of our ancestors is a false sentiment. Neither Greece, nor Rome; nor the three treatises of Aristotle, nor the three Kings of Cologne, nor the college of the Sorbonne, nor the Edinburgh Review is to command, any longer.' When nearer to us, Henry van Dyke sang the glories of Europe, it was not without this restriction: 'But the past counts too much for her.'

In this land of freedom which it does not fill,(1) the American-people has for a century lived a life that has nothing in common with our life. When, crystallized by continuity of abode and the great age of its civilization, the French nation had taken to heart the lessons of the Renaissance, of the Grand Siècle and of the Revolution; the American people, like Siegfried, heard only the murmur of the forest. In the silence of nature, deaf to philosophical abstractions, it caught only familiar sounds, the paddle of the canoeist, the axe of the woodsman, the rifle of the hunter. Admire or contemn, be thrilled or angered by this rough, imperfect, unfinished but formidable poetry of human effort conquering a new world: you cannot escape its meaning. Between the two communities, French and American, there is a chasm wider than the Atlantic: the difference between stability and motion.

These two opposite traits, dominating the lives of individuals, are reflected with all their consequences in the lives of our two peoples. From the dawn of her history, France has felt herself confined to a limited territory within boundaries conceived by all and therefore considered natural, a territory she has spent centuries in acquiring and safeguarding. Situated at a cross-roads where all sought to pass, the Frenchman has held his land only by defending it, and this gave birth to the two conceptions nearest to his heart, the conception of frontiers and the conception of invasion.

On the threshold of his development came successive hordes of barbarians, Huns, Vandals, Visigoths, Arabs, Norsemen. Then from the end of the Middle Ages on, the constant struggle against two convergent dangers from which there was no respite: the English danger and the German danger: the constant care of the Valois as of the Capetians, of the Bourbons as of the Valois, of Clemenceau as of Richelieu. An old problem, this of Security. In the course of centuries the compelling need of protection has buttressed the most varied régimes: Feudalism, Monarchy, Revolution, Empire, Republic. The German who standing on Montmartre in 1814 exclaimed, 'Nine centuries ago our Emperor Otho planted his eagles on these slopes,' admirably expressed the defensive destiny of France. A peasant race wrought into an army to guard a soil which it could hold only by making it impregnable.

Nothing of the kind in the United States. Since their independence, the Colonies have known but one short invasion in 1812, and no foreign peril. From the North, a few months of war, followed by perpetual peace. From the South, at times vexation, never anxiety. East and West, the ocean. From 1776 to 1917 only three foreign wars. In 1812, against England, in 1845, against Mexico, in 1898, against Spain. Wars, none of which compare to the wars France, five times invaded in the same period, has fought within her own borders. The very formation of the continental domain of the United States --- from 1787 to 1912, when the last of the forty-eight States was admitted --- proceeded, except in 1845, either by bloodless occupation, by negotiation, or by purchase. In a century and a half the United States has not had ten years of foreign war. France has been at war for three fourths of her history of twenty centuries.

So the American frontier has nothing in common with the French frontier. The word is the same in the two languages, but does not express the same idea. The Frenchman's frontier is a fortified line on which he fights and dies, a line changed by wars and treaties. The Frenchman's frontier is the soldier. The American's frontier was not a line, but a zone; a zone displaced not by war, but by labour. It was the lengthening shadow civilization cast upon the land. The American's frontier was not the soldier, but the pioneer. The part English and Germans played in the life of France, was played here by Nature. Nature had to be conquered, not armed foes. The United States is divided from its neighbours by geographical lines dotted with custom-houses. It has no Vauban.

A wide difference results in the fundamental national tenets. Wars that count in the minds of Frenchmen are foreign wars. Americans think only of their civil wars. To us the word 'war' conjures up, in an outpouring of hate, of sorrow and of hope centering around a foreign foe, all the glory and the glamour of our past: the Hundred Years' War, the Thirty Years' War, the Seven Years' War, the wars of the Revolution, of the Empire, of the Republic. Americans think of the War of Independence and of the Civil War. Listen to this elderly Southern dame and her memories of war: she tells of Lee, not of Pershing. In the United States the idea of foreign danger is neither spontaneous nor familiar. To die for one's country is by no means axiomatic. The defense of territorial integrity, the ruling instinct of a Frenchman, is but a meaningless phrase to an American.

For a hundred years the same was true of the idea of nationality. The French, whose intestine controversies have run the gamut of internecine strife, enshrine the idea of nationality and hold it aloof from their civil dissensions. Although in the nineteenth century one fourth of the States of the Union were to raise the banner of Secession, there existed in France as early as the Middle Ages that will to live together which furnished Renan with his definition of a nation. Before Joan of Arc, we had the Grand Ferré, and farther back one traces the same spirit in the levies of Bouvines, in the popular uprising to repel the German invasion of 1124, even in the attempts at coalition which, under the Carolingians and the Merovingians, followed the parcelling of the land.

National spirit --- a community instinct above all else which creates, in the service of the country, a duty above all duties, an instinct bred by invasion and frontiers --- is the very soul of France. Even in feudal days, dealings with abroad discredited the Connétable de Bourbon, as later they discredited Condé and the émigrés, allies of the Spaniards or allies of Brunswick. In 1526, the jurists assembled at Cognac during the captivity of Francis I declared that the King had no power to alienate by treaty a single foot of French soil, thus anticipating, curiously enough, by three and a half centuries the Declaration of Bordeaux, protesting against the cession of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871. Thus Frenchmen for hundreds of years have placed national unity above all internal or foreign considerations, or, more simply, have not looked upon it as open to discussion. But at all times and for many and various reasons, national unity has been a matter of discussion in the United States. It took the victory of 1918 to bring surcease.

The various phases of American history, birth, growth, maturity, all bear witness to this. National unity has been an artificial and quasi-secondary thing to Americans. Frenchmen have sacrificed both liberty and equality to it. When they followed Napoleon to the ends of Europe, when republicans of the Convention served the dictator of Brumaire, they did so only to preserve the 'conquests of the Revolution,' meaning national conquests and natural frontiers. Americans, on the contrary, were long reluctant to make the rights of individuals and of local communities subservient to national unity. In the elaboration of their Constitution, as in its application, they experienced great difficulty in choosing between the two. Let us put it in this way: whereas the French look upon the nation as basic, and upon civil liberty as a conquest of man; the United States look upon their individual liberties as a cause, upon their national unity as an effect. Liberty is a constant, nationality a variable.

The contrast is so important and usually so little understood, that I may be pardoned for insisting upon it. When the insurrection of 1773 began to simmer, was the revolutionary movement national? Not if one may judge by what Franklin and Marshall said a few years earlier: 'I never,' said the former, in 1760, 'heard anybody, drunk or sober, express the faintest desire for separation'; and three years later the latter recorded the general attachment to the motherland. Likewise in 1775, Alexander Hamilton deplored 'the unfortunate quarrel' and hoped for 'a prompt reconciliation,' saying, 'I am a strong believer in a limited monarchy and a sincere well-wisher of the present Royal Family.' When war broke out, two thirds of the Colonies were loyalists or lukewarm. Even after Saratoga, many hesitated. The First Congress had no real power to act for the Nation. Once jealous of British rules the Colonies remained jealous of one another.

