In other words, France loses twice every year in her home population two colonies equivalent to Tunis--if we measure colonies in terms of communities made up of the race which has sprung from the mother country. And yet, if once in a generation her rulers and diplomats can point to 25,000 Frenchmen living artificially and exotically under conditions which must in the long run be inimical to their race, it is pointed to as "expansion" and as evidence that France is maintaining her position as a Great Power. A few years, as history goes, unless there is some complete change of tendencies which at present seem as strong as ever, the French race as we now know it will have ceased to exist, swamped without the firing, may be, of a single shot, by the Germans, Belgians, English, Italians, and Jews. There are to-day in France more Germans than there are Frenchmen in all the colonies that France has acquired in the last half-century, and German trade with France outweighs enormously the trade of France with all French colonies. France is to-day a better colony for the Germans than they could make of any exotic colony which France owns. "They _tell_ me," said a French Deputy recently (in a not quite original _mot_), "that the Germans are at Agadir. I _know_ they are in the Champs-Elysées." Which, of course, is in reality a much more serious matter. And those Frenchmen who regret this disappearance of their race, and declare that the energy and blood and money which is now poured out so lavishly in Africa and in Asia ought to be diverted to its arrest, to the colonization and development of France by better social, industrial, commercial, and political organization, to the resisting of the exploitation of the mother country by inflowing masses of foreigners, are declared to be bad patriots, dead to the sentiment of the flag, dead to the call of the bugle, are silenced in fact by a fustian as senseless and mischievous as that which in some marvelous way the politician, hypnotized by the old formulae, has managed to make pass as "patriotism" in most countries. The French, like their neighbors, are not interested in the Germans of the Champs-Elysées, but only in the Germans at Agadir: and it is for these latter that the diplomats fight, and the war budgets swell. And from that silent and pacific expansion, which means so much both negatively and positively, attention is diverted to the banging of the war drum, and the dancing of the patriotic dervishes. And on the other side we are to assume that Germany has during the period of France's expansion--since the war--not expanded at all. That she has been throttled and cramped--that she has not had her place in the sun: and that is why she must fight for it and endanger the security of her neighbors.