Not to recognize this National force has, again, led men into another error: they will have it that the great common actions of Frenchmen are due to some occult force or to a master. They will explain the Crusades by the cunning organization of the Papacy; the French Revolution by the cunning organization of the Masonic lodges; the Napoleonic episode by the individual cunning and plan of Bonaparte. Such explanations are puerile. The blow of 1870 was perhaps the most severe which any modern nation has endured. By some accident it did not terminate the activity of the French nation. The Southern States of America remain under the effect of the Civil War. All that is not Prussian in Germany remains prostrate--especially in ideas--under the effect of the Prussian victory over it. The French but barely escaped a similarly permanent dissolution of national character: but they did escape it; and the national mark, the power of spontaneous and collective action, after a few years' check, began to emerge. Upon two occasions an attempt was made towards such action. The first was in the time of Boulanger, the second during the Dreyfus business. In both cases the nation instinctively saw, or rather felt, its enemy. In both there was a moment when the cosmopolitan financier stood in physical peril of his life. Neither, however, matured; in neither did the people finally move. Latterly several partial risings have marked French life. Why none of them should have culminated I will consider in a moment. Meanwhile, the foreign observer will do well to note the character of these movements, abortive though they were. It is like standing upon the edge of a crater and watching the heave and swell of the vast energies below. There may have been no actual eruption for some time, but the activities of the volcano and its nature are certain to you as you gaze. The few days that passed two years ago in Herault are an example.