How beautiful France seems to me, and how much in love with her I feel to-night! Frenchmen, realize your good fortune to have been nourished by so charming a mother! In the womb of antiquity were formed two priceless treasures: Greek beauty and Christian virtue. It is our France who has saved them from death. No people, no territory, has been willing to receive these heritages. Will all our blood suffice to pay for this unhoped for splendor? Take care lest we weaken. Under my eyes in the moonlight there glide past ancient lands and islands, my memories cross the centuries, rest like arches upon the supports of these legends, and form a bridge which leads far away to Jerusalem and to Athens. Jerusalem and Athens! The barbarous Turks and the ignorant Romans have stripped the gilt from their glory. The sons of these two cities did not know how to defend their patrimony, and two thousand years of servitude, ruin and death, have delivered their helpless peoples over to the pity of history. Let us take good care not to imitate them. Ignorant and barbarian, the Germanic hordes menace us with their claws. The gracious mind and exquisite body of France are receiving the same affront as did her ancient sisters. But in this case the same catastrophe will not follow the same weakness. Let us forget the frivolous thought and discourse of our former days. Beauty must be strong, and one can only smile when the fist is heavy. Let us suffer; let us know how to wait. From her dying sons France demands the right to shine resplendent. How much shall we not love her at the moment when, holding her spear, she undoes her iron tunic, and offering to the world a countenance flushed with feeling and eyes profound with the agony of battle, says in a voice broken with emotion and a smile brimming with pride: “I have consented to shed blood! Let me henceforth sow flowers!” _15 December, after the bombardment of British harbors by German cruisers._ We too could acquire this glory of slaughtering women and children. Who prevents us in the Adriatic? To-morrow, if the French sailors were bandits, the world would learn that their guns had bombarded unfortified towns and the Dalmatian Islands, and, protected by our cruisers’ strength, had eluded the vigilance of Austria. Where on earth did the Germans learn warfare! Does naval honor no longer exist among them? I cannot believe it. There are tasks which a sailor only accomplishes with rage in his heart, and those who fired at Yarmouth, Grimsby and Scarborough would ask pardon of God for the crime which their Emperor commanded. Only this man could have persuaded sailors to destroy peaceful towns. The sound of those shells he sent against a defenseless coast will whistle through history round his accursed name.