When it became necessary to organize in order to endure, those who favoured a strong central government, Washington, Hamilton, Schuyler, Greene, were in a hopeless minority. The majority remained hostile. Had the Constitution been submitted to a referendum, it would have been rejected. The Constitutional Convention which adopted it, under financial and foreign pressure, wrote into it the maximum of States rights and the minimum of federal power. Before they could obtain its ratification, Hamilton, Madison, and their friends had to fight hard in their own assemblies. 'The Constitution,' said John Quincy Adams, 'has been extorted from the grinding necessity of a reluctant nation.' In 1786, Massachusetts rose in arms against taxation. In 1788, it demanded amendments. At a time when the French Republic was proclaiming itself 'one and indivisible,' the American republic was upholding, as its most priceless possession, the rights of the States against federal unity.

This feeling was so strong that, to avoid giving offense, it was necessary to invent an artificial capital amidst the marshes of the Potomac. Pinckney's phrase, 'Let us forge no new chains,' expressed the general feeling. Thousands of Americans looked upon their young government very much as they had looked upon the rusty régime of George III. Jay said: 'I am uneasy and apprehensive, more so than during the war.' Washington, importuned by the thousand exigencies of unswerving localism, asked: 'Yes or No, are we a Nation?' At a time when French sans-culottes were hastening to the frontier with cries of 'Vive la Nation,' American clergymen were invited to change the form of common prayer and instead of 'God save Our Country,' which shocked the traditions of towns and counties, to say, 'God Save the United States.'

What followed is history, but the beginnings throw light upon the tragedy. In 1798, the Resolutions of Virginia, although the work of two of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, enunciated the principles which were to give rise to secession. The North in turn took its stand against union in connection with the proposed acquisition of Louisiana. In 1803, Massachusetts asserted that the entry of Louisiana into the federation would give its members the right to withdraw, and four years later, in 1807, the people of Boston were for separation rather than to prepare, by the purchase of Louisiana, 'the tyranny of the South.' In 1812, Congress declared war on England, without, however, voting the necessary credits; but half the Northern States refused their troops or did not permit them to fight outside their own borders: 'It is like a corpse tied to a living body,' complained Jefferson. Ten days after the British entered Washington, the troops of the Massachusetts militia were withdrawn from the federal service. The English general reported: 'Two-thirds of our Canadian army are eating beef supplied by American contractors.' Later, when the war had to be paid for, the North said, 'The South and West made the war --- Mr. Madison's War --- let them pay for it.' And the purse-strings were pulled tight.

Then came the beginning of the great crisis which for fifty years was to place American unity in jeopardy. No Frenchman of those days could have understood or even conceived the historic dialogue between Jackson and Calhoun which foreshadowed the drama of Civil War.

'I drink,' said the former, 'to our federal union [meaning national union]. It must be preserved.'

And the latter replied:

'The Union --- next to our liberty the most dear.'

In France, during these stormy days, the Restoration and the Monarchy of July were obliged, despite their origin, to give heed to the popular clamour against the Treaty of 1815, and to adopt the policy of their political opponents for the reconstitution of national unity. In France, revolution followed revolution. The cleavage between the parties widened, but who dreamed of the partition of France? It was just the opposite in the United States. Whether anent the tariff under Jackson, or anent slavery under Buchanan, one heard of nothing but the sundering of the Union. The South looked upon secession as a right. In the North, many thought likewise. Winfield Scott pleaded that the sisters be allowed to part in peace. Horace Greeley also. For years severance seemed more likely than the maintenance of the Union.

And yet the Union was to survive, but thanks to whom and at what price? Thanks to one of, those unique men who rise to great emergencies and of which there are but few in a century. At the price of the most awful of civil wars. Amid the chaos of contradictory compromises accumulated since 1820, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed imprescriptible union, as we French understand it. 'Union comes before the Constitution: Union comes before the States themselves. My paramount object is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it. If I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do it.' A marvellous definition of national opportunism, whereby kings and people made France what it is, whereby the United States was to be saved. Marvellous indeed --but how repugnant to the public spirit of the times. It was no sooner uttered than the cannon roared its reply.

And yet the North still hesitated, stirred though it was by the imperious genius whose vision outstripped his time. Desertions, conscription riots, pacifist manifestations, invectives of Vallandigham, 'Your trophies are but tombs. Make Peace!'; copperhead intrigues; McClellan arrayed against Lincoln; hosts of Democrats demanding immediate negotiations; the heroic resistance of the South, serving a lost cause with the most ardent faith. Up to the very end, thousands upon thousands on both sides asked themselves, in their heart of hearts, whether Liberty was not more precious than Union. An issue so utterly incomprehensible to the Frenchman of 1860 that he took no interest in a cause, the inception, meaning, and aim of which passed his understanding.

The result, a miracle of human genius, surprised the most ardent. Whitman's burning lines to pacified America betrayed astonishment: 'Thou a world, with thy vast geography, manifold, different and far flung, gathered by thee into Union with a common tongue, a common destiny, indivisible for all time.' Indivisible? That was the whole issue. Lincoln solved it against the coalition of economic interests and constitutional scruples. But it was to reappear under another guise, no less foreign to our French life, no less difficult for us to understand: Immigration.

No one claims unity of race for France. There is no such thing as unity of race. At the font of ours, one finds Iberian, Ligurian, Celtic, Roman, German, Arab, and Norse strains. But I do say that in fifteen hundred years those varied strains have been welded into tempered mettle, unalloyed during all those fifteen centuries by any great foreign influx. In the nineteenth century, the population of France doubled by natural increase, but in this increase immigration played no part worth mentioning. In the United States the four million colonists of the end of the eighteenth century have grown into 117 millions --by immigration. While France grew from 1 to 2, the United States passed from 1 to 5; it was peopled, not from within, but from without, in the first place by Western and Northern Europe, later by Eastern and Southern Europe. A fact far-reaching in importance; unfathomed in its consequences.

Thus was manufactured a modem nation of a unique character. Of 117,000,000 Americans, less than 59 per cent were born in the United States of native-born parents. The remaining 41 per cent --nearly half the nation --- is made up of negroes who cannot be assimilated (9.7 per cent), or of whites incompletely assimilated of whom some are foreign-born (18.4 per cent), some born of two foreign-born parents (13.2 per cent), and some of parents only one of whom is native-born (5.8 per cent). Every American village is a melting-pot in miniature. In opposition to our French village whose families have been akin for centuries, we have here immigrants from all parts, many recently arrived. Some do not even speak English. Others have learned, God knows how. Many bear the stigma of the brutal transplantation to which they were subjected in their youth and of ensuing misfortune. Attracted, especially in the cities, to others of their own race, they offer more or less resistance to that assimilation which material interest, railroads, newspapers, schools, churches, and welfare-workers press upon them. How many years must pass before their reactions become exclusively and spontaneously American!

