The World Decision

by Robert Herrick

VI

The New France

"This is a return for a new departure!" the Italian poet cried to his people at Quarto when they were still hesitating between the paths of a prudent neutrality and intervention in the world decision. Probably in the poet's thought there was more of concrete ambition for "national aspirations" than of spiritual rebirth. But for the French nation it is the spiritual rebirth alone that has any meaning. No material enlargement of France has ever been seriously contemplated. The acquisition of Alsace can hardly be termed conquest, and whatever hopes of indemnity or other material advantages the French may have permitted themselves to dream of must fade as the financial burden of all Europe mounts ever higher. Even the recovery of Alsace, according to those best able to judge,—in spite of German assertions,—would never have roused France to an aggressive war. Conquest, material growth, is not an active principle in the French character. How often I have heard this thought on French lips,—"We want to be let alone, to be free to live our lives as we think best, to develop our own institutions,—that is what we are fighting for!" For forty years the nation has lived under the fear of invasion, a black cloud always more or less threatening on the frontier, and when the day of mobilization came every Frenchman knew instinctively what it meant—the long-expected fight for national existence. And the hope that sustains the people in their blackest moments is the hope of ending the thing forever. "Our children and our children's children will not have to endure what we suffer. It will be a better world because of our sacrifice."

The conquest that France will achieve is the conquest of herself, and the fruits of that she has already attained in a marvelous measure. The reality of a new France is felt to-day by every Frenchman and is aboundingly obvious to the stranger visiting the country he once knew in her soft hours of peace. To be sure, intelligent French people say to you, when you comment on the fact, "But we were always really like this at bottom, serious and moral and courageous, only you did not see the real France." Pardonable pride! The French themselves did not know it. As so often with individual souls, it took the fierce fire of prolonged trial to evoke the true national character, to bring once more to the surface ancient and forgotten racial virtues, to brighten qualities that had become dim in the petty occupations of prosperity.

After I had been in France a short time, nothing seemed falser to me than the pessimistic assertions of certain German-Americans and faint-hearted other Americans, that whatever the outcome of the world war France was "done for," "exhausted," "ruined," must sink to the level of a third-rate power, and so forth. Nor can I believe the words of those saddened sympathizers and helpers in the ambulances and hospitals, that "France is proudly bleeding to death." Her wounds have been frightful, and through them is still gushing much of the best blood of the nation. Her bereavement has been enormous, but not irreparable. Once a real peace achieved, the triumph of the cause, and I venture to predict that France will give an astonishing spectacle of rapid recovery, materially and humanly. For the New France is already a fact, not a faith.

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Evidence of this rebirth is naturally difficult to make concrete as with all spiritual quality. It is not merely the solidarity of the nation, the fervent patriotism, the readiness for every sacrifice, which are qualities more or less true of all the warring nations, especially of Germany. It is more than the perpetual Sunday calm along the rue de la Paix, the absence of that parasitic frivolity with which Paris—a small part of Paris—entertained the world. It is not simply that French people have become serious, silent, determined, with set wills to endure and to win—for that moral tenacity may relax after the crisis has passed. It is all these and much more which I shall try to express that has revealed a new France.

To start with some prosaic proofs of the new life, I will take the liquor question, a test of social vitality. It is significant to examine how the different belligerent nations have treated this problem, which becomes acute whenever it is necessary to call upon all national reserves in a crisis. Turkey, Italy, and Germany apparently have no liquor problem; at least the war has not called attention to it. Russia, whose peasantry was notoriously cursed with drunkenness, eradicated the evil, ostensibly, by one arbitrary ukase, though, if persistent reports from the eastern war region are true, her great reform has not yet reached her officers. England has played feebly with the question from the beginning when the ravages of drink among the working population—what every visitor to England had known—became painfully evident to the Government in its efforts to mobilize war industries and increase production. Various minor restrictions on the liquor traffic have been imposed, but nothing that has reached to the roots of the matter—probably because of the powerful liquor interest in Parliament as much as from the Englishman's fetish of individual liberty. Although the direct handicap of drunken workmen did not affect France as it did England, the French authorities quickly realized the indirect menace of alcoholism and have taken real measures to combat it. Absinthe has been abolished. For the army—and that includes practically all the younger and abler men—the danger has been minimized by the strict enforcement of regulations as to hours and the non-alcoholic nature of drinks permitted, which are posted conspicuously in all cafés and drinking-places and which are carefully observed, as any one who tries to order liquor in company with a man in uniform will quickly find out! I never saw a soldier or an officer in the least degree under the influence of liquor while I was in France, either at the front or outside the military zone, and very few workingmen. Not content with the control of liquor in the army, the French have seriously attacked the whole problem, which in France centers in the right of the fruit-grower to distill brandy,—an ancient custom that in certain provinces has resulted in great abuses. Legislation against the bouilleurs de crue is one inevitable outcome of the awakened sense of social responsibility in France.

Connected with the liquor evil is the birth-rate question, to which since the war the attention of all serious-minded people has been drawn. The French Academy of Sciences has undertaken an elaborate series of investigations into the relations between the birth-rate and the consumption of alcohol, which would seem to show that there is cause and effect between the excessive use of alcohol and a declining birth-rate. This will undoubtedly tend to create a popular sentiment favorable to restrictive liquor legislation, specifically to abolishing the right to distill spirits. But what is of more real significance is the changing sentiment among the French in favor of larger families. Due, no doubt, directly to the necessities of a draining war, it is also an expression of those deeper experiences that trial has brought. The French have always prized family life, and French family life is, perhaps, the best type of the social bond that the world knows. Under the stress of widespread bereavement the French are realizing that the base of the family is not love between the sexes, but the existence of children. They want children, not only to take the place of their men sacrificed, but as symbols of that greater love for the race that the war has evoked. Although the crudity of the "war-bride" method of increasing the population is not evident in France, every working-girl wears the medallion of some "hero" on her breast. Girls say frankly that they want children. The Latin will never accept the German principle of indiscriminate breeding. As in every other aspect of life, the Latin emphasizes the individual, the personal; but an awakened patriotism and pride of race, a deepened sense of the real values of life will lead to a greater devotion to the family ideal.

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