The unpretentious dignity and courage, above all, the _bourgeois_ simplicity of M. Loubet’s presidentship of the Republic should bid us hope for France in our worst hour of despondency. There is a fine sense of duty in the race, for which this simple civilian stands without brag, assumption, or a trace of French _panache_. Honour came to seek him uncourted, and he has not wavered or been bullied into resignation by the most appalling insults, outrages, calumnies, and actual assaults that have ever been showered on one mortal man. As a figure of civic integrity and of unassuming merit, I know none worthier of admiration in France to-day. For the terrible price paid in Paris for public office is not only abuse of person and principles, but the digging into every private corner of family history with a deliberate intent to injure and wound by attacks upon the dead. It is this extraordinary Nationalist Press that has so brutalised the imagination of the great reading public, that its readers do not even exact logic or a shadow of consistency from those who cater their politics for them. A little while ago two French officers killed their superior officer sent to arrest them on their way into the heart of Africa. Those two officers were then despatched by their own men, and the _Patrie Française_ made a great splash in the way of a patriotic funeral for the assassinated colonel. Had the colonel been murdered by two civilians all would have been well. But the assassins were officers, and officers, when they are not Jews, must always be respected, admired, and adored. So when the patriots had done weeping over Colonel Klobb, since he had been interred with national and military honours, MM. Coppée and Lemaître, in the name of the nation, acting as chief mourners, they decided to forget him and wax exceedingly and patriotically wroth over the fate of his glorious assassins. Why were Voulet and Chanoine killed? Who had dared to kill so sacred a thing as a French officer? It must be the Government, the wicked, infamous, Jew-paid Government. M. Loubet, of course, gave the order, and M. Waldeck-Rousseau transmitted it, and then, lest anyone should live to tell the tale, Waldeck-Rousseau wired instructions to kill off anyone else belonging to the mission. My Catholic friends are ever lamenting the lack of freedom under the Third Republic. I wonder if any Catholic Government has ever tolerated its enemies in the very heart of its rule writing daily in a hostile Press that it traffics in assassination. And nobody seems to find the charge in this case laughable. Nationalism is certainly in direct hostility to all sense of humour.