Another problem, which France has never even suspected: the problem of a hyphenated citizenship and a foreign vote. For these millions of naturalized citizens vote, and their numbers often constitute the majority. What if a conflict arises between their American interests and their hereditary instincts? The Frenchman going to vote may ask what the Royalists will do? what the Republicans will do? what the Socialists? or the Catholics? At no time in history has he had to ask himself, 'How will Frenchmen of German origin vote? or how Frenchmen of Irish origin?' Yet this question crops up in the United States at every national election. To the causes of internal division which exist here as elsewhere, are added foreign causes of division which must be taken into account. An American citizen is constantly subjected to two allegiances: one State, the other Federal. In addition there are days when he may hear within his heart two countries calling: the new one and the old.

The average Frenchman cannot easily conceive the gravity of this dualism. But the American Government and those upon whom it weighs must at all times take it into account. When he cast his vote for war in 1917, Warren G. Harding said: 'I reached a stage where I doubted if we had that unanimity of sentiment which is necessary to the preservation of this free government,' and French readers wondered what he meant. But his colleagues of the Senate understood. All knew the necessity of forecasting the varying reactions of a heterogeneous people. All knew that the Federal Government had never been able to rely on national waves of enthusiasm such as caused France to rise as one man in 1798, in 1815, in 1914, to rely on a living force of national tradition, such as in France has survived all changes of régime: Louis-Philippe bringing back from Saint Helena the ashes of Napoleon; Republicans invoking the treaties of Louis XIV; the Sons of Bretons who fought at Crécy and Agincourt looking upon battles, which arrayed their sires against the King of France, as national disasters.

In short, to build up and maintain its national unity, the United States has had to accomplish tasks from which France has been spared. Under pressure of two circumstances: the interpretation of the Constitution and the composition of the Nation, it has been obliged to solve problems our country has never had to face. After its institutions had been defined, the atavistic instinct of part of its people led the American Commonwealth to treat as a secondary and amendable thing that which in France we hold to be primary and intangible. Whether it be Andrew Jackson at odds with the champions of nullification; Lincoln overcoming secession; McKinley or Wilson, on the eve of two wars, gauging the strength of a national union; the Federal Government could never disregard the possibility of a cleavage which France has never had to fear. Was the danger exaggerated? Perhaps, for the war of 1917 was a splendid test of national unity. But up to the World War, the issue was an open one. It can be summed up in a word often heard in the American Congress: Americanism. Who in France ever preached Francism!

So the lives of the two nations present contrasts galore. Another must be mentioned, a matter not of substance but of size. Between the twenty centuries of France's growth within her limited compass, and the colossal and forced development of the United States, no common measure exists. Contemporary France provides the spectacle of a civilization slowly evolved on a territory little more than two hundred thousand square miles in extent; the United States that of a civilization improvised on a continent as big as Europe. France presents a finished picture; the United States one that is only blocked in. Despite the twenty-fold increase of its population, the density of the United States is only on an average thirty-four inhabitants to the square mile against nearly two hundred in France, and in some of the States it is only from one to five. This expresses the contrast between a stabilized nation living on a land long since partitioned and an ever-changing nation occupying open spaces. In discussing them it is necessary to retain a sense of proportion.

This new difficulty, which proceeds from the whole, becomes plainer when examined in detail. In 1790, the United States had six towns of more than 8000 inhabitants, one of which had 83,000. In 1925, it had seventy-one cities of more than 100,000, of which nineteen had more than 250,000, ten more than 500,000, and five more than 1,000,000 inhabitants. In France, Paris alone had more than 1,000,000, and only fourteen cities exceeded 100,000 inhabitants. Production increased on the same scale. Western land, brought under cultivation from 1870 to 1880, exceeded the area of France. From 1890 to 1900 it exceeded that of France, England, and Germany together. Coal output passed from 15,000,000 tons in 1871 to 429,000,000 tons in 1907, when American production of iron and steel for the first time exceeded the combined production of France, England, and Germany. The United States has 6,500,000 farms worth $41,000,000,000 and yielding $8,500,000,000 a year; 246,000 miles of railways carrying a billion passengers and 2,500,000,000 tons of freight every year. Eighteen million houses shelter 21,000,000 families of which 9,000,000 own their own dwellings. There are 12,000,000 depositors whose bank deposits amount to $7,500,000,000; 271,000 public schools with 22,000,000 pupils; 670 universities with 500,000 students; 3000 public libraries with 75,000,000 books. A total wealth of $225,000,000,000.

Contemplation of these figures has led Europe and France to picture to themselves the United States as a country of unlimited material prosperity, of railways, of ports, of factories, of skyscrapers, of tramways, of automobiles, of elevators, and of telephones; a country of high wages where dollars grow on trees; Eldorado of the daring and hope of the disinherited. Thus, amid the shrieking of sirens and the whistles of locomotives, is America as the majority of Frenchmen see her. And seeing her thus is enough to prevent their judging her accurately. First from lack of proportion, as I have said, but also by reason of the incompleteness of this simplified vision. For behind the American setting, there is the American soul. Behind the difference in size are essential differences.

I have attempted to show these differences on a national plane. Birth, growth, foreign relations, ideals of collective life, composition and proportion; everywhere we find contrasts where preconceived ideas announced affinities. Here is a first obstacle, which must be broken down or overcome if we are to work together. As nations, France and the United States are not of the same feather.

DIFFERENT national formations? Yes, will doubtless be conceded. But can the identity of institutions be denied? France and the United States are two Republics. The two are founded on universal suffrage and the sovereignty of the people. They govern themselves according to the same principles. The affinities of their laws enable them in all things to understand one another without effort .... If repetition creates Truth, as Machiavelli says it creates Right, here assuredly is a truth of the staunchest. No theme has been more everlastingly laboured. Once again, let us look at the facts.

An initial difference between the two democracies is only too plain: one has possessed from the beginning rights which the other won but tardily and by violence. The history of France is not only one long battle for security. It is also one long battle for civil and political liberty. In the beginning was the god of central power. From that central power the people wrested what rights they have. The American of 1787 found in his cradle rights which the Frenchman of 1789 had to wrench from the Bastilles of privilege. Hector Saint-John de Crèvecœur, a French colonist in New England, congratulated himself in the eighteenth century that no despotic power disputed the crops with their lawful owner. France, on the contrary, had seen the land and its lordship maintained by hereditary right in the hands of a small number of families which controlled all real property and political power. The speeches of Philippe Pot, which date back to 1483, are said to contain the germ of all our theories on the sovereignty of the people. Before that sovereignty became a fact, what bloodshed!

