How far it was baseless could be learnt from deeds that spoke much louder than words. Even thus early great accumulations of munitions of war were being made at Cologne, and the military sidings and railway equipments, which could only serve for warlike and not commercial purposes, were being completed. Six years before the war, all the work necessary for an aggressive descent on the West and for the passage through Belgium had been done. Europe was comfortably seated over a powder magazine. M. Clemenceau might well discuss in London, when he came over to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's funeral, as Premier of France, how many hundred thousand men, fully equipped for war, England could land within a fortnight in North-Eastern France, should a sudden and unprovoked attack be made. But he got no satisfactory answer. It is evident, therefore, that what with strikes, anarchist outbreaks, the troubles in Morocco, the menacing attitude of Germany--who, as Clemenceau put it, said, "Choose between England and us"--and the attempts to form an enduring compact with England, Clemenceau as President of Council, with all his energy, determination and versatility, had enough on his hands to occupy all his thoughts. But this did not exhaust the catalogue of his labours during his term of premiership. CHAPTER XVI END OF CLEMENCEAU'S MINISTRY It is easy to be tolerant of the Catholic Church and Catholics in a Protestant country; though even in Great Britain, and of course only too sadly in the North of Ireland, there are times when the bitterness inherited from the past makes itself felt, on slight provocation, in the present. At such times of sectarian outburst we get some idea ourselves of what religious hatred really means, and can form a conception of the truly fraternal eagerness to immolate the erring brethren, nominally of the same Christian creed, which animated the true believers of different shades of faith, whether Orthodox or Arian, Catholic or Huguenot, in days gone by. Those who chance to remember what Catholicism was in Italy, the Papal States, or Naples, two generations ago--the Church then claiming for itself rights of jurisdiction and sanctuary, outside the common law--those who understand what has gone on in Spain quite recently, can also appreciate the feeling of Frenchmen who, within the memory of their fellow-citizens still living, and even themselves in some degree under the Empire, had suffered from Clerical interference and repression, when the chance of getting rid of State ecclesiasticism was presented to them at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Church had entirely lost touch with the temper of the time. Though it may have been impossible for the Vatican to accept the brilliant suggestion that the great men of science should all be canonised and the discoverers of our day should receive the red hat, as secular Cardinals, there was