universal justice for the realization of which they are in duty bound to collaborate with all the others.

One cannot deny that in the course of our own history this idea of liberty has not, at times, changed, and has not, sometimes, failed to suffer destruction while working out its own salvation. It is evident that in teaching men that they have a personal worth, that they are capable and worthy of personally determining themselves and of governing themselves, we expose them to forgetting that they are dependent upon a superior authority and so to take themselves as if they were in themselves the ultimate end of action. It would be more simple, surely, to mold them to the necessary obedience; to inculcate in them that belief that of themselves they are nothing, and that they acquire a value and a reality only in acting under the impulse of a higher power. Hence the French conception of liberty has fallen in certain crises, a fact which has endangered the social order and liberty itself. Ill-willed critics have been able to say that France oscillated between despotism and anarchy. And it is fashionable, notably beyond the Rhine, to maintain that the French are vowed to an ungovernable individualism. The individual, according to this opinion, would consider himself in France as literally sovereign. In the satisfaction of his own wishes, his desires, his caprices, he would place the only law for his conduct. He would recognize in his governors no other rôle, no other right, than that of assuring, of guaranteeing to each person the integral development of his individuality.

That those who have thus estimated France are mistaken is what the attitude of the French people in the present war shows most forcibly. Certainly every one is his very self, every one acts according to the dictates of his own conscience. Does it follow that France is given over to anarchy; that the revolution or the civil war which its enemies foresaw are ready to open up our country; that its unity is only superficial and illusory? There can be nothing more false than such a deduction. The unanimity of these free minds is real. This

war, more than any other perhaps, is a national war for the people of France. It is for this reason that the general will is now more united than ever before. We distinguish no longer between the soldiers of the regular army, the reserves, or the territorials, between the civilian and the military, between the army and the nation. All offer themselves for the common cause, each according to the place which he occupies or which is assigned to him. A single thought fills all hearts: to free the country, Europe, and the world, and to establish the rule of Right among the nations. One dominating ideal pervades all our action, great or small: the good of the service. Before this necessity personal pride disappears. Politics itself, in fact, bows before the national duty. The country has resolved in its entirety and to the limit to perform valiantly all the physical and the moral sacrifices which patriotism demands of it.

What does that mean? Has France become transformed, or resuscitated, or galvanized?

France is to-day what she was yesterday; but the frightful danger with which she saw herself menaced has now spared her the necessity of coördinating, of combining, and of leading back to unity the individual liberties, if those liberties were to have efficacious action. To find principles capable of thus disciplining liberties, without doing them any violence, France has only to study its own conscience. She found there profoundly rooted sentiments of a sovereign grandeur and potency. The first is worship of the Past. There resides in every Frenchman the love of the soil where his ancestors repose, and of the monuments which betoken their piety, their glories, and their genius. The second is that love of Justice and of ideal humanity which, no less than the reverence for the Past, is traditional in the country of France.

If the present war has especially recalled Frenchmen to the duty of subjecting their individual wills to a higher Law, it has, by that challenge, simply excited them to develop harmoniously all their instincts. Man, says Descartes, is

naturally endowed with free will. But free will is, itself, only a faculty of which one may make bad use as well as good use. The destiny of free will is to become Liberty. Free will attains that dignity only when it spends itself in realizing, not any kind of end at all but those alone which dictate or admit Reason.

A CLUE TO RUSSIA 1

H. N. BRAILSFORD

[Henry Noel Brailsford (1873- ) is an English political writer and journalist who is identified with the Liberal Party. He has made several visits to the Near East, in 1913 serving on the Carnegie International Commission sent there. His chief writings are "Macedonia " (1906) and "A League of Nations" (1917). The following article owes its value to its succinct explanation of an intricate matter which is at the base of much of the unrest in Russia.]

About the Russian revolution one feels what Heraclitus felt about the nature of things. It is in continual flux, and any assertion which one may make about it will have ceased to be true as one speaks. The safest plan would be to wag a symbolic finger, as the wise man recommended, by way of indicating that "it flows." Ministries chase each other across the field of vision; after one congress to restore the nation's unity, it is safe to predict that another will be necessary in a month; the little Cossack Korniloff, in spite of his pitiable failure, may not be the last of the Napoleons; and the Maximalists will "demonstrate" again and yet again. It is the way of revolutions to generate energy by explosion. To the steady gaze, however, the flux reveals itself as a stream which moves in conscious and determined currents. The instability and confusion at the center of power is far from meaning chaos; it is, on the contrary, the oscillating index of a struggle of tendencies as rational and inevitable as any clash of wills which can occur in any human society. Our English newspapers attribute the whole conflict to disputes over the conduct of the war or the promotion of peace. The Maximalists are for them merely traitors, bought by German

1 From New Republic, October 20, 1917. Reprinted by permission.

gold, who work to make a separate peace, while Korniloff was the pure-minded patriot whose single purpose was to “get on with the war." This elegant simplification misses the whole point of the internal conflict. To be sure, each side accuses the other of working for a separate peace; the charge is merely a way of saying with due emphasis that one disagrees with a man. The root of the whole misunderstanding is that few of us realize, even yet, that there is latent in the revolution a social as well as a political upheaval.

The general view was that Russia had got rid of Tsardom, and all that now remained for her to do was to adopt at leisure something resembling the French Republican constitution. That, to be sure, was an immense change, but the country seemed to be wonderfully unanimous about it. The partisans of Tsardom dared not show themselves, and the conservative elements, who would have preferred a constitutional monarchy, were embarrassed by the difficulty of finding a suitable dynasty. The Romanoffs, after the Rasputin scandal, were finally impossible, and Russia could hardly go, like a Balkan state, to pick up a foreign princeling in a Viennese café. The graver dispute turned on the question whether the republic should be a federal system, based on full autonomy for such regions, as Finland, the Ukraine, the Baltic provinces, and Siberia. That question, in spite of the preference of the Cadets and other Liberal-Conservatives for a strong centralized government, has practically settled itself. It became clear that these non-Russian regions must receive the fullest measure of home rule; the only practical alternative was independence. The great Russian majority had neither the will nor the power to coerce them. One might have supposed that the foundations of the future Russia were already laid, and that no controversy could shake them. Republicanism on the French pattern, federation of a loose and generous type, universal suffrage for all classes and both sexes, these were fixed by the will of the people or the pressure of irresistible forces. What then is the source of unrest?