The Socialists went quite wild against him--to the lasting injury, as I hold, of their party and their cause--the Radicals and Republicans themselves were more than doubtful of the possibility of his success. Many politicians and journalists of the Right doubted whether they could make common cause with the man who above all other things stood for the permanence of Republicanism and was the bitter enemy of Clericalism in every shape. Shrewd judges of public opinion stated that his Ministry could not last three months. But courage, frankness and good faith, backed by relentless determination, and the genius that blazes up in the day of difficulty, go far. The whole French people suddenly called to mind that this old Radical of the Bocage of La Vendée, this Parisian of Parisians for nearly sixty years, whatever mistakes he may have made in opposition or in office, had invariably stood up for the greatness, the glory, the dignity of France; that he had voted at Bordeaux for the continuance of the war when France lay at the feet of the ruthless conqueror and Gambotta was striving to organise his countrymen for resistance to the death; that from those dark days of 1871 onwards he had always vehemently adjured his countrymen to make ready to resist coming invasion; that from August 1914 he had never failed to keep a stout heart himself and to do his utmost to encourage his countrymen even when the outlook was blackest for the Allies; that he had ever been the relentless denouncer of weakness and vacillation, as he had also been the unceasing opponent of pacifism, pro-Germanism and treachery of every kind; that now, therefore, when _la Patrie_ was in desperate danger, when Paris might yet be at the mercy of the enemy, of whose hideous ruffianism they had had such bitter experience, Georges Clemenceau was the one man to take control of democratic and Republican France in the interest of every section of the population. These stirring memories of the past rose up behind Clemenceau in the present.[E] Thus it was that the new Prime Minister, coming down from the Senate to read his Declaration to the National Assembly, as the French custom is, was certain beforehand of a cordial reception from the great majority of the Deputies. What might happen afterwards depended upon himself and his Ministry: what should occur on this his first appearance in the tribune after nearly eight years of absence depended on themselves. They took good care that, at the start at least, he should have no doubt as to their goodwill. Only the Socialist minority abstained. The Declaration itself was worthy of the occasion, and it was a stirring scene when the veteran of the Radical Party, the Tiger of the old days, rose to deliver it to the House, which was crowded on the floor and in the galleries with deputies and strangers eager to hear what he had to say:--