In other terms, the Americans in their new land made a saving of some eighteen centuries. A saving of effort, but of experience also, that was not vouchsafed to France. When they landed from the Mayflower, the Pilgrims brought with them the jury, the habeas corpus, and many other liberties which to their French contemporaries were but dim and distant aspirations, if indeed they discerned them at all. Americans determined that their political life should be organized on the basis of a contract between equals, which would have found scant favour with Louis XIV. When their sons declared their independence of the mother country, it was they who, in State and Federal Constitutions, fixed the powers of the central government in place of praying for their rights. They never knew that close French blood-tie of Revolution and Liberty. Having neither insults to avenge nor bonds to sever, they created their own laws, tracing the domain of the executive within their own domain. It was the individual who set up the government, not the government which recognized the individual. The movement of public life instead of proceeding, as in France, from the centre to the periphery, went from the periphery to the centre. The Frenchman was obliged to conquer. The American had only to preserve. The distinction created contrary political habits.

Sovereign, not by right of conquest, but by right of birth, the American has more completely secured his rights than the Frenchman, and this also proceeds from the origin of those rights. Our people of France, obliged to wrest their liberties by force from kings and nobles, easily persuaded themselves that once kings and nobles swept away, their liberties were free from further risk:

'Le Peuple souverain s'avance!
Tyrans, descendez au cercueil!'

The ghost of tyranny thus laid by Rouget de Lisle's hymn, the victors went home rejoicing that they had achieved their hearts' desire, went home believing the problem solved. They gave no thought to the other danger. They had yet to learn from Edmund Burke that ‘in a democracy the majority of citizens can exercise the most unbearable oppression on the minority, worse even than the tyranny of a single master.' They failed to see that, having merged the sovereign and the subject in the person of the citizen, they had set up a myriad-headed power in the place of authority with a single head. They failed to see that henceforth they were to be ground by the tyranny of numbers instead of as before by the tyranny of a monarch. And for a whole century they refrained from even the most elementary precautions against this new tyranny.

Against it, from the very outset, Americans, less emotional and more practical, took the most elaborate precautions. The optimism of Rousseau and the doctrine of natural goodness were alike repugnant to them, so they fortified individual right against the power of numbers with a perfection of mistrust worthy of Hobbes. They carried it to the point of paralyzing the Executive, to the point of denying to the central Government the power to prevent abuses of power. We have seen Americans preferring liberty to nationality. We shall see them preferring liberty to authority, goading Lincoln to exclaim, 'Must there be some element of weakness in the nature of all republics? Must the Government of necessity be too strong to care for the liberties of individuals, or too weak to maintain itself?' Having to choose, France sacrificed the individual. The United States has refused to.

To protect the person, it has multiplied legal provisions unknown to French law. Not only has it adjusted the balance so nicely as to hamper the efficiency of all three powers --- the executive, the legislative, and the judicial; but it has promulgated a special and privileged law, called the Constitution, to secure the rights of the individual against encroachment by legislatures, whether State or Federal. In France all laws are equal in power and absolute in effect. As soon as a bill has been passed by the two Chambers, it becomes law; and one law is as good as another. Its sovereignty is absolute if enacted in due form. Law, because the law, has absolute power, without restriction or reservation, over individuals: it can strip them of their wealth; deprive them of their rights; aye, even forfeit their lives. In America, on the contrary, legislative power stops on the threshold of civil liberty; it breaks against the rampart of the Constitution, raised in the beginning. In opposition to our French laws, American laws are neither equal in power, nor absolute in effect. The Constitution is supreme.

Thus legislative enactment --- that is, the will of the majority --- constantly gives rise to questions of competence and to constitutional issues of which we know nothing. American legislatures pass what laws they please, but if the rights of the humblest citizen are infringed thereby, he can appeal to the district or circuit courts, to the federal courts of appeal, to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court thus differs entirely from what too many Frenchmen --- who want one --- believe it to be: a unique and self-governing body, the absolute master of all laws. The Supreme Court is at once the court of last resort in all cases of Federal law, and the highest degree of constitutional jurisdiction, made necessary by the multiplicity and inequality of the laws. The Supreme Court is not the supreme lawmaker; it merely applies the law in the light of the supremacy of the Constitution. The Supreme Court is only the hierarchical consequence of the Constitution, coexisting with other laws; the powers of the legislatures being, according to Marshall, carefully defined and limited:. the 'Constitution is written so that those limits may neither be confused nor forgotten.' We have nothing of the kind in France.

Hence, a second and important difference. France is a democracy which protects the individual only against personal power. The United States is a democracy which also protects the individual against the power of numbers, no less against democratic tyranny than against monarchical tyranny. Whether the executive power be of divine or human origin, Americans have for it none of that respectful confidence which all Frenchmen instinctively feel. In France the whole history of the country has been built up around the State and by it. For centuries the King was the fountain-head of justice, the rallying-point of the nation, the partner of God, just like the Emperor. The State was counted on and counted with, in every act of public and private life. Even now in every hamlet the State is present in the guise of schoolmaster, gendarme, postman, tax-collector, surveyor: all appointed by Paris; all paid by Paris. The Minister of the Interior is the guardian of the communes, and under the Code Napoléon, a guardian has full paternal powers over his charges. From the intendants of Louis XIV, through the prefects of the Empire, to those of the Third Republic, the chain is unbroken.

The result is two essentially different political worlds. Far from considering the central Government as a watchful providence to look after him, the American tinges with distrust what little thought he gives it. Up to quite recent times, the American could live in his home town without having anything to do either with the central Government or its representatives, the post-office excepted. Missouri takes little interest in what goes on in Washington, D.C. The 'Congressional Record' has fewer readers than our 'Journal Officiel.' What is asked of the Federal Government? To assure equality of opportunity and to protect the proceeds of individual effort: a negative rather than a positive duty. The Federal Government is not necessarily indispensable, unless in exceptional cases, to the prosperity of the people. The Federal Government is not looked to for decorations and diplomas. The Federal Government would not be allowed, as in France, to interfere in birth and in death. People make their wills as they please. Centralized authority is the exception, not the rule. So long as it maintains a decent place to live in, no more is asked of it.

Our provinces have retained far more physical and moral personality than the forty-eight astronomically delimited States of North America. But of political independence our provinces had none, neither have their heirs: the departments. On the contrary, the forty-eight States possess administrative vigour unknown to French local life. Thirteen of them, from 1776 to 1781, were totally independent. The thirty-five others joined the Union as free republics with their own written constitutions. Each of them has its own charter, its executive, its legislature, its administration, its debts, its statehood, its courts, its laws. Some are larger than France; others more thickly populated than two thirds of the countries of Europe. Nothing in common with the abstract administration of our departments and the travesty of control over their assemblies. Even the State Government is not the principal centre of local life. The city is even closer to the citizen. Its street, police, charity, and school departments fulfil many of the functions which fall to the central Government in France. French history is one long effort at centralization; American history at decentralization. If such antagonistic formations were to produce similar results, what would become of the law of cause and effect?

