cian; 'so out of the eighty-two, or shall we say seventy dollars, he turns in, you feed him forty dollars' worth. That leaves forty-two dollars at most for you and the children. Now, you would get, if he went into the service, fifteen from his pay, fifteen from the government and twelve for the children. That makes as much as forty-two anyway. If he got killed you would get fiftyseven fifty a month for twenty years, or, if he got incapacitated,' etc., etc. The persuasive examiner went on, putting the allurements of the allotment in a most attractive way, while Clancy, poor soul, squirmed visibly.

Mrs. Clancy would rise to the situation. She would appear to hesitate. 'Well, maybe you're right. The man has n't brought me a full pay envelope since Corcoran's saloon was opened, and that is four years ago, come January. Eighty dollars a month, he says he brings home. Not to me. Let me think it over a bit, will you?'

The interview is suspended. I asked the mathematician a few days later what had become of Clancy. 'Nothing doing,' he sighed. 'She came in yesterday and said Clancy had been to the priest and signed the pledge, and she concluded she could not get along without him.'

The mathematician occasionally got a soldier in this way, but his methods. had by-results not wholly undesirable. 'Most of these men,' he declared, 'think that when they bring home a depleted pay-envelope and give it to the wife, have her cook it and feed most of it to them, that they are worth their weight in gold. I have shown a lot of these women that their husbands pay just about their board, and that they would be better off with a little government money, free time for themselves, and a chance of cashing an insurance policy. I count on doing one or the other of two things, making a soldier or a bet

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D

ter husband. Either result does Uncle Sam some good.'

IV

With all the incidents, humorous or pathetic, which came during the work of the Selective Service Act, the deep and lasting impression, however, made upon my mind was one of profound respect for the patriotism of the poor. We are hearing so much these days about Bolshevism in Europe, and the dangers of the proletariat inflamed against the bourgeoisie and the capitalist dangers which alarm some even in our own country. All these causes for alarm may be real, but there are some facts which should give us confidence. Take our own district, for example, and remember that it is only one of many, and note the response to the call for citizen soldiers.

Our people were all poor. They were asked to fight for a country which had given them little more than a bare subsistence. The red star has been replaced by a gold star in many of its tenement windows. The district contains only seventeen city blocks, yet fifty-five thousand people live in these blocks, closely crowded in tenements. It sent eleven hundred men into the army, half as many more into the navy, and with special inductions surely seventeen hundred men went from it into the country's service.

Forget for the moment that these men went to risk their lives for their country and they saw hard fighting, and we are proud of them. Let us think prosaically of the conditions they left at home. The average wage of these men was at least three dollars a day. These 1700 men (100 from every block on the average, and one block sent 228) had a combined earning capacity of $5100 a day, over $30,000 a week, $122,400 a month. These figures

represent, not the decreased earnings of some large company with vast capital to draw upon: we are talking about the capitalization of human deprivation, lost each day and week and month by about 1500 families living in these congested city blocks. This figure, over $122,000 per month, is lost earning capacity, is wages directly out of pocket. It represents self-sacrifice, even suffering, uncomplaining privation; it represents foregone winter clothing and wholesome food for younger children; dark two- or three-room tenements for parents who can no longer afford to pay $15 per month for rent; it represents almost everything which makes life worth living; education for children, who are now working at tender ages. It represents so many things that I will not tire you with a further enumeration. But these people do not whine or beg; they are patriotic, proud of their boys, and more than willing to sacrifice to give them the one big chance.

The uninformed layman will say, 'But you are forgetting the allotments and allowances to cover these losses, provided for by law.' Well, it is pretty nearly time for something sharp and severe to be said about these theoretical payments and the reasons why they were months in arrears or never came at all. The mothers and wives who re

lied upon them and needed them somehow got along without them, with the help of their neighbors or by unwonted labors. The way in which the department at Washington almost completely broke down under its responsibilities is one of the yet-to-be-discussed problems of the war. With uncomplaining fortitude, our district met the shortcomings of the government, which kept the word of promise to the ear and broke it to the hope.

are

Let us think about this thing further while there is time. We are past the delirious Monday of the world's great armistice weary, staggering toward peace. The big dollar-a-year men are resigning from their jobs at Washington. The camps are emptying and warindustries are getting their contract cancelations; thousands of men being thrown out of war-employment in consequence. The boys in France are looking toward home; reconstruction is the new word, with all the confusion and the potentialities of distress which it implies. Let us not forget too soon the sacrifice of the people of districts of which ours is but a fair sample. Let us make the new America to which the boys return, a land worthy of their generous devotion, and of the willing sacrifice of those who made their service possible.

