liberty to work successfully has kept together divers communities. You may be sure the world such as will be surrounding you in the times that are coming will be very likely to follow your example. You may become the real nucleus for the world government for the future. There is no doubt that is the way things will go in the future. You have made a successful start; and if you keep on the right track, your Empire will be a solution of the whole problem. I hope I have given no offense. When I look around this brilliant gathering, and see before me the most important men in the Government of the United Kingdom, I am rather anxious that we should discuss this matter, which concerns our future so very vitally a matter which should never be forgotten even in this awful struggle, in which all our energies are engaged. Memories of the past keep crowding in upon me. I think of all the difficulties which have surrounded us in the past, and I am truly filled with gratitude for the reception which you have given me, and with gratitude to Time, the great and merciful judge, which has healed many wounds and gratitude to that Divinity which "shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will." I think of the difficulties that still lie ahead of us, which are going to test all the nations fighting for liberty far more than they have ever been tested in the past, and I hope and pray that they all may have clearness of vision and purpose, and especially that strength of soul in the coming days, which will be more necessary than strength of arm. I verily believe that we are within reach of priceless and immeasurable good, not only for this United Kingdom and group of nations to which we belong, but also for the whole world. But, of course, it will depend largely upon us whether the great prize is achieved now in this struggle, or whether the world will be doomed to long, weary waiting in the future. The prize is within our grasp, if we have strength, especially the strength of soul, which I hope we shall have, to see this thing through without getting tired of waiting until victory crowns the efforts of our brave men in the field. THE IDEA OF LIBERTY IN FRANCE1 ÉMILE BOUTROUX [Étienne Émile Marie Boutroux (1845- ) is a professor of philosophy in the University of Paris and is one of the most distinguished of French philosophers. He has been an Exchange Professor at Harvard University, and was in 1912 elected to the French Academy. He has written, among other works, "Education and Ethics" (1913) and lives of Pascal and of William James. This is part of an address delivered on December 5, 1915, before the Conference de Foi et Vie in Paris. In its presentation of the double origin of the French ideal of government and attitude toward life and the perfect combination of the two tendencies, it is a valuable contribution to an understanding of European principles of government.] The French idea of liberty is not a modern invention. It is the blossoming of a double tradition: the Græco-Roman and the Christian. Opposed to the Orient, which subjected man and the world to an absolute empire of transcendent powers and indeterminable fatalities, ancient Greece considered the world to be self-animated, and as tending to realize its own destinies within itself. The directing ideal of Greek thought is Art. Now, in a work of art such as the Greeks conceived it, matter and form are so exactly adjusted to one another, that one is unable to say whether form is the result of the spontaneous development of matter, or whether matter has been purely and simply disciplined by form. In the eyes of the Greek artist matter and form are one. It is neither a foreign force nor an oppressive one which develops matter under the laws of form. According to the voice of Amphion's lyre there arise, 1 Translated by Morris Edmund Speare from "L'Idée de Liberté en France et en Allemagne." Paris, 1915. of their own accord, pliable materials which develop into walls and towers. The great blind man of Moonie1 opens his mouth. .. and the ancient boughs already Incline their foliage softly and in cadence!" If nature in general possesses, within itself, the power of elevating itself toward the ideal, by a much stronger reason is human nature capable of manifesting the attributes of the true, the beautiful, and the good, and of its own accord pressing toward them. When he loves and seeks for knowledge, man thus constitutes morality, convention, the social life, and the political life. From thence springs the Hellenic ideal of education. To uplift men is not, according to the Platonists and the Aristotelians, to impose upon them any plan which one might judge useful, without taking into consideration their natures and their aspirations; it is, on the contrary, to consummate their most intimate wishes, to help them to reach the goal which they themselves aim for. Art, says Aristotle, makes masterpieces with which Nature should be content. It is so with Education, which is the supreme art. If Greece, above all other things, put forth the power of initiative and of perfection which reside in the nature of man, the more peculiarly practical genius of Rome expressly deduced from this notion of man the moral and the juridical consequences which it embodied. Capable of self-mastery and of reflecting upon his own acts man is subjected to the law of Duty. He is not only a plant which blossoms through liberty. He is a will which must obey. And, capable of assuming dignity and moral worth, he possesses as an essential attribute that eminent quality which we call Right. As the Græco-Latin civilization conceives him, man is thus a being capable of personally fashioning himself, of aspiring to the true, the beautiful, and the good, subject to the higher laws which impose upon him duties, and he is provided with essential rights which are born out of this very dignity of his. 1 André Chénier, L'Aveugle. If French thought comes out of this so-called Classical tradition, it is also heir to the Christian tradition. The latter does not contradict the classical ideal at all. But, while the Greeks and the Romans had considered above all things Reason in man, reason through which all men tend to mold themselves into a single being, universal and impersonal, Christianity exalted, in particular, the individual, with his conscience and with his own traits of character. It gives first importance, in God and in man, to love, sentiment, — that is to say, to the peculiarly individualistic element of the soul. It is not simply the human species which, according to the doctrine of Christ, is privileged to approach God and to commune with him; it is every man taken separately, however humble his condition and however limited his vision. "Behold," says Jesus, "this poor widow casting thither, into the alms-box, her two mites. Of a truth I say unto you that she hath cast in more than they all. For they have cast of their abundance; but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had." Such are the examples that Jesus gave to his disciples; such are the servants of God to whom He promises the first places in the Kingdom of Heaven. Every individual, according to this doctrine, is called upon as such to save himself from sin and from death, and to live in God. And the salvation of all, taken every single one, is equally dear to the Father who is all-powerful and all-good. Nourished upon this twofold tradition, French thought has affirmed an ideal of liberty which is vitally identical in the conscience of the people and in the writings and speeches of scholars and statesmen. Liberty, according to this way of looking at things, implies a power of disposing of oneself, of desiring, of thinking, of acting for oneself which belong to the individual as an individual. This power is expressed by the phrase: free agent, which, according to the French point of view, designates a faculty at the same time very genuine and very superior. Each man, through this free agent, is like a personal empire within a universal empire. His very conscience, in fact, is not an insignificant secondary phenomenon, but an original and efficacious reality. Through it each individual is somehow master of himself. Not that the individual is sufficient unto himself nor has the right to regard himself as superior to all laws. French thought does not ratify the exaggerated assertion of Rousseau attributing to the individual "an absolute existence and a naturally independent one." Man finds in his own conscience with irresistible clearness the laws of justice and of humanity. He considers himself therefore as under obligation to his kind and to the universal order of things. The aim which he should impose upon himself is, in this sense, not to differentiate between an absolute individual sovereignty and an absolute abdication, but to conciliate within himself the liberty and the right of the individual with the right of the ideal and the sovereignty of moral laws. If every individual is, by some means, an entire being, it is perforce an entire being that individuals ought to consummate by their union. So that the problem of moral life for French conscience is the very problem which a Greek poet put forth in these words Πῶς δέ μοι ἔν τι τὰ πάντ ̓ ἐσται "How can we so bring it about that the All be One, and at the same time that each member possess an individual existence?" The conception of liberty in the individual is, according to the French doctrine, determined by nations, in the measure that these latter can be held responsible as you would hold people responsible; that is to say, in the measure with which they are endowed with a national conscience and possess the necessary elements for self-government. They also belong to themselves, and must be masters of their own destinies; they also, at the same time, must recognize the existence of a |