Law and authority are at the opposite pole to the French; --- so are the well-springs of power. For one hundred and fifty years, we French have devoted the best of our political efforts to changing our institutions. Since the United States has existed, France, if I count aright, has lived under fourteen different régimes: absolute monarchy, the Constituent, the Legislative Government, the Convention, the Directorate, the Consulate, the Empire, the first Restoration, the Hundred Days, the Constitutional Monarchy, the Reformed Monarchy, the Republic, the Second Empire, the Third Republic --- an average of five years for each régime. The United States during this time has had only one, which still endures. Our present régime, which has lasted for fifty years, is challenged every morning by three parties: the Royalist, the Socialist and the Communist. The American régime is challenged by none. Except during the last half-century, the French have persistently sought change. Americans have given it no thought. We are in many ways as much the slaves of tradition as they are; but we are also born revolutionaries, even though we carefully cling to the framework of the régimes we destroy.

What does this mean, if not that Americans are more conservative than the French? We built barricades, beheaded a king, setup the Commune of 1871, bent each time on rebuilding the house from cellar to garret. In America, even revolutions are conservative! Conservatives, those Boston merchants who drove out the English, not in the heat of political or class passion, so natural to us, but to preserve fiscal conditions necessary to their business prosperity. Conservatives, those Virginia planters who fought not to force their interpretation of the Constitution upon the rest of the Union, but to defend the common right of each partner to withdraw from the Union. In the midst of political strife, in times of social upheaval, Americans respect their institutions, which none seek to destroy. The right of amendment amply satisfies the yearning for innovation, and nothing but praise is heard of the Constitution itself. How different from France!

Something else again: respectful of institutions, Americans carefully avoid bringing religion into politics, while in France the two are inseparable. Some peculiar kink in our Latin mind makes it impossible for us to separate politics from religion. Rome, so tolerant of the polytheism of its subjects, withdrew the statue of Jesus from the Temple of Agrippa and persecuted the Christians, as soon as they began to claim monopoly of truth for their God. Later the Empire, after the Council of Nicea, attempted to bolster up its tottering universality with the universality of the Catholic Church. And ever since we Latins have sought in vain to separate the two. This perpetual imbrication has furnished paradoxes not a few. A successor of Saint Peter chastised by order of a descendant of Saint Louis; a conquering soldier crowned by the Pope, in the name of Divine Right. What is worse, it has furnished centuries of religious wars, the Ligue, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the civil constitution of the clergy, the Concordat, the so-called 'Lay Laws,' the Law of Separation, quarrels which, now all ties are parted, survive their object because every one stakes something on both. This aspect of French politics is a closed book to Americans. It does more than anything else to discourage their affection.

How could they understand, never having lived the life from which this instinct springs? Although issuing from the Puritan theocracy of Massachusetts which was a State religion because only its members could vote, Americans from the very first placed the barrier of common law between the Churches and the State. Never, from that day to this, has civil power stretched forth the arm of unbending authority over religion, no matter what the creed. Never, from that day to this, has Religion raised its voice or hand against established institutions. Politico-religious movements, like the Know-Nothing, have invariably failed. No special legislation, no privileges, no exceptions, no bargaining with the churches. One law, the law of association. It passes the understanding of Frenchmen! A moment ago it was Americans who could not understand our religious controversies. Now it is we who cannot understand their religious peace. That religion should not set citizens by the ears is something no Frenchman can conceive.

Still less can we conceive religion that unites. Still less can we conceive that in the absence of a State religion all creeds should lead their congregations to the support of the State: yet such is the case in the United States. Even more astounding this: the various creeds preferring social action to dogmatic disputes, have actually perfected, to the great advantage of America, a sort of evangelic coöperation which aspires to creating happiness in this world, not only in the next. Protestants have set the example: inspired, perhaps, by John Robinson, the pastor of the Church of Leyden from which issued the Church of Plymouth, who urged his flock 'to walk with all men for the common labours of mankind.' Methodism, Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, have all followed suit. And then a day came when a Catholic, like Brownson, preaching Americanism, adapted the uncompromising rigidity of the Church of Rome to this new tendency. Parliament of religions, congress of liberal creeds, where each year Protestants, Jews, Deists, Catholics, meet for human welfare and common action in the spirit of Roosevelt's words, 'We must have religions for all kinds of men'! France --- where 'Dogma triumphant' has always been the slogan of Religion --may measure by this the chasm which separates her from the religious peace America enjoys.

No struggles centering round a régime, no struggles centering around religion, what inspiration is left for political life? Something in which France has rarely taken a supreme interest: economic welfare. Do not misunderstand me. I do not underestimate Marxism, and I know the part that economic factors have played in the history of France. But I say that, on the whole, France's history has not been moulded thereby. The French State, welder of national unity, was of necessity a political and military organ. The great dates of our revolution are political and military dates. Not so in American history. The invention of steam and of electricity had a thousand times more effect in the United States than in France. The whole history of the New World, from Columbus to the blossoming of the West, is economic. No similar curve exists in that of France.

This is worthy of thought. At the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, France was inspired by two contradictory and successive ideals: the ideal of equality and the ideal of authority --- mainsprings of the execution of Louis XVI and of the power of Napoleon. At the same period what inspired North America? Economic necessity. The revolution of 1776 was of fiscal origin. If England had not prohibited the trade in molasses and killed by industrial monopoly the ship chandleries and distilleries of New York, if even she had but tolerated smuggling, there would have been no revolution. The Constitution itself was as much an economic as a political compromise, between business and agriculture, between capital and labour; a compromise cluttered up with customs clauses. Then two great party struggles: the consolidation of debts and the national bank. Then two wars of purely commercial origin: one with France in 1796, one with England in 1812. Finally a fifty-year civil duel of fundamental economic character. It is clear in the matter of tariffs; in the matter of slavery, proof is easy.

That struggle, the most dramatic of American history, began after the brilliant period during which France, for a quarter of a century, made law according to Rousseau and fought according to Charlemagne. Whence did it arise! From anti-slavery campaigns ---as so many Frenchmen believe, to whom Mrs. Beecher Stowe is more familiar than Lincoln? No. It arose out of one of the innumerable incidents which marked the opening-up of the West. Anti-slavery campaigns came later, and with all due respect to the sincerity of the abolitionists, their efforts must be considered not as a cause, but as an effect.

Since 18920, slavery had been maintained by compromise. The Treaty of 1848 with Mexico had instituted slavery in Texas where it did not previously exist. Abraham Lincoln at the beginning of the Civil War had no thought of abolishing slavery. Nothing here in common with French political dogmatism --- abolitionist with Schoelcher, as it was 'frontière naturelle' under Louis-Philippe or 'nationalité' under Napoleon the Third. The conflict which for so many years was to threaten the unity of the American Republic was no dogmatic dispute, no philosophical quarrel! The issue was economic, solely economic. How was the West to be developed?

Slavery in the West would have meant the shutting-out of white labour, which since 1815 had been constantly attracted there. The West free would have meant the shutting-out of the South, whose wealth equally with that of the North had contributed to its opening-up. The issue was the future of a territory, vested by the Ordinance of 1787 in the Federal Union, for the development of which North and South proposed two irreconcilable systems. If the West, which both North and South needed, had not existed, the South would have kept its slaves and the North, more anti-negro than the South, would have raised no objection. Lincoln himself admitted it. Once war had broken out, not for the freeing of the blacks but for the preservation of the Union, emancipation followed and even suffrage. But the two amendments were a consequence, not an aim. They were the capstone placed upon the whole, like the 'World Safe for Democracy' of Woodrow Wilson. All of which is as unlike as can be to France's spontaneous and immediate liberation of the slaves by the decree which annexed Madagascar.

