VII

THE VISION OF FRANCE

[Mr. James M. Beck, formerly Assistant AttorneyGeneral of the United States and the author of The Evidence in the Case, has just returned from England and France, where he was entertained by many soldiers and statesmen in both countries and where he was able to witness for nearly a week the battle front from Verdun to Rheims. On his return he responded to the toast "France" at a banquet given by the France-America Society on the birthday of Lafayette on September 6, 1916, in honour of M. Jusserand, the French Ambassador. As his speech is of general interest, The Times reprints it in order that a wider audience than those who attended the dinner may read Mr. Beck's testimony to the spirit of France.-New York Times.]

Ir is a great privilege to join in this tribute of respect to the Ambassador of France. It has been his high privilege to represent his noble and heroic nation in the capital of the greatest of the neutral nations during one of the stormiest crises of human history. It is little

to say that he has done so in a manner that has not only worthily represented France, but has never at any time abused the hospitality of the people to whom he is accredited.

We would welcome the French Ambassador, even if his personal merits were less than they are, because he is the representative of that country, which of all foreign nations is the first in the affections of the American people. Our country has always been and is today under an immeasurable debt to France. This obligation is a commonplace of our history, and I refer to it only to make one suggestion. A possible disadvantage of this enthusiastic celebration of Lafayette's birthday, if it have any, lies in this, that the glamour of his youth and the romantic splendour of his career serve to obscure the great debt which America owes to other illustrious Frenchmen of that epic period, many of whom, as Rochambeau and De Grasse, are familiar to Americans by name, but some of whom, like the great Foreign Minister of France, Vergennes, or like Beaumarchais, who helped to send the first indispensable aid of arms and munitions to our armies, are little known. Above all, our admiration for Lafayette should not obscure the services of those great philosophic thinkers of France of the eighteenth century

Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau, and many others, whose hatred of oppression found so great a reflex in our Declaration of Independence.

In now returning to my native land after an absence of two months in England and France, I take this first occasion to express my most grateful appreciation of the overwhelming courtesy with which I was received in both countries. I do not regard this generous welcome as merely a recognition of the little I was privileged to do for their cause, but simply as a method that England and France chose to recognize that very large group of Americans, of whom I was but one, who disdained in the greatest moral crisis of civilization to be intellectually or morally neutral.

You have asked me to respond to the toast of "France." What a noble and inspiring theme, and how utterly beyond any power, either of the spoken word or the printed page, to do full justice! To any one who has been privileged, as I was, to have the spiritual revelation of seeing that great country transfigured in its noble fight for the basic principles of civilization, any words of praise seem pitifully inadequate.

When I am at a loss for any words to voice a sentiment, I always recur to the most universal

genius that the world has yet produced, our own English Shakespeare, of whom I like to think— although it is little more than conjecture that while his father was English, as his name implies, and belonged to that sturdy yeomanry "whose limbs were made in England," yet that his mother, with the beautiful name of Mary Arden, may have had some French-Norman blood in her veins, which contributed something to that clarity of expression and exquisite refinement of thought which so pre-eminently characterize the greatest of all poets.

I looked into my Shakespeare to find what the great poet had said of a soldier of France, and in King John I found these lines, which I think make the best response to the toast which the committee has done me the great honour to assign me. He says:

France, whose armour conscience buckled on,
Whom zeal and charity brought to the field
As God's own soldier!

What nobler tribute could an English poet pay to the immemorial enemy of England than to call a champion of France "God's own soldier"? And I, who have seen these soldiers in the trenches on the far-flung battle line from Verdun to Rheims,