I

LET the reader be reassured. This will be no foolish attempt at painting a grand Reynoldsian portrait, with the background of victory and of a glorious sunset to warm it. The following pages aim only at replacing the main facts of Clemenceau's life in their natural environment. Even this humble task has its difficulties, for Clemenceau, as an individual, is far from being well known; he has been frequently and passionately discussed; and there have been in his long life curious incongruities which had better be merely stated than explained.

Georges Clemenceau was born in 1841, the son of a country doctor in a village of Vendée. People in Vendée, since the royalist rebellion of 1794, have been divided into 'Whites' and 'Blues,' the former being the Royalists and the latter the Republicans, with all the changes that such words must inevitably undergo in the space of a century. Now, Dr. Clemenceau was a Blue, and of a decidedly deep dye, for he was anti-royalist and anti-clerical to the extent of refusing to let his children be christened, even in a district where religious antagonisms were so marked.

It should not be inferred that Clemenceau's father had had these opinions bequeathed to him. On the contrary, his family was entirely on the other side, belonging to the aristocracy of the province and being better able than most others to support its claims with

seals and charters. One of his uncles to whom M. Clemenceau refers affectionately in Le Grand Pan- was a priest. But the medical schools of the early part of the nineteenth century in France were hot-beds of atheism, and toward 1840 a physician who retained some religious belief was regarded as a phenomenon. So young Georges Clemenceau grew up in a home which must have been pointed out as a stronghold of 'advanced ideas,' and it is probable that both his father and himself enjoyed the consciousness that it was.

Circumstances must also have helped to make a resolute partisan of the boy. He was seven in 1848, when the Second French Republic was proclaimed; and even to its enemies this new experiment appeared so idealistic and noble, that when, three years later, it was brought to an end by the President - Prince Louis BonaparteLouis Bonaparte - becoming a dictator, there was disappointment in all liberal circles; and in the environment in which Georges Clemenceau was being reared there must have been rage. A boy of eleven, intelligent as this one undoubtedly was, is deeply influenced by such happenings.

About this time young Georges was sent to the lycée at Nantes, to go through the classical course which was the universal rule in those days, and became optional, only in the case of a future physician, in 1902. He was a good scholar and must have enjoyed his Classics, for even now he frequently quotes the Greeks. The lycées in those days were patronized by Republican

families preferably to Catholic schools, because their teaching staff was secular, and a few professors here and there actually were against the tyrant, as Napoleon III was called by his braver enemies. But even there the son of Republican parents must be conscious of being watched and disliked as a future agitator and the cause of possible trouble to the headmaster. So this atmosphere again could only produce irritation, and occasionally dare-devil recklessness, in such a boy as was father to the Clemenceau we have known.

Indeed, in 1860, Georges Clemenceau was ripe for the freedom of the Paris Medical School. Here, where he was entered on graduating from the lycée, the student could rail at religion superstition, he no doubt called it - in the paternal vein, and even ventilate his abhorrence of the Imperial régime in the cafés to which the not very scientific sawbones of those days devoted much of their valuable time. Yet even this had to be done with some precaution; and how unreticent Georges Clemenceau must have been between his twentieth and his twenty-third year, we can easily imagine. The consequence was that in 1861 he spent seventy-three days at the Mazas penitentiary, and three years later even a worse misfortune befell him. The academic authorities, shocked, as he himself says, at his insistence in proclaiming the Republic while there was an Emperor, temporarily struck his name from the rolls.

He was twenty-three years old, and not rich: he could not afford to wait till the tyrant was overthrown, to go on with his medical studies. Those were not days when the French felt particularly anxious to seek their fortunes abroad; but Georges Clemenceau chose that desperate course. A few miles from his long-familiar town of Nantes, the big ships constantly sailed for America.

