Anatole France came into the open in the course of the Dreyfus case, and since that time he has never ceased to interest himself actively instead of philosophically in everything that was unhappy and oppressed--workers, natives, generally speaking the underdogs. His little book, _The Church and the Republic_, published in 1905, in which he demolishes the case for the absolute freedom of the Catholic Church, because there is not absolute freedom, but only so much as does not clash with other freedoms, had an immense success and powerfully assisted M. Combes in his campaign for Disestablishment. Anatole France, heir of Voltaire and Renan, has always seen the Church, a survival full of charm and grace, as the enemy of the people. Had it not been for the hierarchy, I do not believe he would have attacked the faith: religion would have made a pretty toy for the child that calls itself man. But religion allied with ministers and financiers, sabre-rattlers, religion _à la_ Kaiser, he has sworn to root out. He wants to do this because he has a vision of a humanity to come when none shall suffer at the hands of the State, when one sex will not crush and the other deceive, when black faces may smile on white. He has expounded his creed in many political speeches, though he is not a good speaker; he has come before his audience with his long, whimsical, Pan-like face and his sorrowful eyes, flicking them with irony and yet touching their hearts, asking always for justice and yet for sanity. His speeches are like his writings, except that he has a Latin fondness for the rhetorical question. They are polished, literary, and he generally begins like an American by telling his audience one or two humorous stories: he believes in laughter, and he who laughs with him will soon think with him. But there is always a sting in those stories: it is not for nothing that he is so fond of telling the old fairy tale of the wrestler who could turn himself into a dragon and then, if St George appeared, into a duck: there are many of our Cabinet ministers who have been dragons at the Albert Hall and ducks in Committee Room 15, with, as Anatole France says, “a domestic animal’s mild voice.”