The French press has waxed sorrowful and bitter over France’s sense of isolation. Her cherished belief in the “unshakable American friendship” has been cruelly shattered, and she has asked of Heaven and earth where is the (proverbially absent) gratitude of republics. That there is no such thing as an unshakable national friendship is as well known to the clear-headed and well-informed French as to the rest of us. They were our very good friends in 1777, and our love for them flamed high. They were our very bad friends in 1797, and by the time they had taken or sunk three hundred and forty American ships, our affection had grown cool. It revived in 1914 under the impetus of their great wrongs and greater valour. Some good feeling remains, and bids fair to remain, if the press and the politicians of both lands will kindly let it alone; but popular enthusiasm, a fire of straw, burned itself quickly out. After all, we ourselves are no longer the idol of our whilom friends. A fairy god-mother is popular only when she is changing pumpkins into coaches, and mice into prancing bays. When she gives nothing but good advice, her words are no more golden than her neighbour’s. In the realm of the practical, a friendship which does not help, and an enmity which does not hurt, can never be controlling factors. Great Britain sets scant store by any ally save the sea. She has journeyed far, changing friends on the road as a traveller by post changed horses. She has fought her way, and is singularly devoid of rancour towards her enemies. The time has indeed gone by when, after battle, the English and French knights--or what was left of them--would thank each other for a good fight. Those were days of lamentable darkness, when the last thing a gentleman craved was the privilege of dying in his bed by some slow and agonizing process, the gift of nature, and gratefully designated as “natural.” The headsman for the noble, the hangman for the churl, and the fortunes of war for everybody, made death so easy to come by, and so inexpensive, that there was a great deal of money left for the pleasures of living. That stout-hearted Earl of Northumberland who thanked God that for two hundred years no head of his house had died in bed, knew what his progenitors had been spared. Even in the soberly civilized eighteenth century there lingered a doubt as to the relative value of battle-field, gallows and sick-chamber. “Men may escape from rope and gun, _Some_ have outlived the doctor’s pill;” sang Captain Macheath to the fashionable world which thronged to hear the verities of “The Beggar’s Opera.”