In the field of politics, as such, the most interesting new fact is the attitude of the Conservatives. For a long time, in the hope of discrediting the Republic, they made it a principle to support not the best but the worst Republican. A gradual process, culminating in the shock of Casablanca and Agadir, has made manifest the hopelessness of such merely negative action, if it could be called action. They have come down into the arena. President Poincaré was their first achievement. The Three Years’ Law of the Barthou Ministry was their second. If at the following elections the ancient apathy and the modern _m’enfichisme_, as it is styled, can be overcome, they will reach the third, and that will be permanent. The five pistol-shots of Madame Caillaux may very well prove to have been the first effective dissipation of a slumber. The alignment of parties is, at all events, clearer than ever before. On the one side, the Radicals and Radical-Socialists “unified” at Pau. The essential principle and foundation of this group is the existence of a state of war between the friends and enemies of the Republic. The point of view is that of Jacobinism, but for the guillotine of purification there has been substituted the administrative machine. It is understood that the “eating of curates” is the normal occupation of all adherents; but, of course, one appetite will exceed another. The better is the unappeasable enemy of the merely good-- _Un pur trouve toujours un plus pur qui l’épure._ On the other side the new party of appeasement of MM. Briand and Barthou. Its leaders and members have come to it, as to every central position, from different camps and by different routes. Hammered upon from the outside by German aggression, they demand domestic peace as the first condition of national security. They ask for a _république aérée et habitable_. They propose an army strengthened and increased through the sacrifices of the rich and the middle classes. It is a synthesis of Déroulède and Millerand, of militarism and social transformation. M. Jaurès and his integral Socialists may, of course, be trusted to find their place among the “pacifists.” The late Herr Bebel led the German Social Democrats back to an acceptance of the national idea; but not so M. Jaurès. A strategist at once bold and astute, who has never known the responsibilities of office, to whom _la patrie_ is only a gunmaker’s advertisement, he will almost certainly co-operate with the reorganised _bloc_. It is for the prophets to tell us what the elections will bring forth. For us, plain onlookers, the life of the most interesting and logical nation in Europe has come to a crisis, the solution of which may notably react not only upon civilisation and humanity--those great abstractions--but upon ourselves, and the little parts we play in each. THE SOLDIER-PRIESTS OF FRANCE