Do not imagine, however, that this titanic crisis exhausted the supremacy of economics in American politics. Free silver provided the next issue. The West, poor, in debt, thirsting for credit, demanded the right to mint its silver dollars and, on behalf of Western farmers and Western mine owners, started a Democratic crusade against the plutocrats of the East, on a platform of free silver. In turn railroads became the issue, under McKinley and Roosevelt, when the producer, alarmed by the power of the railroads, to which he owed his prosperity, but which could ruin him by rebates, denounced the control of legislatures by money and demanded a political cleanup. Then trusts became the issue, under Roosevelt and Taft, when the consumer, feeling the pinch of prices which had escaped the natural law of supply and demand, called upon the Federal Government for help and demanded regulation by public authority. For full fifty years American politics revolved around these issues. They dictated nominations for the Presidency, changes in the laws, even amendments of the Constitution. In France, during the same time, the war of 1870, the Commune, the 16th of May, the public education issue, General Boulanger, the Dreyfus affair, the Russian alliance, the Western ententes. Once again, dissimilarity of preoccupations is self-evident.

Throughout these struggles, American party organization remained unchanging and permanent. I have recorded fourteen changes of régime in France in less than one hundred years. If I were to enumerate the parties which created, controlled, or destroyed those fourteen régimes, the count would run into hundreds. In our Chambers the group --- poor parent of the party --- a parliamentary formation having no counterpart in the electorate, has become the unit of measure. The combinations to which it lends itself are so numerous and so arbitrary that in 1921 and 1925 we had the same Prime Minister come into power with two opposing majorities. Can American readers imagine Woodrow Wilson being elected in 1916 by the Democrats and in 1920 by the Republicans? In contradistinction with the flying dust of our political organizations, the United States has only two great parties which, under different names, have always existed and are so firmly rooted that men as popular as Theodore Roosevelt have failed to break them up by the creation of a third party. As old as the Constitution, they are almost equally venerated.

To Frenchmen who, in their own two Chambers, see groups changing from one legislature to another and sometimes from one session to another, these two great parties, which have endured for nearly one hundred and fifty years and are still full of strength, seem to emerge from some lost world. Frenchmen can no more understand their vitality and length of life than they can the reason for their existence, which grew out of two tendencies, personified in former days by Hamilton and Jefferson, both totally unknown to us. It is true that with the lapse of time those tendencies have become blurred, and the initial differences find less expression in present-day problems. The great issues round which the battles of the past were fought, free silver, the railroads, the trusts, civil service, the Philippines, etc., are exhausted. To draft opposing platforms, brains must needs be cudgelled. When an issue is found, such as the Treaty of Versailles, it is pounced upon. As a rule the tariff has to serve. On all essentials the two parties are in substantial agreement; and as members of the American Federation of Labour are pretty well divided between them, there is not even the resource of socialist congresses to stir up dogmatic strife. If a popular movement manifests itself in the country, Republicans and Democrats seize upon it, flatter it, and struggle to get on the band wagon. Such fundamental unity is not the lot of France.

The American régime has vices which are by no means hidden. The two parties, more powerful than ever as political machines despite the exhaustion of their programmes, are as keen as ever about elections to strengthen their prestige. They divide political jobs like spoils, enslave the citizen to the machine, seek vote-getting candidates rather than able executives, stoop to graft which would be impossible in France and of which the Republican U.G.I. in Philadelphia and Democratic Tammany in New York are shining exponents. If I compare, it is to explain and not to criticize. I merely emphasize the evident contradictions between French political activity and American political activity. No Frenchman would ever allow himself to be imprisoned from birth in one of the huge political organizations within which generations of Americans have abided since 1787, as they have abided in the Constitution. Two fine bottles with different labels, a humourist has said, but the bottles are empty. But empty though they be, they play their part. They play it with the consent and coöperation of more than a hundred million people who are content therewith, just as their great ancestors were content to contrast, in naïve and symbolic prints, the six-horse carriage of George Washington and the nag which Thomas Jefferson used to tie to the Senate railing.

Sister Democracies, both equally Republics --- as the parrot-like exponents of the alleged identity of French and American institutions keep on repeating. We have just seen that everything except the label is different: the formation of civil liberty; the definition of the rights of the individual; his protection against the tyranny of numbers; the citizen's attitude towards the régime and towards religion; the relative importance of economic and political factors; the organization of parties; the position of the citizen. If we rely on alleged identity for ease of mutual understanding, surely we rely in vain!

WITHIN these dissimilar spheres, national and political, individuals move, society evolves. Here also the rhythms are discordant, the tendencies contradictory.

In the first place, individualism, on which both countries pride themselves, follows opposite laws in each. American individualism is much more social than French individualism. In the United States the individual seeks company. In France the individual seeks isolation. The American sings with Emerson a hymn which a Frenchman might think written for him about 'the sacred nature of human personality.' But he conceives the perfection of personality only in collective harmony, and this is the distinctive trait of his idealism. As far removed from the anarchism of Rousseau as from the egoism of Nietzsche, the American hates solitude as much as we hate association. A 'meeting-going animal' he was called in the seventeenth century, and although that applied then only to his religious life, it is applicable now to all his activities. From the time he cuts his eye-teeth, he belongs to a club. As a student, he joins a fraternity. He feels the need of contact with other people. The words he loves: good feeling, good will, coöperation, are all words expressing combined effort. A Frenchman is only happy when working alone. He scarcely tolerates the eye of the State in his affairs, never that of his neighbour. The American seeks association; the Frenchman loathes it. The former is bubbling over with public spirit, of which the latter has none.

A first result: the love of compromise. To unite --'unite instead of separate,' as Josiah Royce said ---one must compromise. The American is taught to compromise in school, in church, in business. His political history, as we have seen, is one long series of compromises; just the opposite to French history, which is one long series of refusals to compromise. Individuals follow the example of the Nation. While a Frenchman is only at ease in the absolute, the American accommodates contraries. He prefers synthesis which combines, to analysis which divides. And this is true politically, socially, and intellectually.

Theodore Roosevelt and Daniel Webster both thought that an ideal Constitution would be a fusion of the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian systems. A great captain of industry, like John D. Rockefeller; a great labour leader, like Samuel Gompers, late President of the American Federation of Labour, meet to discuss how capital and labour can best cooperate. The pragmatism of William James is a philosophy of compromise. Emerson was content with the imperfections of the Republic --- a raft on which one's feet are always wet, but on which one never drowns. Woodrow Wilson defines politics as 'the art of being human, an art of liberty and strength.' Every American accepts that definition. Who cannot see that had initial hardships been complicated by unyielding dogmatism, failure must have ensued? Action, that is the relative, conquered reason, the absolute. Our Latin logic and the ease of our existence have driven us in the opposite direction.

