The Press Tuesday, November 26, 1929. Clemenceau.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19786, 26 November 1929, Page 10

The Press Tuesday, November 26, 1929. Clemenceau.

\p r*<> or Me ai'-o ::.".- ■: t V •-..■■'.•• ".1 1 ; v. ..:■ h : ■■> •' - '!•-'■''• can •■lir.ojy ;t~rf« in •-■ - r:'v.r _* ar. 1 ap- | him: hit ther- will perhaps i be less divergence thar. ..i often to be noticed when a m.i:.'- s- >■"'- -igTiai f'-r hi- cuJi'eu.pi-rarie- in decide and say what they thought of him. More clearly than mosjt. he hud long s:n d---rin.il h.n;-l:. ar.d n-th:r:u' he ■oid -r d:-l :">!l ■■•;'-id«- :h- ii-r:r.:tion. I po-.wr a- a .-tate-man wrt- d=Tiwn from his being inflexibly !->yal to a certain few ideas; and this inflexibility was his weakness as a politician, because it made him a difficult leader and colleague, and because it forbade him to accommodate his 1 principles to circumstances, by concession and toleration and compromise, even to advance them. He had two BTeat opportunities, as Prime Minister, to show his strength, the second of them coming at the end of 1917, in his seventy-seventh year, when his country's situation called for such firmness, integrity, and fire as his and eouid be saved by nothing less. More, j perhaps, now than then, when the truth was necessarily darkened, it seems as if Clemenceaus genius had been for fifty years hardening and preparing for this crisis, in which he was greatest; it is beyond doubt that only a man holding so fast to his faith that he grew one with it, like the man in Pilgrim's Progress, whose sword " clove u to his hand," could have met and overcome the difficulties of those days. Clemenceaa'fi faith was the right one and his victory that of his two ideas, that France must be secure and that France must be free, over the deadliest challenge to them. He did not willingly retire from political life after the Peace Conference, which he dominated. He resigned the office of Prime Minister, hoping to become President of France: and he was defeated. But it is his disappointment that is to be regretted, rather than its cause; for the splendid climax had been reached, and to look back at that, on hia death, is to feel that in the politics of the post-war period he could have added at beat only an unnecessary appendix. The same principles and the same character appear at every point in his career and direct its straight course. As a Republican patriot he was against Napoleon ism in 1870, but threw himself into the military and political defence of France when Napoleonism broke at Sedan. He was a member of the extreme Left, under Gambetta; but when his leader began to grasp personal power Cfemenceau left him. This breach, perhaps more than anything else, was the cause of that critical and independent attitude which made him more effective in destroying Ministries than in co-operat-ing with others to create and maintain them. Eighteen Governments fell before him before he formed one himself. He fought the reactionary Boulanger, all the more fiercely because Boulanger had stupidly invited him to become a party to the proposed coup d'iiat as Prime Minister. He via against alliance with Russia, beeau.se it was J reactionary, and always worked for alliance with England, because she was democratic and free. He opposed colonial expansion, first because he believed with Johnson that Empire exchanges security at home for dangerous responsibility abroad, and be foresaw the need for concentration and readiness, and second because he believed that French statesmanship had liberal duties in France sufficient to occupy ail its energy. He seemed to be doing nothing but oppose and obstruct, and when he lost his seat the eclipse appeared final; but his conversion to belief in Drcyfus's innocence and his advocacy of that lost cause, which helped to save it, restored him politically. He became Prime Minister in 1906, and, though his was the most Radical of Ministries, earned the hatred of the Labour and Socialist groups by breaking strikes with military force: his view of individual liberty did not square with that of the Socialist strikers, who would not allow a blackleg the liberty to work. When his unusually long-lived Ministry fell, Clemenceau devoted himself, for the two years before the Great War, to warning his countrymen that it was coming and to sink their differences and prepare for it. He himself was the readiest of all.

A few years ago Mr Philip Carr wrote of the " fiery, tireless, and simplifying energy of this splendid old " man." " Simplifying " is a penetrating and just word, which explains the strength of a really great man. He saw, in the hard light of a rather pessimistic realism, two fixed principles, and was governed by them in all his work of criticism, destruction, planning, building, and fiehting. Thi.« i« far other than thp consistenry of dull men: it is the l«nr«», constructive mind"? act of com prehension.