e
nation was unprepared for war, torn by political strife, and in a
position to be ruthlessly trampled on by the Germans. The France of
1900-13 is not a very pleasant France to remember.

For one thing, the bitter strife aroused by the breaking of the
Concordat and the seizure of the property of the Church was slowly
crystallizing into an icy hatred, the worst in the world, the hatred of
a man who has been robbed. The Church Separation Law may have been right
in theory, and with the liberal tendencies of the reformers one may have
every sympathy, but the fact remains that the sale and dispersion of the
ecclesiastical property passed in a storm of corruption and graft.
Properties worth many thousands of dollars were juggled among political
henchmen, sold for a song, and sold again at a great profit. Even as the
Southerners complain of the Reconstruction rather than of the Civil War,
so do the French Catholics complain, not of the law, but of its
aftermath. The Socialist- Labor Party exultant, the Catholic Party
wronged and revengeful, and all the other thousand parties of the French
Government at one another's throats, there seemed little hope for the
real France. The tragedy of the thing lay in the fact that this disunion
and strife was caused by the excess of a good quality; in other words,
that the remarkable ability of every Frenchman to think for himself was
destroying the national unity.

Meanwhile, what was the state of the army and navy?

The Minister of War of the radicals who had triumphed was General Andre,
a narrow, bigoted doctrinaire. The force behind the evil work of this
man can be hardly realized by those who are unfamiliar with the passion
with which the French invest the idea. There are times when the French,
the most brilliant people in the world as a nation, seem to lack mental
brakes--when the idea so obsesses them, that they become fanatics,--not
the emotional, English type of fanatic, but a cold, hard-headed,
intellectual Latin type. The radical Frenchman says, "Are the Gospels
true?" "Presumably no, according to modern science and historical
research." "Then away with everything founded on the Gospels," he
replies; and begins a cold-blooded, highly intellectual campaign of
destruction. Thus it is that the average French church or public
building of any antiquity, whether it be in Paris or in an obscure
village, has been so often mutilated that it is only a shadow of itself.
France is strewn wi