The result is that the American, better protected than the Frenchman in his civil liberty and political rights, is less well armed against social conventions. Once outside the legal fortress of the Constitution and the Supreme Court, he puts up with anything. By a wave of his hand, a policeman stops twenty thousand people. A hundred and one petty tyrannies, which in France would lead to riot, are meekly borne: blue laws, all kinds of 'Don'ts,' at all times and places; prohibition, etc. The American submits to things that would exasperate a Frenchman. He likes to agree with the majority, which we love to defy. He thirsts for unanimity; has faith in the wisdom of nations; respects all established customs. From his school days he is the prisoner of countless axioms, which French boys would tear to pieces. He is taught to think like the rest. He is subjected to mass production of emotions. Gavroche sticks out his tongue at the bullet which lays him low. The American has nothing of the Fronde, nor any taste for uprisings such as, for centuries, prepared the way for our Revolution. He prefers to believe in the automatic accomplishment of national destiny and to allow it to absorb his own. He is a model of social discipline. Far more jealous of his political liberty than the instinctively plebiscite-loving Frenchman, he sacrifices without a qualm other liberties: those we value most. In this respect the two countries present inverse reactions.

If we seek the reason, we find it in the instinctive and utter optimism which takes for granted the unparalleled perfection of American civilization. American optimism is a natural force. Surprising, if one goes back to pioneer days; but conceivable, if the intervening hundred years are considered. Jonathan Edwards delivered the repentant sinner into the hands of an angry God. William James agrees that 'the God hypothesis' works fairly well. It is a far cry from the one to the other; but between them there is first the rough life of the West, which could not have been lived without optimism; then refreshing stages, the smiling utilitarianism of Poor Richard, the uplift of Channing and Emerson towards the inner light; inspiration; self-reliance. In the forest ringing with human endeavour, who could refuse to believe in effort? We, who for two thousand years have dwelt in the same place and followed familiar paths, have difficulty in grasping such faith. But to the squatters and farmers it was a prime necessity. Here, the difference of national formation explains ethical differences.

This optimism has made the United States what it is; but because it is what it is, its optimism has increased a thousand-fold. At first cause, it became effect. In the light of such prodigious success how could doubt creep into the soul of man? This continent is the only one where no man submits to Dante's 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here.' Hope is the most precious asset of the immigrant. When Moses read the law to the people of Israel, he showed them the promised land. Here indeed is a promised land, unfolding its irresistible attraction from one ocean to the other. This is no Old-World land, where opportunities are fewer than men; where social barriers limit man's effort; where specialization, permanence of location, and continuity of calling, crystallize human lives. In the United States every one knows that nothing is ever final for any one; every one knows that to-morrow the poor may be rich, the tenant a landlord, the workman an employer. 'We owe our wealth to the great army of the ragged.' This saying of Woodrow Wilson shows the gulf that separates the Old World from the New. The United States has its disinherited, as has Europe, but they do not carry that tragic cross --- no hope of better days.

James Bryce has most vividly described this feeling of unlimited potentiality, present in American life, lacking in French life: potentiality of material comfort and moral consolation within a boundless land where every one can make his way; where arable land in marvellous abundance awaits the new arrival; where the soil bears every product of the temperate zone and many of the semi-tropical; where the subsoil vies with the surface in wealth; where. the home market offers the producer an almost infinite capacity of absorption; where the effect of the worst financial crisis is wiped out in a few months; where opportunity, sung by Emerson, rises at each step, as birds rise from the stubble in the early morn before the sportsman. It is not chance which has sown optimism in these thousands of hearts; it is Nature, a prodigal Nature unknown on this side of the Atlantic, which has transfigured the modern crusaders who left the shores of poverty. Its lasting impress is on individual character.

Because Americans are optimistic, they are better equipped than the French for the battle of life. But the price of this advantage is a source of weakness, a diseased pride. At every page of their history crops up a childish belief that Americans are the chosen people. 'God has sifted his people to choose the good grain that will grow in the wilderness'; this initial definition by one of the pilgrims of the Mayflower echoes down the years. 'We shall be a model to the world,' boasted George Washington. Jefferson hailed 'this nation of men, equal by their talents and their merit.' Even the aristocratic Hamilton condescended to recognize that his people --- which at times he calls silly fools --- are destined to decide the important question, 'whether societies are capable or not of establishing a good government from reflection and choice.' Fifty years pass and here is Emerson: 'America ought to be the lawmaker of nations... the moral development of man, as such, is bound up with the development of Americans,' and Walt Whitman's 'America, the land of glory.' Our contemporaries are no less boastful. McKinley: 'America has the best government that ever existed'; Woodrow Wilson: 'American life is a prophetic type of humanity'; Warren G. Harding: 'In a century and a half America has done more for human progress than all the nations of the world in all history.' What hyperbolical self-praise! It leaves Frenchmen, who are not accustomed to spare one another, dumbfounded.

Americans are in no way ashamed of it; for their pride is without limit. Is not their country the only one in which democratic institutions have worked for a hundred and fifty years without a hitch? The only one which in the same length of time has transformed a small colony of 4,000,000 inhabitants into a mighty nation of more than 100,000,000 souls? Can any one question the excellence of a régime crowned by such achievement? Is it not clear that a century of American history is an abridgement of ten centuries of human history; that the great men of America are the incarnation of all human achievements: George Washington, liberty; Jackson, authority; Abraham Lincoln, union; McKinley, wealth; Roosevelt, power; Woodrow Wilson, democracy? How can these millions of immigrants, come from afar to seek a better life, cover themselves with the shame of doubt, when before their very eyes this magnificent achievement rises to the skies? The American citizen, as powerful as the citizen of Athens, more powerful than the citizen of Rome, more powerful even than his elected representatives, since he alone can change the limitations the Constitution imposes upon them, is unspeakably proud of his individual as well as of his collective might.

Is it necessary to add that this state of mind does not make understanding any easier? Convinced that he always stands for wisdom against folly, and for virtue against vice, the American takes little pains to penetrate the meaning of things he does not understand. He is impatient of all contradiction. He wants results, now or not at all. He prefers rapidity of execution to perfection of finish. He condemns whatever is unfamiliar to him. In his passion for constructive effort, he pays no heed to objections. He disdains precedent, at the risk of relapsing into error.

He believes only in his own experience. He decides the affairs of others, peremptorily and without regard for their feelings. He carries into discussions an itch for prophecy which our old country has long since learned to discard and which irritates our logical mind. Such, the counterpart of magnificent virtues.

