pursued by Jules Ferry, because she felt that it must weaken France in preparing for the great and final struggle with Teutonism which she knew to be inevitable. Thus, when Ferry requested her to cease from attacking Germany, she defied him, assuring him that nothing less than imprisonment would stop her, and that no honour could be greater than to be imprisoned for attacking Bismarck. Juliette Adam has always been intensely sure of herself and her opinions. She has the virile fighting spirit of a super-suffragette. "Always out of rank," as Gambetta described her, "Madame Integrale" has displayed throughout her political and literary work a contempt for compromise of every kind, which occasionally leads her into untenable positions and exaggerations. Like her friend George Sand, she has ever been an inveterate optimist and in the clouds, and this defect of her very qualities has tended to make her proficient in the gentle art of making enemies. Thus she broke with Anatole France for espousing the cause of Dreyfus, because, in spite of her keen sense of justice, she identified the Army with France and was instinctively opposed to Jews, because she regarded their "cosmopolitan" influence as incompatible with patriotism. For her, all things and all men have been subordinate to the sacred cause, to her watch-word and battle-cry of _Vive la France_! Nobly has she laboured for France, confident ever in the _renaissance_ of _la Grande Nation_, and of her country's final triumph. And to-day her unswerving faith is justified, and her life work has been recognised and crowned with honour in her own land. With one exception, all the articles collected in this book have been taken from Madame Adam's "Letters on Foreign Politics" in _La Nouvelle Revue_. Together they constitute a remarkable testimony to the political foresight and courage of _la grande Francaise_, and an equally remarkable analysis of the policy and character of Germany's ruler. AUTHOR'S PREFACE Modesty is out of fashion nowadays: what is wanted is the glorification of every kind of courage. That being so, I hold myself entitled to claim a Military Cross, for my forty-five years of hand-to-hand fighting with Bismarck and with William the Second, and to be mentioned in despatches for the past. JULIETTE ADAM. CHAPTER I 1890 William II, the "Social Monarch"--What lies beneath his declared pacifism--His journey to Russia--The German Press invites us to forget our defeat and become reconciled while Germany is adding to her army every day. April 12, 1890. [1] What an all-pervading nuisance is William!