Our side was that of Justice, of international fidelity, and respect for treaties, of Morality, written or unwritten. I was not afraid of bringing up these popular commonplaces, and I clearly dissociated our cause, even from that of the Allies. We were the only nation with completely unsullied hands, and peace-loving hearts. We were the only ones who, drawn into the struggle against our will, in bearing the heaviest burden, were fighting for our very existence. I asked them to think what the French mind meant to the world, what would be missing in the progress of humanity in the future if we let ourselves be overcome. We were not only defending our immediate interests, but a certain smiling Reason, a certain completed and definite genius whose secret to-day we alone possessed. It was a decisive conflict. Fortin was right about that. If we were conquered again this time, we should always be. It would mean that our name would be scratched off the list of leading nations, our colonies sacrificed, three or four provinces torn from our Mother-country, who in future would fall a prey, every ten years, to the appetites of the conqueror. The end of France was what the aggressors wanted. To extinguish this blazing hearth of liberty and light, to smother this ringing voice continually calling the nations to the realisation of themselves, and to those in power to respect the down-trodden. Ah, my friends, what an hour it was to strain our faculties, to prove ourselves worthy of our humbler brothers who were showing such self-sacrifice and instinctive heroism! We others ought to be strengthened by our education. I dared to plead the memories of the soil which bore us. I evoked the rolling uplands of Champagne where we had lingered yesterday and where we might return again, summoned by the melancholy accents of the guns. How many battles had been fought and won there by men of our blood! They were the Catalonian fields, where, at the dawn of our history, the hordes of barbarians already issuing from Germany had spent themselves against the vigour of the Gauls, the allies of Aetius. And was it not just a few miles away, on the hills and in the valleys which to-morrow's prodigious engagement would perhaps gain for the enemy, that the astonishing episodes in the French campaign had been enacted, a hundred years ago! Champaubert, Sesanne, Montmirail, and again Meaux and Moret. It was there that our fathers, children of sixteen, the last class eligible for mobilisation, had held out for weeks, flying from one valley to another, inflicting defeat after defeat on an enemy five times more numerous, on the European coalition! And we, after a long peace, well-taught, well-led, animated with the breath of civism--should we not find a way to hurl back over our frontiers the enemy whom Napoleon had trodden under his heel?