The underlying cause of these opposite reflexes is the antagonism of two civilizations. The one --- ours --- is daughter of pagan antiquity; the other, daughter of the Reformation. The one, descended from Greece and Rome; the other, from the Bible. The Bible is the vigorous trunk from which spread the boughs of the American oak. In its shade arrivals of immigrants have lain down to rest; so much so that even Catholic immigrants --- the wall of dogma notwithstanding ---have soon felt themselves more in sympathy with Protestant fellow Americans than with European fellow Catholics. Reformation, a reaction against the mating of pagan culture and Roman hierarchy which under Julius II and Leo X was the soul of the Renaissance! Reformation, a challenge to the life-springs of French genius; to the treasure-store of ideals, of feelings, of emotions handed down to us from antiquity --- that priceless heritage saved from barbarian hordes by studious monasteries. The years have passed. The challenge has remained. Whatever adds grace to our lives is suspect to the American conscience.

When Luther and Calvin, in the name of personal judgment and restored discipline, cut Christendom asunder, there arose two beliefs which, unable to destroy each other by violence, have remained face to face like two repellent poles. We French represent two traditions, the ancient and the Catholic, which Protestant Anglo-Saxons most distrust. We have not progressed beyond the doctrine of Plato. Ideal man is to our mind the standard of value. We measure the progress of the individual, not by material achievements, but by his intrinsic worth. Whether in matters of faith or of reason, we are classics. Rationalists in the seventeenth century, critics in the eighteenth, poets in the nineteenth, we place the subjective development of self above all else. From Descartes' stove to the Parnassian tower of ivory, disinterested culture, making man the ultimate aim of man, has been held by our élite to be the highest form of human endeavour.

Not at all so with Americans; first because, they were not able, then because they did not desire. I say they were not able, and of this there is abundant proof. The circumstances of their origin did not lend themselves to intellectual life. Many among them dreaded it. Alexander Hamilton looked upon our philosophers as poisoners of the human mind. Fisher Ames thought the formation of an American literature modelled on ours would be a danger. 'I hope,' said John Adams, 'that the age of sculpture will not arrive very soon. I would not give sixpence for a statue of Phidias or a picture of Raphael.' Such being the opinion of New England, one could hardly expect the squatter, ever seeking to overcome material obstacles, to combat it! The English, who pitilessly denounced the poverty of American thought at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were lacking in measure and justice. 'Who reads American books,' asked Sidney Smith; 'who goes to see American plays?' It is true that North America in the first third of its history contributed but little to the progress of thought. How could she? She was creating life, and sufficient to the day was the effort thereof.

I also said that America did not desire to acquire the spirit of our culture, and this must not be forgotten. What was America's first contribution to metaphysical speculation? The staunchest repudiation of the essential characteristic of French thought. The determination to make American thought, not the servant of individual progress, but the agent of social progress. When Emerson proclaimed, 'We are done with our apprenticeship,' it meant first that the time was passed when American publications printed only English essays; when James Fenimore Cooper apologized, in the preface of 'The Spy,' for having dared to select an American subject. But it meant also the birth of a speculative activity which was to oppose itself to European subjectivism. Nothing of the proud detachment which characterizes our authors. The mind directed towards action. As we have just seen economics overriding politics, so we are to see social tendencies overriding intellectual preoccupations. Just as Religion becomes a national asset, so is Thought to become a social asset. In one case as in the other, collective progress is the aim.

Colonial moralists, religious and secular, Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, had set the example. Unitarians and transcendentalists accentuated this tendency. Emerson, Alcott, Fuller, Thoreau, Longfellow saturated American literature with public spirit. Emerson asserted in every line that action was the object of his metaphysics. Each of these authors incarnated a phase of American history, Cooper, the frontier won from the Indian; Whitman, the union preserved; Beecher Stowe, the slave freed; William James, endeavour as a doctrine. When one prided himself upon 'expressing the modern'; when the other wrote, 'the ardent energies at work in New York and Chicago to cover the world with means of communication and link up peoples in a community of thought, are the manifestations of the same eternally young forces which made Italian art, the poetry of the Middle Ages and the beauty of ancient civilizations,' all agreed that art was subordinate to life. Edgar Allan Poe alone --- we know at what cost --was in sympathy with the Latin ideal of art for art's sake. Our impassibility appeared to Americans as vain-glorious or criminal.

I neither judge nor criticize; I seek to understand; and I say that things being as they are, communion between our two countries is difficult to establish. I know full well the immense effort America has made for the intellectual formation of its constantly changing population. I know that, as soon as the village was settled, the colonists demanded books. I know that, as early as 1787, Congress by liberal grants of land endowed schools and universities. I know that the United States established public education before France, and that Horace Mann preceded Jules Ferry. I know the prosperity of their six hundred universities; the profusion of their chairs, of their laboratories, of their libraries, far better stocked than ours. And I should have bad grace to forget it, I who had my first contact with America in the ancient precincts of Harvard. But I do say that this splendid equipment is far removed in character and tendency from our ordinary field of vision. I say that American education, like American art, like American literature, like American philosophy, aims not at the perfection of man, but at the development of the Nation. I do say that, in its very essence, it is social and not individual.

This is because American culture, like American politics, has tasks unknown to ours. In the first place, it is asked to do what religion is asked to do: to absorb and to digest. Then it has a national mission, to unite instead of to divide. It must produce executives and men of action to develop the vast territory of the United States. It is true that in some few universities one finds seminaries of pure learning equal or even superior to those of Europe in the absolute disinterestedness of their speculative researches. But this is the exception. Taken as a whole, the aim of education is to form professional men, farmers, engineers; and to form them numerous rather than eminent. To turn out by mass production the cadres of the army of labour. Curriculums and lectures are essentially practical. Effort is directed towards the welfare of the country rather than towards personal culture. Emerson is a reference; Edison is a model.

In short, the two orientations are so utterly different that they are inassimilable. In the very domain where French effort is denationalized by its own object, American effort is consecrated to the service of public interest. The American demands that his universities turn out trained men necessary to his progress. He is perfectly satisfied if the personal development of the individual attains to the level where he is most profitable to the community. The saying of Horace Greeley which has caused many a smile, 'We must have a literature which makes common cause with the aspirations of the farmer, mechanic and worker,' is fuller of meaning than appears at first sight. The collective aim dominates and oppresses the individual. Education itself is the slave of social interest. Human personality is esteemed only in proportion to the services rendered to society. The hierarchy of values is essentially different from what it is in France. We do not think alike. The axes around which we revolve are not pointed in the same direction.

In the year XIII of the Republic (1805) a Frenchman, Perrin du Lac, published a book in Paris, 'Voyage dans les deux Louisianes et chez les nations sauvages du Missouri.' From pleasing descriptions and somewhat far-fetched conclusions I cull this sentence in which the author candidly says what he thinks: 'The guiding principle of Americans seems to be never to do anything as we do.'

Must I confess that I prefer this plain admission to any amount of the conventional oratory which has accustomed us to sloth by concealing the truth? Divided by so many contrasts, our two people can neither understand, appreciate, nor complete one another unless they are told what separates them and are guided towards reasoned coöperation. Hereafter is told the story of such a combined effort, in all its many aspects. If success is possible, the renewal of error would be damnable. Perrin du Lac was right. Instinct forbids Americans and Frenchmen to do anything in the same way. The real worth of method is that it disciplines instinct. May it be permitted to offer the two countries their 'Discourse of Method'?