1907, at the Tivoli Vaux-Hall), he impressed upon them their double duty—war against war, so long as it is only a menace upon the horizon, and in the hour of danger war in defence of national independence. For this great European was also a great Frenchman.[1] Yet it is certain, too, that the firm accomplishment of his patriotic duty would not have prevented him from maintaining his human ideals, and watching with untiring eyes for every opportunity of reconstructing the shattered unity. Certainly he would not have allowed the vessel of socialism to drift, as his feeble successors have done.
⁂
He has passed from us. But the reflection of his luminous genius, his kindness in the
- ↑ Who has spoken more nobly than he of the eternal France, "the true France, that is not summed up by an epoch or by a day, neither by the day of long ago, nor the day that has just passed, but the whole of France complete in the succession of her days, of her nights, of her dawns, of her shadows, of her heights and of her depths; of France who, across all these mingled shades, all these half-lights and all these vicissitudes, goes forward towards a brilliance which
she has not yet attained, but which is foreshadowed in her thought!" (1910.)
See his masterly picture of French history, and his magnificent eulogy of France, at the Conference of 1905, which he was prevented from delivering in Berlin, and which Robert Fischer read in his place.
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