which we call republican mystics); and to forget it, and to ignore it, does not necessarily mean that it has not existed. Men have died for liberty as men have died for faith. These elections of today appear to you a grotesque formality, universally hypocritical, corrupt through and through; and you have the right to say so. But men have lived, men without number, heroes, martyrs, and I will say saints, and when I say “saints,” I know, perhaps, what I am talking about . . . an entire people have lived so that the lowest idiot of today should have the right to accomplish this corrupt formality. This was a terrible, a laborious and formidable childbirth. Nor had this always reached the limit of grotesqueness. The peoples around us, nations, entire races, are in travail with the same painful childbearing; are working and struggling to obtain this ludicrous formality.

"These elections are ludicrous. But the heroism and the sanctity with which, by means of which, are obtained these ludicrous results, temporarily ludicrous, contain all that is most fine and most sacred in the world.

"Everything begins in mystics and ends in politics. . . . The essential is that in each order of things, in each system, the mystic should not be devoured by the politic to which it has given birth.”

I thought of Péguy when I read this simple answer in Witter Bynner's New World: "Beauty in politics? If you put it there." Péguy reacted against our tendency to desert politics. He accepted all the duties of the citizen.

Charles Péguy, who went as a lieutenant of reserve with his section of infantry, was killed at the battle of the Marne, in September, 1914.

The following lines are to be found in his last Cahier, which was entitled "Sur la Philosophie de M. Bergson," and was among the best works he ever gave. One may realize the loss we endured by his death.

"A great philosophy is not an irreproachable philosophy. It is a fearless philosophy.

"A great philosophy is not a dictation. The greatest is not that which is faultless.

"A great philosophy is not the one against which there is nothing to say. It is the one which has said something.

"And, moreover, it is the one which had something to say, in spite of being unable to say it.

"It is not the one which has no errors. It is not the one which has no gaps. It is the one which has abundancies.

"It is not a question of confusing. It is in the

schools that it is a question of confusing. It is not even a question of convincing.

"To confuse the adversary in a matter of philosowhat bad breeding!

phy

"The true philosopher knows that he is not standing opposing his adversary, but beside his adversary and others, facing a reality always greater and more mysterious.

"And this even the true physician knows. That he is not standing opposing his rival physician, but beside him, facing a nature always more profound and more mysterious.

"To listen to a philosophical debate, or to participate therein, with the idea that one is going to convince or subjugate his adversary, or that one is going to see one of the two adversaries confound the other, is to show that one does not know what one is talking about, to acknowledge to great incapacity, vulgarity and barbarism. It is evidence of a great lack of culture. It is to show that one does not belong to this country."

His conclusion to the discussions about Bergsonism was this:

"It is a prejudice, but it is an absolutely uneradicable prejudice that demands that an inflexible reason should be more a reason than a flexible one.

... It is the same prejudice that demands that an inflexible scientific method should be more a method, and more scientific, than a flexible scientific method.

"It is evident, on the contrary, that it is the elastic and flexible methods, flexible logic, and flexible morals that are the most severe, as they adhere the most closely to their object.

"An inflexible logic may permit errors to escape from its recesses. . . . An inflexible moral may permit crimes to escape from its recesses, while, on the contrary, a flexible moral will hold, denounce and pursue the sinuosities of those things which seek to escape. Inflexibility is essentially false; flexibility is true.

"It is flexible morals which exact a heart to keep perpetually ready and pure, and which exercise the most implacable and hard restraints. The only ones which are never absent, which do not pardon. It is elastic and flexible morals, flexible methods, flexible logic, that exercise the most implacable obligations. It is for this reason that the most honest man is not he who enters into apparent rules. It is he who remains in his place, who works, who suffers and who says nothing."

These are the last lines of his that were published. But Péguy was still an elder to us. I shall quote

now another writer, who really embodied, for the few years of his life, our best feelings, beliefs, enthusiasms. He was the living soul of us all. Henri Franck died at 23, before the war, leaving an unfinished poem: La Danse devant l'Arche, and various essays on philosophy and literature.

Here are the verses where he speaks of his friends and of our group:

1

"French boys, fine of face, raised by your mothers,
Who from babyhood had slow and serious growth
In your large houses enclosed in leafy gardens.
Boys religious as I was, from childhood taught
To assist the priest and help in conducting the mass;
Older, you left intelligent mother and wise father
And came to complete in Paris the growth of your spirit.
You have sense and pleasing manners, politeness and
warmth;

Latin and geometry you knew, and combining

Things respected from childhood and those learned in college,

Religious boys, much troubled by your studies,
At twenty years strangely you try to reconcile
Old beliefs with your new uncertainty."

And this expresses the understanding among the young men who find themselves before the new task of their lives:

"O the joy of feeling ourselves in heart among our contemporaries,

And of building up our spirits through each other!

1 Translation by Miss V. Hale.