This was a most important self-imposed mission. Clemenceau, as he showed by his vote at Bordeaux, was strongly in favour of continuing the war and bitterly opposed to any surrender whatever. At the same time he was a thoroughgoing Republican who did not forget that the mass of Frenchmen must have voted for the Empire a few months before, or Napoleon's plébiscite, of course, could not have been so successful, even with the whole of the official machinery in the hands of the Imperialists. Differing from Gambetta afterwards on many points, the coming leader of the advanced Radicals was at this period entirely at one with the man who had not despaired of France when all seemed lost. But in order to carry on the war with any hope of success and to keep the flag of the Republic flying, it was essential that the people of the provincial towns and the peasants should be kept in touch with Paris and be convinced that the only chance of safety and freedom lay in sinking all internecine differences for the sake of unity. No man, not even Gambetta himself, was better qualified for this service. Throughout his tour he kept the independence, welfare and freedom of France as a whole high above all other considerations. But the risks he ran were not trifling. The local reactionists were by no means ready to accept his views. The police was set upon his trail, with great inconvenience to himself. But at no period of his life has Clemenceau considered his personal safety of any account. He had set himself to accomplish certain work which he deemed to be necessary, and he carried it through without reference to the dangers around him. Nor must the success of this propaganda be measured by its immediate results. The great thing in those days of defeat and despair was to keep up the national spirit and to declare that, though the French armies might be beaten again and again, the France of the great Revolution and the Republic should never be crushed down. Believing, as Clemenceau did, in the religion of patriotism and the sacred watchwords of the eighteenth-century upheaval, he spoke with a sincerity that gave to his utterances the value of the highest oratory. The speeches produced a permanent impression on those who heard them, and their effect was felt for many years afterwards. But this was quite as objectionable to Thiers and the case-hardened reactionists as his previous conduct had been to Pyat and the extremists of the Commune. Men of ability and judgment are apt to be caught between two fires when prejudice and passion take control on both sides. It was, in fact, little short of a miracle that the future Prime Minister of France did not complete his services to his country by dying in the ditch under the wall of Père-la-Chaise at the early age of thirty-one.