The half-fledged physician sailed on one of them. He stayed four years in the United States, keeping himself, not by the practice of an art he was conscious of having by no means mastered, but, as so many educated emigrants had done before him, by teaching his own language. He came back to France in 1868, with an American wife and with a knowledge of the English language which stood him in good stead during the Great War, but with a curious. indifference to English or American thought and to political conditions in the United States. Most Frenchmen who have lived in America show the deep imprint of their experience during all their lives, but Georges Clemenceau seems to have come back as unmixedly French as when he left.

He settled in Paris again, and went back to his interrupted medical studies. A year later he took his degree, and immediately looked for patients in the Montmartre district.

The famous hill was not at that time the haunt of pleasure-seekers that it has since become. The American artists who loved it twenty years ago must remember how like a Southern French town the climbing winding streets used to look. It was a neighborhood of workmen, or very small tradesmen, with a proportion of painters and sculptors. The local doctors had a slim chance of attaining either to fame or to wealth; but they must have known their clientele as intimately as they might have in any provincial market-town. So it was with Clemenceau, and it gave him a chance to make a career beside the one he had inherited rather than chosen.

France frequently shows a type of man scarce in the rest of the world, namely, the politician evolved from the country doctor, or even from the veterinary surgeon. It is surprising that no political physician has yet beaten the political lawyer in the race for the

Presidency, for each Parliament has numbered between sixty and eighty members of that profession, some of whom have achieved considerable success. Nobody could have been surprised in Montmartre to see the new doctor take advantage of his daily growing acquaintance with the quarter to give a political significance to his hatred of the Imperial government, of the Church, and of all their supporters.

The power of Napoleon III was fast waning at the time; the Emperor, a few years before, had been compelled to renounce the absolute authority he had possessed between 1852 and 1860, and probabilities pointed to democratic changes. In Belleville — a quarter almost adjoining Montmartre - a young barrister of rare magnetism and eloquence, Léon Gambetta, had been elected a deputy on what was called a very 'red' ticket, and his platform, which included equal franchise, proportional taxation, disarmament, and the transfer of authority to the people, was fast becoming popular. Georges Clemenceau adopted it, and with the violent views he had cultivated, nobody was better fitted to defend it. In fact, he sprang into notoriety almost at a leap. It is surprising to note that as early as September, 1870, as soon as defeat had swept away Napoleon III and made a republic the inevitable alternative, Clemenceau, who barely a year before was still walking the hospitals, had become Mayor of Montmartre and was on the eve of becoming a prominent member of the Municipal Council, and of being sent as a deputy to the Assemblée Nationale.

Such unexpected risings from obscurity are frequent in all revolutions, but, contrary to what has also been so generally the case, Clemenceau never relapsed into anonymousness. During the decade which followed 1870 he was not known to many foreign observers

beyond professionals like Bismarck or Sir Charles Dilke; but in Paris, and even throughout France, he was as popular a character as he is to-day.

What sort of a person was he at that time, and what were his tenets and influence? An answer to these questions will enable us to visualize him more distinctly and to proceed with comparative rapidity through the continuation of his career.

II

Gambetta was the great man of the nascent Republic. He had founded it on the ruins of the Empire, and he was now defending it against the Assemblée Nationale, which, as everybody knows, consisted of a large majority of Monarchists busy making a republican constitution because they could not agree about the person of the monarch.

Clemenceau admired Gambetta, and they fought side by side. Both men were patriots and had voted on February 17, 1871, against the delivery of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany. Both wished to rebuild France on entirely democratic foundations. But while Gambetta revealed himself as Oriental by his warm heart and warm imagination, by his splendid rhetoric, by his deftness at making the most of contingencies, by his magnetic gift for making and keeping friends, but also by his laziness, by his charming way of fancying that problems were solved when they ceased to bother, and by a pliability to circumstances which made him willing to negotiate secretly with Bismarck less than ten years after the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, Clemenceau was very different. He flattered nobody, loved nobody, and though followed by a large party, was not much loved by anybody. He had not yet developed the capacity for elegant witticisms which later on gave a sort of dry grace to his sarcasms; he was nothing