M. Caillaux is a financier of financiers. His whole career has been associated with the dexterous manipulation and acquisition of money in all its forms. Clemenceau never had anything to do with finance in his fife, and wealth is the last thing anybody could accuse him of possessing. Clemenceau, though no sentimentalist, makes an exception in his view of life where Frenchmen, France and Paris are concerned. With Caillaux audacious cynicism in everything is the key-note of his character all through. Moreover, the one is very simple in his habits, and the other is devoted to ostentation and display. Caillaux's cynicism is as remarkable as that of Henry Labouchere, though more malignant. When he carried the Income Tax through the Assembly and was upbraided for having made himself the champion of such a measure, he claimed that, though he had obtained for his measure a majority in the Assembly, he had used such arguments as would destroy it in the country. Whatever may be the truth of that story, it is certain that the result has been as predicted. So in the course of the Agadir affair. M. Caillaux, as Prime Minister during the whole of the proceedings, was reluctant, and perhaps rightly so, to assert the claims of France with vigour. He was, in fact, quite lukewarm on behalf of his country, the representatives of other nations doing more for France, it is said, than she, or her Premier, did for herself. No sooner, however, was the business settled than M. Caillaux, the judicious but unavowed anti-expansionist, claimed that he had secured Morocco for France! However this may be, M. Caillaux has always favoured a close political and financial understanding with Germany, as by far the more advantageous policy for France, in opposition to a similar _entente_ with England: a view which, of course, he was quite entitled to take and act upon, though its success in practice must have reduced France to the position of a mere satellite of the Fatherland. Before the war it was possibly a justifiable, though scarcely a far-seeing, policy.