THE WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 3384, 22 January 1919, Page 56

THE WEEK.

With bows and smiles and a general interchange of courtesies, with luncheons and speeches and motor drives, with glimpses of unfamiliar light-blue uniforms, and a kissing of hands, also unfamiliar, but by no means unpleasing to the victims of it ; with cheers and enthusiasm and occasionally disastrous attempts to sing the "Marseillaise," the French Mission has been and gone again almost before we knew it was here. Of what it has achieved in the way of establishing trade relations between this country and France only those*' who are conversant with these matters can tell us. Whether the visit will have much effect in promoting a greater mutual knowledge of the two countries is very doubtful. These same Frenchmen are only one or two out of nearly forty millions of people. They have learnt something of us and of Australia during their tour, and they will tell a few friends about it when they get back, and that is all. Similarly, except for members of Chambers of Commerce and others who had a chance of seeing a fair amount of them, the general public of New Zealand is no wiser for the visit of these travellers than it was before, except for this fact: that in our isolation, set down here in the midst of stormy oceans, it is something for us even to see men from another country, to be reminded that France is something more than merely a battlefield where our soldiers have done great deeds, and to feel sth'red to some interest, oven if it be but a faint and passing one, in another people and another race at the other side of the world. To me, for instance, as I watched those dark-haired Frenchmen, so different in many ways from the British type, there came the thought of how little I really knew of France beyond the few geographical and historical facts that one acquires in the course of an ordinary education. Of the French people themselves I knew next to nothing. So I hied me to one of the libraries to see if there I could learn something more, and there, for once in a way, found exactly the book I wanted—- " France To-day," by Laurence Jerrold. It is written by one who evidently knows the French well, and gives a comprehensive survey of their life to-day—their politics, religion, literature, and social Fife, both before and after the war.

From this book, along with various odd items of information, such as the fact that the French colonies have no self-govern-ment of their own, but are represented in

the French Parliament (the reverse of our system), and that the French President is not elected by the people as in America, but by the Parliament, I gathered that there are four outstanding features in the French national character—the remarkable unity of France, the intense patriotism of its people, their devotion to " the family," and the thrifty and conservative" spirit which makes France the land of small capitalists, each with some sort of a stake in the country. To explain what he means by the " u"nity " of France, our author first bids us look at the map, showing how her three seaboards, the Pyrenees, the Alps, and in the beginning the Rhine, made France naturally one land, and goes on to speak of the unifying influence which has always been at work throughput French history to weld its different" peoples—• Gauls, Norsemen, Franks, Latins, Phoenicians, and Basques —into one. " The French is organically one nation, as France is structurally one country. No people in Europe is more one people. It is not a homogeneous people ; it is a greatly varied people, but it is a people organised by time, chance, by instinct, and by conscious purpose to be one people. All the governing powers of the country have for centuries worked towards uniting the nation. The chance that began the making of one French people was the lie of the land, upon which wanderers of different races at last settled. The unifying and centralising instinct has not been only that of rulers; the governed also, in spile of long and stubborn holding out of kingdom and province against absorption by the cafetian crown, gradually were drawn out of the parochial to a broader patriotism. But the unifying of France has certainly also been reasoned; instinct became conscious intuition, and the French nation of deliberate purpose organised itself." One result of this unity is the • growth of "l'esprit francais," the "French spirit," which is so strong that it stamps itself indissolubly upon all the foreign elements that come under its influence. Mr Jerrold instances Alsatia, which, " German in great part by race and almost wholly by language, remained doggedly French in spirit, notwithstanding all that German Eolice domination could do, because Alsatia ad been French. The French imprint upon Alsatia had been originally a foreign one: once stamped it was never forgotten, and what Germans could with historical logic claim to be a return to German rule never effaced it." It is this "remarkably strong national spirit, presumably, which explains that wonderful French patriotism which has for long been the wonder of other nations, and has never burnt with so clear a flame as during these four long years of horror. To the Frenchman France is. his second mother—if, indeed, she does not come first, —and that means a good deal more when speaking of a Frenchman than it does when speaking of almost any ether nationality. There xs a vague idea abroad that the French have no family life, and that because they have no word for "home" thev have not the thing itself. There could be no greater The froth and frival which is often all that the- casual visitor sees of Paris—and therefore thinks he knows France —is but the fringe at the edge of the real national life, which goes on quietly all the time. The Frenchman's great ambition is to " found a family." For this his parents plot and plan to get him a good position, so that he may be eligible as the husband of some well-brought-up girl, whose own parents have planned and saved that she may have a good dowry and make a good match. "All look far ahead to, future means, connections, positions, future prospects for the children not yet born or thought of. It is still a social bargain—the man bringing his position, salary, and connections, the girl her dowry and the social connections and influence of her parents, to ' found a family.' " Not at all the right way to go about, according to out thinking—a most sordid way; while to the French our haphazard way of allowing young people to choose for themselves is regarded as unreasonable and improvident to the last degree. For the Frenchman, above all, likes to be guided by reason, and it seems to him only just that a marriage planned for the future should turn out better in the end than one founded on what may be only a momentary passion. At any rate the family is founded, " instinctively one tiny community, bulwarked against the rest of the world," and the new parents begin to plan ahead for the next generation as their parents planned before them. Even if the feeling between husband and wife may not be very deep, the tie between parents and children is so strong that it keeps the home together in circumstances when it might otherwise split up. Nowhere is this tie, especially between mother and son, stronger than it is in France, and the-law upholds what sentiment encourages. It is onlv lately in France that a man over 30 has been allowed to marry without the consent of his parents.

To this devotion to the family, this careful looking to its future, may no doubt be attributed a great deal of that French habit of thrift which also is a wonder to other nations, and which helped to pay off the indemnity of 1871 with a promptitude that astonished the conqueror of that time. According to Mr Jerrold. " the ordinary navvy, the coal-miner, the factory hand in certain large industrial centres, live from hand to mouth in France, as in most other countries.' In nearly all other trades and industries the French employer employs a man or woman with capital—a tinv capital—behind him. Your general cook in Park has a few thousand francs in railway shares. The waiter at your favourite cafe asks your opinion on Spanish Government stock, in which he has put his savings." In the country, too, conditions tend to thrifty working of the soil and the conservation of family life, for practically every peasant owns the land he works, and every member of the family has a share in its distribution. France has therefore millions of land-

owners where Great Britain has thousands, just as it has its innumerable tinycapitalists, and these two things will be important factors in any great social upheaval that may come upon the world. The dreams of many revolutionary socialists fall flat before the hard-headed, hardworking, hard-fisted Fycnch with his tiny but stubbornly-held heritage. " While* ho owns his field it is difficult to think that there will ever be a social revolution in France. If it comes it will, anyhow, not include nationalisation of the soil. If ever the French syndicalist go to the French peasant and propose him that, I pity the French syndicalist under the pitchforks." "Wft are apt to think of France as a very unstable, revolutionary kind of country because of its political changes during the last 150 years. At heart it is now one of the most conservative, as it is one of the most democratic, . countries in the world. One is always learning. ELIZABETH.