The war itself rather strengthened than weakened his tendency in this direction. Having comfortably recovered from the unpleasing effect of the murder of M. Calmette of the _Figaro_, for which crime his wife was acquitted, he used all his influence, in and out of France, to bring about a peace with Germany, which could with difficulty be distinguished from complete surrender, as soon as possible. This while the German armies were in actual occupation of more than a fifth of his devastated country, that fifth being the richest part of France. His interviews with Signer Giolitti, a vehement partisan of Germany, and certain strange intrigues in Rome and elsewhere, could only be regarded as the more suspicious from the fact that he travelled with a passport made out in a fictitious name. Altogether M. Caillaux's proceedings at home and abroad, in Europe and in South America, gave the impression that he was pursuing a policy of his own which was diametrically opposed to the welfare of his countrymen. Some who have watched closely M. Caillaux's career from his youth up are of opinion that the man is mad. But there is certainly method in his madness. Whatever the defects to which the high priests of international financial brotherhood may plead guilty, they never admit lunatics into their Teutono-Hebraic Holy of Holies. Access to the interior of that sanctuary is reserved for the very elect of the artists in pecuniary conveyance. But it is precisely within this innermost circle of glorified Mammon that M. Joseph Caillaux is most at home and most influential. And these people, so ensconced in their golden temple, were the ones most anxious to bring the war to an end no matter what became of France. This, as has been well said, was a civil war for Jews; but for the Jews of the great international of Mammon it was civil war and hari-kari at one and the same time. So there was weeping and wail in Frankfurt-am-Main, there was wringing of hands in Berlin on the Spree, and the Parisian devotees of the golden calf were not less profuse in their lamentations.