he beginning of the war. The
administration at Paris ordered the prefects throughout the country to
have removed from the official minutes the resolutions of sympathy for
the Boers which had been adopted by the provincial councils. But opposed
to the correct attitude of the Government, popular feeling was
manifested in different ways. A committee of ladies in Paris made a
direct appeal to the French people. They declared: "We are not biased
enemies of the British Nation ... but we have a horror of grasping
financiers, the men of prey who have concocted in cold blood this
rascally war. They have committed with premeditation a crime of
_lese-humanite_, the greatest of crimes. May the blood which reddens the
battle-fields of South Africa forever be upon their heads.... Yes, we
are heart and soul with the Boers.... We admire them because old men
and young women, even, are all fighting like heroes.... Alas! to be
sure, there is no more a France, nor yet an America.... Ah! Ideal
abode of the human conscience, founded by Socrates, sanctified by
Christ, illuminated in flashes of lightning by the French Revolution,
what has become of thee? There is no longer a common temple for
civilized states. Our house is divided against itself and is falling
asunder. Peace reigns everywhere save on the banks of the Vaal, but it
is an armed peace, an odious peace, a poisoned peace which is eating us
up and from which we are all dying."[5] Such hysterical outbursts in
France were not taken seriously by the Government, and the feeling which
inspired them was possibly more largely due to historic hatred of
England than to the inherent justice of the Boer cause.

[Footnote 5: London Times, April 2, 1900, p. 5, col. 5.]

The Ninth Peace Conference, which was in session at Paris in the fall of
1900, without expressly assuming the right of interfering in the affairs
of a friendly nation further than to "emphatically affirm the
unchangeable principles of international justice," adopted a resolution
declaring that the responsibility for the war devastating South Africa
fell upon that one of the two parties who repeatedly refused
arbitration, that is, it was explained, upon the British Government;
that the British Government, in ignoring the principles of right and
justice, in refusing arbitration and in using menaces only too likely to
bring about war in a dispute which might have been settled by judicial
methods, had committed an outrage against the